Reviews
Thomas H. Green
The latest edition of theartsdesk on Vinyl combines the best new sounds on plastic with the vinyl reissues that are pressing buttons. Ranging from heavy rockin’ book-style boxsets to the funkiest summertime 7”s, all musical life is here. Dive in.VINYL OF THE MONTHThis Is The Deep The Best Is Yet To Come (Part 1) (B3)London indie outfit This Is The Deep make wonderfully eccentric but catchy music. The Best is Yet to Come (Part 1) is a mini-album that plays at 45 RPM, whose eight songs mingle quirky post-punk dub-funk with something altogether poppier and frothier. They are unafraid of Read more ...
David Nice
When the history of 2021’s slow emergence from lockdown comes to be written, musical administrations will stand out among the heroes. That’s especially true of the country-house opera organisations which have mushroomed in recent years. Don’t ask where some of the money comes from, or who it’s for, but celebrate for now how much work these set-ups have given top-notch singers, players and production teams, many of whom have hardly worked in the previous 14 months. Michael Chance at The Grange Festival has had a particularly tough time – we don’t know the half of it, though I learnt a little Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In John Eliot Gardiner’s magnificent wide-ranging biography of Bach, Music In The Castle of Heaven, he tells the story of the composer’s early run-in with a bassoonist with his typical zest for detail. “[H]e called him a Zippel Fagottist. Even in recent biographies this epithet continues to be translated euphemistically as a ‘greenhorn’, a ‘rapscallion’, or a ‘nanny-goat bassoonist’ whereas a literal translation suggests something far stronger: Bach had called Geyersbach ‘a prick of a bassoonist’.”Nina Raine’s spiky, heartfelt account of the fraught relationship between Bach (main Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A welcome West End upgrade is the order of the day at J'Ouvert, the debut play from Yasmin Joseph whose 2019 premiere at South London's Theatre 503 additionally marked the directing debut of the actress Rebekah Murrell. And now here it is, all but prompting spontaneous dance breaks throughout the (socially distanced) Harold Pinter Theatre as the second in the producer Sonia Friedman's audacious RE:EMERGE series, offering highly visible platforms to emerging playwrights: ANNA X completes the trio of commercial premieres next month. For now, J'Ouvert has the buoyant effect prompted by the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The boat ride lasts only a few minutes, but it takes you to another world. Orford Ness is an island of salt marsh and shingle banks off the Suffolk coast inhabited by birds, rabbits, hares and a few small deer.But the landscape is dotted with evidence of human activity – dangerous activity. “Prohibited Area. Photography and Sketching Forbidden” reads a notice in the Information Centre and, as you wander past the pink sea campions and delicate, yellow-horned poppies, signs reading “Danger Unexploded Ordnance” encourage you to keep to the designated pathways.Called “the island of secrets” by Read more ...
David Nice
While the big choral societies are asking, with good cause, why they remain silenced when it’s OK for football fans to sing on the terraces, the top voices of smaller ensembles are being heard again by select audiences. Not so small, in the case of the 24-strong young opera choruses of Garsington (times two, the groups divided between operas) and Grange Park Opera. Tenebrae in the wide-spread group its director Nigel Short (pictured below by Sim Canetty-Clarke) offered us in the welcoming space of Saffron Hall came close at 20 singers, and expressively unsurpassable in a typically ambitious Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It is an index of the ambition of some venues that they are not only reopening their doors, but also staging plays that remind us of the talents of our best writers and actors. Although the stage monologue has recently been almost as infectious as the Delta variant, and as tiresome, the Lyric Hammersmith offers three for the price of one in its reopening programme. Set in West London, this triple bill of monologues examines the legacy of Empire, the tensions of racism and the pleasures, and pains, of parenthood. Although each playlet is distinct, somehow, lurking underneath the surface, or Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In Handel’s operas (as, indeed, elsewhere in art and life) the worst witch may turn out to have the best character. Without the sorceress Melissa, splendidly full of evil ruses yet endowed with a generous measure of tragic pathos, Amadigi di Gaula might freeze into a static amorous stand-off between pasteboard nobles contending with a harsh – then, suddenly, kindly – fate.Thank goodness that Irish soprano Anna Devin, as the lovelorn enchantress, graces Netia Jones's ingenious if somewhat hyper-active production of Handel’s 1715 heroic romance in Garsington Opera’s pavilion at Wormsley. In a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Empty Sky, Elton John’s first album was released in June 1969. Now, an album titled Regimental Sgt. Zippo has turned up. It’s marketed as “The debut album that never was.” The 12 tracks are annotated loosely as having been recorded from November 1967 to May 1968.Regimental Sgt. Zippo is great. The album opens with “When I Was Tealby Abbey”: string-drenched psychedelic pop easily as good as the early Blossom Toes or a Mark Wirtz confection. As the album goes on, what was being absorbed is evident. The Zombies are in there. “And the Clock Goes Round” has the rolling piano chassis of The Left Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's commanding, and then there's Michael Sheen, who sweeps on to the Olivier stage 15 minutes or so into the new National Theatre revival of Under Milk Wood and scoops up the entire production with it. Inheriting a role made to order for this Welshman, Sheen takes to his fellow countryman Dylan Thomas's 1954 classic as if on a date with destiny. Lyndsey Turner's approach to the intrinsically piecemeal material may at times tilt towards the fussy, but Sheen comes at this portrait of small town life like a man possessed and holds the audience in his disheveled, gleaming-eyed grip from the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
She became one of the most successful pop stars in history, but Britney Spears has also become a paradigm of the horrors and pitfalls of life in the white heat of showbusiness. This new documentary by Samantha Stark (made by the New York Times) tracks Britney’s path from her upbringing in the small Bible Belt town of Kentwood, Louisiana through her precocious progress from an 11-year old star of TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club – also featuring Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling and Christina Aguilera – to monster-selling hits like "...Baby One More Time" and "Oops!.. I Did It Again". But then come Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Thirty years on, Alex and Jason meet at a university reunion and cab it back to Jason’s old student house where Alex is thinking “probably…” and Jason is thinking “probably not…” - each, it turns out, with good reason. We look on as the clumsy fumblings of youth get replaced with the anxious fumblings of middle age, two temporal spaces coming together in one room. Deborah Bruce’s new play for the Hampstead Downstairs eschews the opportunity to take potshots at her generation (no “OK boomer” vibe here) and instead treats seriously a collection of issues that will have said boomers Read more ...