Reviews
theartsdesk
There's so much stuff on TV, in all its many multi-streaming hats, that I somehow haven't got around to watching Succession. Apparently it's the best TV show ever made.Oh well, there's bound to be another one along in a minute. Theartsdesk's eagle-eyed reviewers have found plenty to amuse themseves with elsewhere during 2021, and we parade our particular predilections below. Adam SweetingIt's a Sin, Channel 4 When I reviewed the first two episodes of Russell T Davies's shattering, but also where appropriate very funny, take on how the AIDS crisis hit Londin in the 1980s, I could have Read more ...
theartsdesk
Despite its much delayed start, 2021 was a great year for the visual arts, and institutions and artists alike showed their resilience in agile and sensitive responses to unprecedented conditions. The plastic arts took on a new significance as people adjusted to life without human touch; equally, the experience of viewing art online revealed the extent to which tactile qualities are experienced through looking. Here are some of our thoughts on the best of the year just gone.*Seeing paint on canvas, walking around a sculpture and looking at the textures of plaster, stone, metal and wood was as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title might provoke a quick double-take. Wasn’t A Very British Scandal that series about Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott, starring Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw?Duh, of course not! That was A Very English Scandal (though both of them are produced by Blueprint Pictures). But was it really a great idea to tag this plushly-produced, starrily-cast, historically-based three-parter as though it’s just the latest product to trundle off a televisual production line? We look forward to the box set where it’s bundled in with A Very English Education, A Very British Brothel, A Very British Hotel Chain Read more ...
David Nice
As the catastrophe unfolded in 2020, it seemed reasonable to speculate that the biggest orchestral works – Mahler and Shostakovich symphonies, Strauss tone poems among them – probably wouldn’t be heard live in our concert halls for years.Yet see how adaptable and uncrushable our great performing artists are. Following four and a half months of mostly scaled-down or middle-range opuses streamed online, the London orchestras adapted with alacrity. Simon Rattle welcomed an audience back into the Barbican, wondering at “that sound you make with your hands” for a nicely-tailored London Symphony Read more ...
David Nice
January to mid-May 2021 were the bleakest Covid months, yielding only the occasional livestream at least half as good as being there (Barrie Kosky’s magically reinvented Strauss Der Rosenkavalier from Munich, a film of Britten's The Turn of the Screw around Wilton’s Music Hall more imaginative than the actual production). The burden then fell, in England at least, on the country opera houses. It was clear from the start that the operatic heroes of the year would be the administrations of Glyndebourne, Garsington, Grange Park Opera, The Grange Festival, Longborough, plus others we didn't Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The archive release which had the greatest impact, and still does, was Linda Smith’s Till Another Time 1988-1996. After it turned up, the reaction to a first play was instant. How could this have escaped attention? The compilation opened the door on a brilliant artist, one previously known to a particular audience.Till Another Time raises the point that it’s impossible to keep on top of everything, to know about everything. Even though she issued new releases until relatively recently, Smith had slipped through a personal knowledge crack. Thankfully, that’s now rectified.That’s one aspect of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Voces8 online festivals – which were born of a need to keep the show on the road during at the beginning of the pandemic – have rapidly become a fixture of the musical landscape, setting the bar for online presentation of choral music and broadening the reach of all the groups involved. And if in this fifth festival some features have become familiar – Apollo5, I Fagiolini and the King’s Singers – there are also some American novelties this time round. Award-winning group The Crossing offered a reflection on moving on from Covid and the St Olaf Christmas concert was a first taste in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Friday night was Mark Gatiss night. His new version of Antonia Barber’s novel The Ghosts (filmed as The Amazing Mr Blunden in 1972 by Lionel Jeffries and similarly titled here) sprawled across two hours on Sky, while his adaptation of M R James’s ghost story The Mezzotint was awarded a mere 30 minutes on BBC Two. The latter won hands down.Gatiss’s Mr Blunden (★★) stuck faithfully enough to the original story of a modern-day family being visited by a ghostly solicitor, the titular Mr Blunden (played here by the fruitily thespian Simon Callow as though he’d just popped in one from one of his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Frida Hyvönen’s UK profile isn’t as high as it is in her home country Sweden. Over here, what she gets up to is less apparent than the activities of some of her more heavily marketed fellow Swedes. Hence Dream Of Independence coming as a surprise, and the choice of it as the lead here.Dream Of Independence is instantly accessible and tune-packed, with its direct lyrics given added force by Hyvönen’s blunt delivery. A few specific tracks were noted when it was reviewed in March but any of the others are similarly emblematic of the album’s excellence. “Head of the Family” describes an intra- Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 1999, The Matrix offered something revolutionary. With a heady brew of William Gibson-influenced cyberpunk, Platonic philosophy and Prada, it proved that blockbusters could be both smart and action-packed. Remember those days? Two decades on, The Matrix films have been the subject of doctoral theses, inspired a new era of sci-fi's, video games, and spawned the idea we are all living in a simulation (it’s worth digging out Rodney Ascher’s incredibly enjoyable, A Glitch in the Matrix). Now in The Matrix Resurrections we return to the world created by the Wachowskis. Lana Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Was Peggy Ramsay a “woman out of time”? The celebrated London literary agent, who nurtured the talents of at least one generation of British playwrights, surely counted as a legend in her own lifetime (she died in 1991). Has she lasted beyond it?That the stories relating to her professional life – the personal life was kept much more off limits – around her celebrated office off St Martin’s Lane, up those flights of stairs, have lived on is due not least to Alan Plater’s 1999 drama Peggy For You in which he (one of the hundreds of writers on Ramsay’s roster, of course) imagines a day in the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It had been a tense week, explained Jonathan Sells, the artistic director and bass-baritone of Solomon’s Knot, from the stage of the Wigmore Hall: unsure if the concert would go ahead, unsure who exactly would be able to perform, unsure if there would be anyone in the audience.In the event it did go ahead, there was an audience present (although I was watching the livestream) and the hastily revised cast cramming the stage gave a joyful and uplifting account of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio that was a triumph in the circumstances.Solomon’s Knot’s credo is “to blow the dust off early music” and “ Read more ...