Reviews
Ian Julier
Although the composer singled out as the flagship promotional hook for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s concert was the “Brilliant Mendelssohn”, the programme also highlighted Mozart, Schubert and Britten to complete a quartet of musical child prodigies.Nurtured in Vienna via choral, orchestral and operatic work as well as studying the violin, the Austrian-Spanish conductor Teresa Riveiro Böhm has recently been Leverhulme Conducting Fellow in partnership at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland with the BBC Scottish SO, as well as working towards a Specialised Master’s Degree in conducting Read more ...
David Nice
Hunger for the gruesome horrors and euphoric highs of Greek tragedy seems to be stronger than ever. Yet when it comes to epic sequences, nothing in recent decades has quite had the impact of Peter Hall’s Aeschylus Oresteia at the National Theatre or John Barton’s three-night RSC journey from Aulis to Tauris The Greeks. Now Age of Rage from Ivo van Hove and his Internationaal Theater/Toneelgroep Amsterdam joins them in the pantheon of great theatre.There’s a radical reaction here against everything that seems to me to have gone wrong with often admirable UK attempts to reimagine that ancient Read more ...
Veronica Lee
After the latest disaster in Alan Partridge’s rollercoaster career, what would be the logical next move? To be a lifestyle guru, obviously. Partridge's creator Steve Coogan dipped into the idea back in 2008's Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters and now, co-writing with Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons, Partridge is imagined as the purveyor of a lifestyle programme called Stratagem – where you turn STRAT into A GEM. No, me neither, but it’s as mad as anything else that the gaffe-prone broadcaster has come up with.The first half feels somewhat laboured, as if Coogan and his co- Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Prior to alt-j’s encore getting underway their video wall switched to the Ukrainian flag. “Fuck Putin!” bellowed keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton, to hearty roars of approval, in what was both a brief reminder of the outside world beyond the increasingly humid Barrowland and also a look at the band themselves and their own emotions, which otherwise remained distant during this show.That distance was quite literal, particularly early on. The trio were on a raised platform on the stage, meaning they truly towered over the audience, while a large portion of the gig was spent with them in shadow, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
We are in a room in a simply decorated house in northwest London, where an Ethiopian-British family is gathering for a funeral “tea” for 28-year-old Ife, their first-born son and beloved twin brother of aspiring artist Aida. He has died of his crack addiction. But this is not exactly the house of the title. What follows in Beru Tessema’s debut stage work, directed by the Bush’s artistic director, Lynette Linton, is a process of identifying where Ife’s home actually was – and where all of the other family members belong too. Ife’s father Solomon (Jude Akuwudike), divorced for eight years Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In another flare-up of Pyrrhic Hamas missiles and punitive Israeli bombing one year ago, over 60 Gazan children were killed. Michael Winterbottom and his Palestinian co-director Mohammad Sawwaf made Eleven Days in May as a “simple memorial to the children who lost their lives”. Sawwaf interviewed surviving relatives, who detailed those lives and erased futures. The result is an understated, unanswerable anti-war film.Sawwaf frames surviving relatives in simple group portraits, structuring the film like a photo album. They sketch affecting, affectless biographies. “Mirwal was two years old, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Somehow or other, fictional representations of the police have become an off-the-cuff index of changing times and evolving values. Dixon of Dock Green’s cops were stern father figures who knew right from wrong and considered it their duty to give villains a clip round the ear. The Sweeney weren’t quite so sure about right and wrong but gave everybody a good kicking anyway, while risking a bollocking from the boss for their blatant rule-bending. Prime Suspect’s DCI Tennison had to battle entrenched sexism in a mostly-male police force. Now, in ITV’s DI Ray, a female Asian police officer has to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Over January, February and early March 1975, British music fans could buy tickets for what was titled The Naughty Rhythms Tour. Three bands were billed, with the running order changing each evening. The tour was the idea of Andrew Jakeman, who worked for one of the bands, and Chris Fenwick, the manager of another: on their own, each band couldn’t fill larger venues. Together, more tickets would be sold and fans would be picked up.Jakeman was working for Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers, one of the three bands. Fenwick managed another: Dr. Feelgood. The third outfit on the tour was Kokomo Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The programme for this concert had Andrew Manze’s fingerprints all over it. Of all the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s semi-regular guest conductors, he’s the one who most consistently delivers on the highest level. A thinker to his fingertips, he constructs programmes as intelligently as he plays them.So what a wonderful idea to begin with music by Grace Williams and end with music by her teacher, Ralph Vaughan Williams. I wasn't familiar with Grace Williams’ music before this concert, but even if you didn’t know the connection you could hear some of RVW’s influence in the way she uses a string Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
No surreys, fringes or corny chap-slapping: the Rodgers and Hammerstein revival that has arrived at the Young Vic from New York, trailing a Tony award, is no ordinary makeover. Daniel Fish, its director, has spent the best part of 15 years stripping down and remodelling the 1943 original. The framework of the story — of farmers and cowmen in 1906 Oklahoma Indian Territory, poised to join the union and warring over their womenfolk — is still there. But its new engine takes it to exciting and violent places. We enter the auditorium with the house lights on full beam. The room twice goes to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is at its most radical and corporate here; maybe decadent is the word. We start with surgeon turned sorcerer Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) threatened then slaughtered in a cosmic chase sequence. It’s just a dream, then it isn’t, and so is/isn’t pretty much everything that follows. For a film due to be a huge mainstream hit, Doctor Strange in The Multiverse Of Madness is narratively anarchic, and dependent on degree-level knowledge of MCU arcana, clearly feeling, as this franchise invincibly warps and morphs, that we’ll take anything now.When the Doc wakes Read more ...
David Nice
You know great singing when you hear it. In Handel, for me, that was when Lucy Crowe took over a Göttingen gala back in 2013; in Mozart, most recently, it came from Emily D’Angelo making her Royal Opera debut in La clemenza di Tito. Last night, in an opera of genius from first note to last, both shone, but neither eclipsed other performances or took the spotlight from the ravishingly beautiful playing of Harry Bicket’s English Concert.Handel's main roles were divided between five women’s voices of outstanding quality, delivering the sort of performances where singing seems as natural as Read more ...