Reviews
David Nice
Tom Rakewell Esquire, the Glyndebourne edition generally known as “the Hockney Rake” though it is very much director John Cox’s too, is 46 years old. The great Bernard Haitink, who conducted the first airing in 1975 at a time when Stravinsky's extraordinary score was hardly the repertoire staple this production has helped it become, has just left us, but it’s poignant that one of his disciples, Kerem Hasan, is in charge of the tour revival. With young singers at the top of their game, musical and dramatic tradition is very much alive and firing, however sophisticatedly, on all cylinders. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Channel 5’ s decision to remake James Herriot’s much-loved Yorkshire vet stories was an inspired one, and this second series has effortlessly carried on the mood of gentle observation, nostalgia and slapstick comedy amid scintillating Yorkshire Dales scenery. A teeming cast of dogs, cats, horses, cows and chickens is permanently on call to provide fuel for the adventures of Herriot and the Farnon veterinary dynasty.Much of the time, the second series has merely rung a few changes on the formula perfected last time around, but fans of the show (and of Herriot’s original books) won’t mind. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Forty five minutes into their set Field Music play “A House is Not a Home”, from their 2006 second album Tones of Town. An hour in, “Them That do Nothing” from 2010’s Measure is aired. They end with “Orion From the Street”, the opening track from their recent Flat White Moon album.Afterwards, leaving the venue and pitching into the assault of Friday night Camden, its shouters and stumblers, a voice is heard above the din saying the show was a great introduction to Field Music as they’d played what amounted to a greatest hits set. Yes, but more was going on.Flat White Moon explicitly draws Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
“What a lovely sound that was!” declared Music Director Thomas Søndergård, bounding onto the podium of the Usher Hall. He was referring, of course, to the warm applause greeting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra on its first full outing in front of an Edinburgh audience in nigh on 18 months. Readers in England might be faintly surprised that many weeks after a largely unmasked Prom season in London, Scottish audiences are only now creeping back into their familiar spaces, and in the case of the Usher, masks are still compulsory, with conspicuous social distancing reducing the capacity of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Over 1974 to 1978 Graham Collier issued five albums on his own imprint Mosaic. There was another in 1985 and eight releases on Mosaic by other musicians, but for its first four years the imprint was dominated by the British jazz composer, bassist and bandleader’s own work. In the same period, three books Collier had written came out. There was Jazz – A Students' and Teachers' Guide, published by Cambridge University Press, Compositional Devices, published by America’s Berklee College and Cleo and John, about Laine and Dankworth. Collier was busy.He had graduated from Berklee in 1963 and went Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Jaws was the Moby Dick of late 20th century capitalism, a fantasy about fear and the unknown for a society that had rarely felt more secure and powerful. Despite the tremors caused by the Watergate scandal and the loss of the Vietnam war, the US would be the wealthiest country in the world for the next three decades and in Jaws Steven Spielberg announced himself as its chief mythmaker.This shark-tooth-sharp comedy, which has swum relatively seamlessly down to the West End from the 2019 Edinburgh Festival, is an enjoyable three-hander about the near-disasters behind the scenes in the film’s Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Kicking off a brand new partnership between the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Hockley Social Club, this first ever Symphonic Session saw a string quartet from the CBSO take centre stage at Birmingham’s latest street-food venue, Hockley Social Club, on Thursday evening. Hockley Social Club is the new, permanent Brum-based home for street-food stalwarts Digbeth Dining Club. Founded almost a decade ago, Digbeth Dining Club has brought its signature street food events to myriad Midlands venues, including the ruins at Coventry Cathedral and the stunning grounds of Warwick Castle. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This Korean-made show suddenly became Netflix’s all-time greatest hit, demonstrating once again the irresistible allure of a game show which ruthlessly massacres its contestants. Squid Game has some fairly obvious antecedents – for instance The Hunger Games, the Schwarzenegger vehicle The Running Man and the Japanese TV show Battle Royale – and also carries echoes of the 1960s cult mystery The Prisoner and perhaps a soupçon of Lord of the Flies. The fact that it has come out of South Korea undoubtedly sprays on an added miasma of strangeness (avoid the dubbed English dialogue option, because Read more ...
Robert Beale
The youthful New Zealand-born conductor Gemma New and British cellist Laura van der Heijden between them set the Hallé quite a challenge at this concert.The music was all written in the past 75 years or so – by classical measures that’s pretty recent – and not by any means standard repertoire. And, written for large orchestra in complex scoring in each case, it made considerable demands. They rose to almost all of them with passion and skill and won a generous reception for their efforts. The newest was first: Icarus, by Lera Auerbach (written this century). It’s based on the famous Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Laura Marling was one of the most active lockdown performance artists, doing her bit to play solo streams to a captive and culturally starved virtual audience.The simplicity of her uninterrupted sets, low production values and absence of small talk suits her so well that she’s continued the social distancing of just her and a guitar on stage in this, her first real life tour with actual crowds in four and a half years.Setting her intention to avoid pre-amble and simply capture her audience through mesmeric storysongs, "Take the Night Off" rolls into "I Was An Eagle” rolls into "Breathe". The Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Upon emerging onstage at the Barrowland, Fontaines DC took time to pass flowers into the crowd. Aside from the occasional thank-you later on, that was the only genteel note struck in a thrilling, compelling and often bruising set. Their last visit to Glasgow back in 2019 had been hindered at times by some dubious sound, but there were no such issues here. Instead, this was a group in control throughout, pacing the set well and sounding rousingly triumphant by the night’s end.A wider repertoire helped, too. The set was split nearly exactly between debut offering Dogrel and last year’s A Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Grenfell: Value Engineering isn’t actually a play. It’s an edited version of the testimony heard by the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, particularly Phase 2, from January 2020 to July 2021. Along with director/producer Nicolas Kent, Richard Norton-Taylor has distilled the Inquiry’s proceedings into two-and-three-quarter hours of devastation. They show that tens, maybe even hundreds of people are responsible for the fire that killed 72 and injured almost as many. It’s verbatim theatre, but it leaves you speechless.The set-up is simple. Designers Miki Jabikowska and Matt Eagland have recreated the room Read more ...