Reviews
Bernard Hughes
This concert started with a heartfelt and moving speech from the Festival Hall podium by Vasily Petrenko, half-Ukrainian, brought up in St Petersburg. “What could I have done? What could we all have done? I have no answers.” The only answer he provided was music-making of driven intensity, ferocity alternating with anguished lyricism in Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto, testimony from a composer well acquainted with Russian oppression.The soloist in the concerto was the youngish Spanish cellist Pablo Ferrández (pictured below), whose slightly brittle sound in the opening movement gave way Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A few years ago Ralph Fiennes starred as the narcissistic, belligerently ambitious, ultimately tragic architect Halvard Solness in Ibsen’s The Master Builder, in a fine adaptation by David Hare. You might argue that there isn’t much of a leap from the fictional architect to the real-life New York planner Robert Moses, though Moses didn’t die falling from one of his buildings. Actor and playwright have been here before. Moses is one of the most influential and divisive figures in the history of New York, a man whose creations of parks and highways transformed the city and its Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Acknowledging the contrast between personal and public situations, The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman says “I have a lot of songs about not being heard, yet I’m holding this microphone.” An individual’s voice can be ignored, but if it’s given a context which enables reaching out – it may be heard.The Weather Station’s February 2021 album, the pointedly titled Ignorance, framed her concerns about climate change and its horrifying effects as a broken relationship. It can be read as form of break-up album. However, the fissure examined is between humanity and the world hosting it. At the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
When we first meet Sarah, the teenage heroine of Freya Waley-Cohen’s WITCH, she’s alone in her bedroom Googling “How to stop feeling shitty?”. She’s being bullied and sexualised by boys at school, but she could just as easily be asking on behalf of any one of her operatic forebears: Manon; Carmen; Armida; Alcina; Butterfly; Elvira.This triple bill, which frames Waley-Cohen’s new work with Monteverdi and Strauss’s takes on the abandoned and betrayed Ariadne/Arianna, offers a statement about the female experience – AKA operatic variations on feeling shitty.Too often lectures when it should live Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Rakel Mjöll has a nice line in understatement. “We released this album in July 2020”, she said at one point, referring to her band’s sophomore record “So When You Gonna...” before adding, dryly, “which wasn’t the best time”. Finally, nearly two years later, Dream Wife have managed to get out on the road and actually tour those songs, and, thankfully, this was an evening worth the wait.A glowing logo with the band name on it hung above the stage in the converted church that is St Luke’s, and like a punky Bat Signal, when lit up the band appeared, with bassist Bella Podpadec in particular Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At first, Bortenfor comes across as an all-instrumental extended mood piece. A breathy saxophone and trumpet mesh over a gently see-sawing double bass. Clusters of piano notes occasionally intersperse themselves into the undulating textures. A pedal steel evokes shimmering water.After nine tracks the album ends with “I havn,” a hymnal composition with wordless vocals and a series of crescendos. Once it’s all over, the lingering feeling is of having leafed through old photo albums, the sense that frozen pasts are trying to assert their presence in the present; that Bortenfor – the title Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
To stage a double bill of unusual 20th century Russian operas would be brave at the best of times. To do so in the Fair City of Perth amply demonstrates Scottish Opera’s laudable commitment to extend its influence beyond the Edinburgh-Glasgow cultural axis. Perth is blessed with a fine old theatre and a superb modern wood-panelled concert hall, but it’s a good 90 minutes from Scottish Opera’s base in Glasgow and more often than not simply bypassed by holidaymakers heading for the heather and snowclad peaks of the Highlands.Rachmaninov’s The Miserly Knight and Stravinsky’s Mavra are an Read more ...
Annabel Bai Jackson
No mental health condition has become quite as kitsch as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Its tacky shorthands – the hand washing, the germaphobia, the clean freaks – have made their way into everything, from Buzzfeed listicles to The Big Bang Theory. As for literature, there’s a gaping OCD-shaped hole. Depression gets William Styron’s Darkness Visible, psychosis Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. But the implicit cultural understanding of OCD as “quirk” has made it unworthy of literary treatment: insufficiently disturbing for trauma plots, and too specific to be a metaphor Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s been 14 months since the release of Wardruna’s most recent album – Kvitravn. However, repeated waves of Covid have since prevented them from going a-viking and bringing their new show to live audiences around the UK.Nevertheless, both the band and their fans’ patience was finally rewarded this week, as Einar Selvik’s seven-piece band of Norsemen and women came to Birmingham’s Symphony Hall for the first time. However, anyone who might be thinking that a 2,000 plus seater might be a bit of a stretch for a relatively niche group of artists whose sound falls somewhere between ambient folk Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is there really such a thing as an unmissable show? Depends on your taste of course, but for sheer hype this event takes some beating: two-time Olivier Award-winning star Ruth Wilson (last seen doing her sinister stuff in the BBC’s His Dark Materials) has teamed up with boundary-smashing director Ivo van Hove (whose A View from the Bridge was a decade highlight) to stage Jean Cocteau’s 1930 monologue about a woman waiting for her lover to phone. Part of the hype is the hot cakes effect — the show is in the West End for 31 performances only.Wilson plays the unnamed woman, a role which both Read more ...
Richard Bratby
JS Bach’s Passions as music theatre? Well, why not? Whatever the aura of untouchability around these works, they were always conceived as part of a bigger picture: a communal sacred ritual in which the divide between performer and audience wasn’t so much blurred as nonexistent.Anything that gets us closer to that experience surely serves Bach’s ends; at any rate, something needs to be done to break these works out of the curious sterility of so many modern concert performances or the frosty purity of the recording studio. In that light, English Touring Opera’s decision to tour the St John Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It’s not hard to see, watching Tom Fool at the Orange Tree Theatre, why Franz Xaver Kroetz is one of Germany’s most staged playwrights.Born in Munich in 1946, he’s known for unflinching portrayals of poverty and what it does to people. Directed sensitively by Diyan Zora, this production is a masterclass in what critic Richard Gilman dubbed “the theatre of the inarticulate” – but it does leave us yearning for a little more depth.The inarticulate in this case are the Meier family, of 1970s Bavaria. Martha (Anna Francolini) looks after the home while her husband Otto (Michael Shaeffer, pictured Read more ...