Reviews
Christopher Lambton
I expected the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland’s Usher Hall concert to be jam-packed with a joyful melee of admiring friends and relatives. This is a vast orchestra of over 100, and it wouldn’t take that many aunts and uncles to fill the Usher’s cavernous spaces, but in the event the audience for this inspiring and diverse programme was disappointingly thin. I was told it was a tough sell, being Good Friday, the beginning of a holiday weekend, and with Covid restrictions still in place in Scotland for another 72 hours or so. Better, by all accounts, in Glasgow the following night.The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What’s in the groove isn’t necessarily the end of the story. Sound is fixed into a record when it’s pressed. Get it revolving on a turntable, dump the needle onto it and what’s heard is what’s intended to be heard. It’s fixed. Nonetheless, DJs realised a record can be part of the route to something else, something which becomes their creation.Saturno 2000 - La Rebajada de Los Sonideros 1962-1983 celebrates a previously obscure form of sonic manipulation. In Mexico, DJs were playing records at a lower rpm than the standard 33 1/3 or 45 bringing their tempo down to make them more easy to dance Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Having not heard a Passion live for several years I decided to do two in close succession, to compare pieces from different ends of the musical spectrum.Bach’s 1724 setting, a masterpiece of the baroque, dramatises the story through emotional engagement and expressive characterisation. Arvo Pärt’s Passio (completed 1982) is by contrast severe and minimalist, its declamation deliberately flat and detached, until a blazing climax, one of the hardest earned releases in all music.I borrowed the CD of Passio from my local library as a teenager, when the Hilliard Ensemble’s premiere recording first Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Zorro (what a name!) is back, swashing and buckling his way into the West End, 13 years after he left and now not the only one wearing a mask. He’s also an entertainer turned political leader, inspiring his people to resist an evil martinet. Well, that sort of thing is back in fashion too.Stephen Clark and Helen Edmundson’s story sets up two brothers in the Spanish outpost of Los Angeles (it’s 1805) with one, Diego – younger, the favourite – sent to Barcelona to learn the skills he’ll need to lead the pueblo when his father dies, and the other, Ramón – older, resentful – staying in California Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
British political life in the Boris Johnson era routinely seems stranger than fiction, and this adaptation of Sarah Vaughan’s novel about a Flashman-style Tory MP should delight all those who view Westminster as a sewer of privilege, corruption and back-slapping old-boy networks. Refreshingly, it doesn’t dabble in actual politics at all, but the action speeds along with an easy fluency which comfortably carries the viewer over its multiple absurdities.Rupert Friend plays James Whitehouse, a Conservative minister under the Prime Ministership of Tom Southern (Geoffrey Streatfeild). A smooth and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of the fictitious Major William Martin, whose waterlogged corpse washed up on the Spanish coast in 1943 bearing bogus documents designed to fool the Germans, was previously filmed in 1956 as The Man Who Never Was. That version took a few liberties with the facts (not least a wholly invented episode with a pro-German Irish spy), but Operation Mincemeat, directed by John Madden and based on Ben Macintyre’s book about the event, mostly plays it with a doggedly straight bat.This is more of a behind-the-scenes howdunnit than a big-bang war movie, and could function credibly as a stage Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Felt Mountain is not one of Goldfrapp’s most dynamic albums. So, what better venue to stop off in Birmingham to celebrate 20 years since its release than the iconic all-seater Symphony Hall? This the venue, after all, that is renowned for some of the best acoustics in the whole of Europe.That said, it’s not actually 20 years since Goldfrapp’s debut album first came out. That was in 2000. However, recent events have meant that a tour that was supposed to happen in 2020 got delayed until 2021, only to be rescheduled again to 2022. In fact, if it had got pushed back another year, it would have Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sandra Bullock is on terrific form in this rollicking romcom in which she plays Loretta Sage, a historian who writes bestselling romance novels in which the heroine has adventures in exotic places with her lover, Dash. Now, still grieving the loss of her archeologist husband five years before, Loretta has been sent on a book-signing tour by her manager, Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, giving it both barrels).Bad enough for Loretta that she has to leave her apartment where she could happily stay for ever, but she has to go on the road with Alan (Channing Tatum), the chisel-jawed, hunky model who Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
With its wild, windswept seascape and cliff-top settlement, the first scene of The Northman, Robert Eggers’s first big-budget movie (around $90 million in the making), harks back, a little, to The Lighthouse (2019), a one-of-a-kind black and white marvel with only two protagonists. (Cinematographer Jarin Blatschke has worked on all Eggers’s films, including his first, The Witch, as has costume designer Linda Muir).But similarities end there, and if you wince occasionally at the violence in The Lighthouse, which includes being buried alive, attacks by a deranged supernatural seagull and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Paul Verhoeven’s latest provocation is an old-fashioned but vigorous 17th century lesbian nun shocker, based on eye-poppingly explicit testimonies at the Christian church’s sole lesbian trial. It’s his most sustained examination of faith and sex, a theme going back to the repressive Calvinist father and sexually anarchic teens of his wild Dutch hit, Spetters (1980).Benedetta (Virginie Efira) has been imbued with a sense of religious destiny since childhood. Accepted into a Tuscan convent under stern but worldly Abbess Felicia (Charlotte Rampling), confusing, erotically charged dreams of Jesus Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Ché Walker claims he wrote Wolf Cub, now in the Hampstead Downstairs studio space, in a two-day blitz prompted by Donald Trump’s election win in 2016. He was working in Atlanta at the time, the home city of Claire Latham, the solo performer for this piece. With Walker directing and the twice Olivier-winning actor Sheila Atim, no less, providing evocative incidental music, they have created a haunting 80-minute monologue that embraces epic events.The locus of the spasm the US was experiencing when Walker sat down to write Wolf Cub is traced back to Ronald Reagan’s two-term Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Jane Austen’s waspish vision revealed the vanities, delusions and cynical financial calculations that underpinned most of the relationships of her day. The element in which she thrived was repression; the heart constrained beneath the corset, the raging passion held firmly in place by that most important part of an Englishman’s anatomy, the stiff upper lip.This production – which opened to acclaim at the Manchester Exchange in 2017 – rips off the corsets and liberates the lips so that the vibrant, sometimes even violent subtext is revealed. In place of Austen’s assiduous filleting of Read more ...