Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
Thanks to the pandemic, the planned tidal surge of Fidelio productions never quite happened during Beethoven’s anniversary year of 2020. Instead, the birthday’s boy’s sole opera – beset by glitches and re-thinks ever since its creation – has rolled on intermittent waves into houses and halls around the world. Mounted by the Insula Orchestra with the accentus choir (based in the western Paris suburbs of the Hauts-de-Seine), the version conducted by Insula’s founder Laurence Equilbey arrived at the Barbican last night as something of a straggler.It had, all the same, much to offer and please Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it domestic farce and a fever-dream fantasy of a song-cycle: Stravinsky’s Mavra (1922) and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) make for an unexpected double-bill. But, if the two stand slightly awkwardly next to one another, they are both facing in the same direction – each looking back into the musical past.Passacaglias and fugues, love-duets and ensembles, waltzes and folksongs: these are the fragments gathered up by two composers less interested in tearing down the musical establishment at the start of the 20th century than re-purposing it, twisting and skewing the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of those films that are guaranteed to make an audience feel their age. Unless you’re steeped in the multiverse genre (The Matrix films, the Marvel canon, etc.) and are comfortable with absurdist pop culture memes, it may well leave you reeling. Brace yourself for two hours and 20 minutes of handbrake-turn jokes and surreal, comic action sequences. Divided into three parts, Everything focuses on Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), an immigrant from Hong Kong who runs a laundromat in the San Fernando Valley. She lives above the Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Mancunian tribute to Ralph Vaughan Williams – a symphonic cycle shared by the BBC Philharmonic and Hallé – reached its conclusion with the Eighth Symphony last night. But, unlike most concerts in the RVW150 sequence, in this one (the final performance in the Hallé Thursday concerts series of 2021-22), Sir Mark Elder added an eclectic mix of other composers’ work to the evening. Value for money, without a doubt (main picture: Sir Mark Elder with the Hallé).First up was Stravinsky. The Concerto for piano and wind instruments is a challenge to the ensemble as much as its soloist, and there Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The Quiet Girl is adapted faithfully from Claire Keegan’s wonderful short story, Foster, first published in the New Yorker magazine in 2010 and then expanded into a novella.Much of the dialogue in Colm Bairéad’s beautiful, mainly Irish-language film, which is in many ways about the power of silence, is reproduced unchanged from Keegan's book.Set in 1981, the first scenes present nine-year-old Cáit (the marvellous Catherine Clinch, a 12-year-old newcomer) as more obviously unfortunate than in the book, perhaps to build up back-story.She’s bullied and slow at school and wets the bed at home, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Brandon Wardell is a big social media star – he has a large following on Twitter and Instagram, YouTube and TikTok – and has in the past appeared as support for fellow Millennial Bo Burnham. And now he is doing a short run at the Soho Theatre.Wardell starts by asking who in the audience had heard of him before they bought tickets, and those who had not; on the night I saw the show it was split evenly between the two groups and he appeared disappointed. It's a fair enough question for an American comic doing his first UK run to ask but, along with him telling us to laugh more loudly, it Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Who was Walter Sickert and what made him tick? The best way to address the question is to make a beeline for the final room of his Tate Britain retrospective. It’s hung with an impressive array of his last and most colourful paintings. Based on newspaper photographs, playbills and publicity shots scaled up for transfer onto canvas, they make a strong argument for viewing Sickert as a modernist – a precursor to artists like Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans and even Andy Warhol, who explore the alienating effects of the mass media on people in the public eye and their followers.By contrast, the early Read more ...
Katie Colombus
To take to the streets in Brighton in pursuit of a superior political ideology isn't unusual. What is unusual is that some of the young folk currently lurking about the Brighton Museum are part of dreamthinkspeak, an immersive theatre company taking part in this year's Brighton Festival.Before the evening begins, us "recruits" are introduced via a "secure platform" online, to an exciting sounding rebel movement's dream of freedom from their dystopian state. In small groups we arrive in secret locations, before being given an ipad and bemusedly squirreling around the dark museum and its Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Nick Cave’s cinematic progress has been unexpectedly, catastrophically personal. 20,000 Days On Earth (2014) introduced Bad Seed Warren Ellis as his droll, wild-bearded foil, with scripted, semi-fictitious revelations. Andrew Dominik’s One More Time with Feeling (2016) was a compassionate crescendo of grief at the death of Cave’s son Arthur, alongside sessions for the album Skeleton Tree, finding the singer suddenly raw and defenceless, searching for balance and a way forward.Dominik returns here to film lockdown performances of songs from Ghosteen, the record which truly reckoned with Arthur Read more ...
David Nice
When in 2018 Andris Nelsons and his "new" Leipzig orchestra sealed an auspicious partnership with a locally significant but modestly scaled symphony, Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” (No. 3), they could not have foreseen two years ahead when the bigger orchestral works would stay under wraps. Nelsons’ “Richard Strauss project”, shared between Leipzig and his other orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, makes sumptuous amends.Sadly, the Boston diptych due to follow this one in London has been cancelled, and the second of the Leipzig concerts (★★★) – I missed the first owing to Europe Day duty/ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The gentleman in the centre of the picture above is Ivan Dorn. In Ukraine, he’s a pop star. A big pop star. His music, as he puts it on stage during the show opening Tallinn-Narva Music Week, is “pure Ukrainian house music.” Yep, there’s the bing-bong piano lines and cowbell beats of the pop end of house.Before 24 February this year an Ivan Dorn live appearance would of course be fun, an uplifting experience with a jumping-up-and-down audience doing lots of arm waving. This is confirmed in Tallinn where his enviable charisma is tempered by a charming awkwardness telegraphing he’s not fully Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
Scrolling to the top of my Twitter DMs, most of which are from close friends or acquaintances, I notice the message request section flash “1”. It’s a signal I usually ignore, having learnt from past mistakes that what ends up in this screened-off section isn’t, as Twitter’s privacy settings rightly intuit, worth my attention.This time, however, I press on the notification, see the message and laugh. “Hi you are so beatifoul” the request reads alongside a small profile pic of a pale, sour-faced-looking male. Laughter turns to cackling (the LMAO-kind) much to the annoyance of those around me, Read more ...