Reviews
David Nice
Best new opera in years, they said – don’t ask who – after the Aldeburgh Festival premiere of Tom Coult’s Violet. I’d have been happy in Hackney had it been as good as, say, Philip Venables’ 4.48 Psychosis or Stuart MacRae’s The Devil Inside. Alas, nowhere near.The premise is interesting: oppressed wife Violet, a prisoner in her own home, starts to find a zest for life as time begins to disappear and what seems like global meltdown heads towards the end of the world. But Alice Birch’s doomy libretto gives no powerful words to make us care about the four characters, and when the overwritten Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Collective were back on home ground last night in the tour of a programme featuring the first performances of a new song cycle by Edmund Finnis, Out of the Dawn’s Mind. Soprano soloist was the amazing Ruby Hughes.It was home ground for her, too, in a sense: as a former student at Chetham’s School of Music she’s an old friend of the Collective’s leader and artistic director, Rakhi Singh.Ruby Hughes and the Collective created a moving and stimulating online streamed programme from the Lakeside Arts venue at the University of Nottingham in February last year – Dowland, Debussy, Mahler Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Figuratively, “Tselane” is Blk Jks’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Both songs begin quietly and move through passages of turbulence suggesting an impending tempest. Each has a command of dynamics which pulls the listener in, generating anticipation for what comes next. On stage, “Tselane” is introduced as a “lullaby.”Musically – beyond them being a form of rock – little obviously connects “Tselane” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” but the association is there: it’s about the contrasts, the subtle union of drama and tranquillity.“Tselane” was first heard as the closing track of Blk Jks – said Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
In a world seemingly devoid of joy, Hollie Cook's fourth album is a very welcome salve indeed. It’s not just the deliciously mellow groove of the genre and her mellifluous tones, but the feeling of stepping away from the everyday – a holiday from the horrible – which makes this a musta-have for all summer gatherings. At first listen, Happy Hour can seem a bit "samey" but that’s an illusion. Stick with it. In fact, this, her first self-produced effort is something of a triumph. Dreamy and serene, this is Lovers' Rock for the Covid generation. Deceptively simple, the first three songs – Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Slamming the door on experience comes with repercussions in A Doll's House, Part 2, the thrilling Broadway entry from American writer Lucas Hnath that has arrived at the Donmar as part of an America-friendly season at that address including Marys Seacole (already finished) and The Band's Visit (still to come).In each case, the Covent Garden venue has chosen to take a fresh look at the source rather than bringing over a pre-existing version, which in this case allows for the director James Macdonald to effect his customary wizardry. This veteran of new writing is well-matched to Hnath's Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Will Erich Korngold, the great cinema composer, ever be recognised as a great composer for the live theatre? Probably not, at least until the prejudices that did for him in his lifetime – the prejudice against film and popular music and the prejudice against Jews – are fully corrected in practice as well as in people’s minds. Korngold, happily, is on the way back, though it has taken a long time. Die tote Stadt should, if justice be done, clinch his return.This terrific opera, first staged in Hamburg in 1920 when Korngold was 23, admittedly created its own problems from the start. It was the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is gig theatre the latest sugar rush? Okay, it ups the brain’s serotonin levels and charges around your body like a crazy electric current, but amid the joyous nerve reactions does the music speak louder than the words?These questions won’t bother many in the young audiences that are targeted by the Soho Theatre as it stages Bangers, a “mixtape play” written by Danusia Samal and directed by Chris Sonnex, and featuring original music by Duramaney Kamara, Samal and Sonnex, but they are worth asking. After all, this is meant to be a new writing theatre.Bangers comes to this venue’s sweaty studio Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The devil, in Verdi’s Otello, doesn’t quite have all the best tunes. Desdemona trumps him there. But the arch-manipulator Iago boasts a part of such polished, seductive wickedness that (as in Shakespeare’s tragedy) the villain can often make off with the show.At Grange Park Opera, the great Simon Keenlyside (pictured below) threatened at several points to overwhelm David Alden’s new production: a dominance rubbed in by his silent, watchful presence at the edges of the stage, even when he had no words to sing. That this bluff, leather-jacketed baritone wrecker didn’t run away entirely with the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The story is riveting. A nanny living in New York and Chicago spent her spare time wandering the streets taking photographs. She learned to develop and print, but her plan to publish the images as postcards fell through and, as time passed, she stopped bothering even to develop the negatives let alone print them.So most of the 140,000 pictures which she took over a period of 40 years were seen by almost no-one, including herself – until, that is, she failed to pay the rent on the storage unit where they were kept and its contents were auctioned off.That sale was in 2007, and it could have Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Odesa (Sunnyside) is a deeply-felt and wonderfully played solo piano album with a massive emotional and stylistic compass. New York-based composer/pianist Vadim Neselovskyi has made a strong statement in homage to the city by the Black Sea where he was born, and to its unique cultural and musical heritage.Neselovskyi is one of those musicians whose astonishing potential – above all as composer – was spotted ridiculously early. He entered a newly-formed elite composition class in his home city at the age of just eight. By 14 his compositions were being presented abroad by Ukrainian cultural Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Kathryn Hunter’s performance as Lear forges its heat from contradictions. She is as frail as she is strong, as detestable as she is loveable, as powerfully charismatic as she is physically diminutive. That she is a woman playing a man is the least extraordinary aspect of what she achieves in this production. This is a Lear that eviscerates emotionally at the same time as it illuminates the fragility of a society rotten with corruption and lies.Hunter famously first played Lear in 1997 at a moment when discussions about gender and identity were at a very different level to where we are now. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Suspect has a simple premise: a detective goes on a routine visit to a mortuary where an unidentified young woman has been taken after being found hanged. Suicide is the initial judgment: the cop, Danny Frater (James Nesbitt), grills the pathologist (Joely Richardson, pictured below) about the case and starts to leave. Then he pauses, policing instincts a-twitch, and uncovers the body’s head. Horror of horrors, it is his estranged daughter Christina, and he doesn’t believe she killed herself.Over eight half-hour episodes, Danny tracks the people in his daughter’s life, each episode bringing Read more ...