Reviews
Jenny Gilbert
Carlos Acosta’s idea of putting live music first and foremost in BRB’s latest mixed bill was a no-brainer. The Midlands-based company, directed by Acosta since early 2020, is unique among British ballet companies in being able to call on its own full-time orchestra (the Royal Ballet has to share theirs with the Opera), and it happens to be a first-class band.So the prospect of Britten and Beethoven forming meaty chunks in the typical three-ballet sandwich promised a feast – on the aural front at least – in an evening entitled Into the Music, to which an appropriate response might be “Who Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Hermes Experiment are the cool kids of the contemporary music school, who have brought a "build-your-own-repertoire" approach to generating music for their unique combination of soprano, clarinet, harp and double bass. As their name would suggest, they are firmly in the experimental tradition, using improvisation, extended techniques and graphic scores.They attracted the appropriate level of beards and cardigans to their Purcell Room recital, starting at the undeniably hip time of 10pm. The concert was called "Familiar Objects" – and there were domestic items, from clothes airer, to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Confidence, says Helen Bauer, is a good thing. As a woman who casts herself as the leading lady in any situation, including funerals, she has oodles of it – as well as bucketloads of energy in a show that starts with a declaration of intent: “I'm going through a very confident phase and I think you should be there for me.” The audience is on board straight away, such is the force field she exerts from the moment she walks on stage.In Madam Good Tit Bauer talks about some of the things she's supposed to be as a modern woman (she has just turned 30) – including being self-aware and body- Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The release of Call Jane could not be more timely, just as the American midterms loom and liberals reel from the overturning of legislation that allow women access to safe and legal abortions in the US. This well-crafted drama tells the true story of a group of women in 1960s Chicago who ran a secret organisation that provided almost 12,000 terminations when to do so was a criminal offence. Elizabeth Banks plays Joy, a housewife devoted to her daughter and lawyer husband, living a perfect suburban life reminiscent of The Graduate and The Stepford Wives. Read more ...
David Nice
Sullivan’s Overture to The Yeomen of the Guard isn’t quite the equal of Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger – what is? – but its brass-rich brilliance and wholesome ceremonials wouldn’t have been possible without that great example. Cue the first of director Jo Davies’s missteps as a 1950s newsreel gives us the “backstory” of alleged spy Colonel Fairfax’s imprisonment: loud broadcast voice over Chris Hopkins’ already speedy account is a big mistake.Sometimes the fidgety routines for the chorus and three busbied tapdancers look like a halfhearted attempt to rival the more Read more ...
Tim Cumming
A minute before coming on stage, the audience is asked to observe a minute’s silence for the victims of the Halloween tragedy in the central Itaewon district of the South Korean capital of Seoul. The stage is dark, clouds of dry ice forming a vignette around the three sets of instruments – Ham Minhwi’s bass guitar and pedals, Jang Dohyuk’s drums and Yun Eunhwa’s personalised yanggeum, or hammered dulcimer – and when they walk on stage and set themselves up, we in the audience remain silent until Yun Eunhwa starts to play.It’s a sombre and focused start to a striking and arresting journey in Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Ainadamar - meaning "fountain of tears" in Arabic – is the name given to a natural spring high in the hills above the Andalucian city of Granada, the site where the poet and playwright Federico Garica Lorca was executed in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. It’s also the name – and an apt one in many ways – of Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s extraordinary 2003 one act opera which tells the tale of Lorca’s life and death through a series of flashbacks.It is a ferocious mix of opera and flamenco in a production – a collaboration between Scottish Opera and Opera Read more ...
mark.kidel
A tall African man stands alone in a pool of light. He has a cello and an immensely versatile voice. In a matter seconds, he holds the audience enchanted. He inhabits the stage as if it were by a campfire in the bush.The Bouffes du Nord, the Paris base for Peter Brook’s ritual-rich theatre for many years, the beautifully worn shell of a former music hall, with decaying walls in different tones of orange and red, has seen so many extraordinary performances. I, for one, will never forget Brook’s fulgurant Hamlet with Adrian Lester in the title role, and Isabelle Huppert, raw and present in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Much of Amateurs is observational. “Folk Festival” ponders appearing at said event: is the place on the bill right; would fitting in be easier if the lyric’s subject were a different age? During “Market on the Sand”, it’s wondered while browsing whether there is “something here that is meant just for me”.Amateurs, by Australia’s Laura Jean Englert, feels as if it’s the result of a period of contemplation. The album begins with “Teenage Again”, an acoustic guitar-driven mid-tempo folk-rocker with a Neil Young feel. “When I was 17, my mama couldn’t handle me” are the opening lyrics. Approaching Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Scottish playwright Rona Munro is both prolific and ambitious. After her trilogy of historical dramas, The James Plays, was staged in 2016, she continues to work on her cycle of seven works, covering the years from 1406 to 1625, which are designed to give today’s Scotland a contemporary equivalent of Shakespeare’s medieval history cycle.Her latest, Mary, opens at the Hampstead Theatre because this venue is run by her long-time collaborator, director Roxana Silbert. So who is it about, and how relevant is the play to a general audience?The title refers to Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, who Read more ...
David Nice
In usual circumstances, a fully staged opera and every voice-and-piano song-cycle by a single genius in one weekend would be an embarrassment of riches. The only problem about Britten hitting the heights, above all in setting toweringly great poetry by Auden, Blake, Donne and Hölderlin, at the top of a long list, meant one sitting and squirming at most of Ronald Duncan’s wretched lines for an opera which even in its very subject is problematic, The Rape of Lucretia.Oliver Mears’ production (pictured below, both production images by Camilla Greenwell), originating here at Snape Maltings with Read more ...
Robert Beale
Is Artificial Intelligence pointing the way to musical composition in the future? The BBC Philharmonic, conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni and colleagues at the Royal Northern College of Music made a case for it in this concert.The highlight of the college’s Future Music festival, the programme celebrated the fifth anniversary of PRiSM (the centre for Practice and Research in Science and Music) at the RNCM, and also the supposed centennial of the orchestra itself. It presented two works by Emily Howard, PRiSM’s director: Antisphere (from 2019) and Elliptics, a setting of a poem by Michael Read more ...