Reviews
Bernard Hughes
I Fagiolini do not just do choral concerts. Indeed, director Robert Hollingworth claimed in the pre-concert chat, he finds choral concerts boring. Instead what he and his group provide are experiences that go beyond straight recitals, bringing together elements of poetry, theatricality and unlikely juxtaposition, making old music sound new and allowing new music space to breathe alongside established classics.At Christmas I reviewed their contribution to an earlier Voces8 online festival, in which they combined Charpentier, Howells and Dylan Thomas. Also around the same time they released a Read more ...
Jon Turney
Music and time each dwell inside the other. And the more you attend to musical sounds, the more complex their temporal entanglements become. Time structures music, rhythmically and in its implied narratives. From outside, we place it in biographical time, whether cradle songs, serenades to a lover or wakes. Then music sits in history, yet somehow also apart from it, the latest sounds prone to evoke links between sonic effects and emotion that feel inexpressibly ancient. More ancient still, when we muse on bird choruses, animal cries or the thousand mile songs of whales, human music seems to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Oscar Wilde's fabulous play satirised Victorian England and contained a shedload of quotable quips. Now Yasmeen Khan has written an updated and uprooted version, set in the North of England, which takes aim at any number of class and ethnic stereotypes.The joint production (by the Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield and The Dukes, Lancaster) is set, the onscreen captions tell us, “somewhere in a posh bit of the North" and “somewhere else in the North” and a running gag has several characters saying: “I'll go to the foot of our stairs. No, nobody says that.” Other lines upend British-Asian Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Read our review of the season finale hereDark family dramas set in unglamorous, unprosperous communities in the north-east of the USA have become a genre unto themselves. One thinks here of the work of writers such as Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea) and Dennis Lehane (Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone), and maybe Chuck Hogan and The Town for good measure.New from HBO, Mare of Easttown (showing on Sky Atlantic) is a fine addition to this lineage, thanks to a superb and surprising lead performance from Kate Winslet and excellent work from the show’s writer and creator Brad Ingelsby ( Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
For their concert debut at St Martin-in-the-Fields, The Gesualdo Six brought a programme of English motets for the final instalment in the venue's trio of Easter concerts. Having come together for a one-off project in 2014, singing Carlo Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsories for Maundy Thursday, this young, all-male ensemble found their vocal chemistry worked so well they carried on making music together. Though Gesualdo was absent from this performance, the works performed were all from around his time, opening with Orlando Gibbons’s "Come oh Holy Ghost".The group have a remarkable blend, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s such a genial feel to the pairing of Oliver Ford Davies and Stephen Boxer in Ben Brown’s new play that there are moments when we almost forget the weighty historical circumstances that lay behind the long-awaited encounter between two old friends, this evening of conversation and drinking, that is its subject. For Brown’s protagonists are sometime MI6 colleagues Graham Greene and Kim Philby, reunited in Moscow in 1987 as the former, now one of the world's best-known writers, pays a visit to his old acquaintance, the defector ensconced in the third decade of his Soviet exile. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After winning a couple of Baftas, and with five nominations at next week’s Oscars, Promising Young Woman comes surging in on the crest of a wave. Emerald Fennell, already known for acting roles in The Crown and Call the Midwife and for showrunning series two of Killing Eve, hits it out of the park here as writer and first-time director, and she’s the first British female to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar. She’s brilliantly supported by Carey Mulligan’s sizzling lead performance.Promising Young Woman isn’t easy to pigeonhole, but that’s part of its tantalising allure. It’s by turns a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although it is not solipsistic, Flat White Moon is Field Music’s most personal, most revealing, warmest-sounding album so far. David and Peter Brewis have opened up. Their ninth studio album together opens with a seeming declaration. “Orion from the Street” has a drum pattern, bubbling, whooshing sounds and weaving, treated guitar unambiguously alluding to The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Field Music have never before so directly acknowledged an element of their musical autobiography in their own compositions.There are more nods to The Beatles. “When You Last Heard from Linda” has shades Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It'll All Work Out In Boomland was issued by Decca at the end of July 1970. A poor seller at the time, it began attracting attention in the mid-Eighties when prices for original copies began creeping up. Around 2000, it was picking up about £100. These days, a first press of British rock band T2’s sole album generally sells for between £300 and £400. There’s the odd outlier where it has fetched over £1000. It’s a wallet buster.Despite T2’s commercial failure, Decca must have been interested in the band as there were two British pressings of the album in 1970: one without the band name on the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On first sight, Citizen Lane's appeal may seem limited to those with an Irish connection or an interest in fine art. But director Thaddeus O'Sullivan turns what could have been a dry documentary into a witty and fine-looking docudrama about Hugh Lane, a turn-of-the-century art dealer and philanthropist.O'Sullivan utilises talking heads and historical recreation to tell Hugh Lane's rather remarkable story through Mark O’Halloran’s witty script. Lane was part of Ireland's Anglo ascendency – not aristocratic, but landed and monied all the same. Born in County Cork in 1875 and educated in England Read more ...
Robert Beale
Sir Mark Elder is back with the Hallé for the latest (and penultimate) filmed concert in their “Winter Season” of 2020 and 2021, including the world premiere of Huw Watkins' Second Symphony. He introduces it from the Bridgewater Hall foyer, and mentions plans for a six-concert summer series with audiences present in the hall – well, let’s hope so.There’s the usual “tuning up” brief clip of the busy streets of Manchester, and it’s straight into Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, with principal flute Amy Yule’s delightful solo, the harps of Marie Leenhardt and Eira Lynn Jones, and Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The Southbank Centre automatically stuck the trusty “Bohemian Rhapsodies” headline on this London Philharmonic Orchestra concert of Czech music streamed from the still-deserted Royal Festival Hall. Given Janáček’s presence on the bill, they should have made that “Moravian” as well. I know – get a life. Well, as we wait for that to begin properly once more, Marquee TV continue to bring high production values to their transmissions from the RFH.Sometimes, indeed, the team seems to takes undue, intrusive care. Directed by Nathan Prince, this gig featured too much moody blue and crimson lighting Read more ...