Reviews
David Nice
There is genius not only in the rainbow hues of Pavel Kolesnikov’s playing but also in the way his chosen programmes resonate. He’s given us interconnected wonders from across the centuries, but chose to focus on the greatest of composers for the piano in only his third such recital. His first all-Chopin concert was given in sentimental homage to his birthplace, Novosibirsk; the second was a BBC Lunchtime Prom of Mazurkas; and this third, under circumstances even more exceptional than the Prom, brought light to his first UK audience after lockdown – a privileged 25 of us each evening.In Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s no accident that the eponymous young antihero of Coincoin and the Extra-Humans loses his virginity to the daughter of a French white nationalist in a field close to a sewage farm. The stench of racism pervades the hilarity of Bruce Dumont’s follow-up to his 2014 miniseries Le P’tit Quinquin, which happily features the same principal cast members. Available in four 52-minute episodes but more hypnotic when watched in one sitting, Coincoin is a deceptively gentle polemical comedy so rich in ideas it deserves its own sequel. Hopefully, the story of the Pas-de-Calais farmer’s son Read more ...
David Nice
Things fell apart; the Centre Right could not hold. Anne Applebaum knows it from the inside. A Reaganite with whom I imagine a civilized conversation would have been possible even in former times married to a Polish politician, now MEP, Radek Sikorski, whose many good deeds speak louder than his views, Applebaum has produced a concise, lucid and very readable summary of how it all went wrong. She reminds us of key happenings in the unhappy chronology while summoning up a range of figures on the scene, now so-called populists and including erstwhile friends, to root it all in the specific.The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was Alison Ellwood who directed 2013’s History of the Eagles, and now she’s at the helm of this new two-parter on Sky Documentaries, telling the story of the Los Angeles music scene from the mid-Sixties to the early Seventies. The musicians’ community in the streets and meandering side roads off Laurel Canyon Boulevard was a hive of artistic activity encompassing among others The Byrds, The Monkees and The Turtles, Love and The Doors, Crosby Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, the Mamas & the Papas, Jackson Browne and the Eagles. Frank Zappa lived here too, and even the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“These are African rhythms, passed down to us from the ancient spirits. Feel the spirits, a unifying force. Come on, move with the spirits. Stand up. Clap your hands. Groove with the rhythms. Get down. Get off.”So begins “African Rhythms”, originally released in 1975 as the opening cut from an album of the same name by Oneness Of Juju. It was issued on Black Fire, their own label.As a thematic mission statement, “African Rhythms” lays it out. As a musical mission statement, “African Rhythms” was equally explicit. With its clamorous percussion bedding, the track is driving, funky, jazzy and Read more ...
David Nice
“At the Pärnu Music Festival 2020” were words I never expected to type. A fortnight ago Estonia finally upped its non-quarantinable country rate from 15 to 16 infections in every 100,000 people (the UK was then on 15.9; our unfathomable Foreign Office has not, to my knowledge, returned the compliment, despite Estonian rates being next to 0 for weeks). That meant two key players of the Estonian Festival Orchestra, clarinettist Matthew Hunt and horn-player Alec Frank-Gemmill, as well as myself could travel. If a first visit in 2015 was cause for wonderment at how the restless Soviet state of 26 Read more ...
Marianka Swain
We’ve already had The Last Five Years in lockdown; now, we get a digital production of American composer Jason Robert Brown’s earliest work. A series of wistful pop/jazz numbers loosely linked thematically, rather than narratively, this 1995 abstract musical features various characters responding to a moment that upends their lives. Formally, it’s another Brown show that suits our current circumstances, since the songs are mainly standalone solos, and the performers’ various homes work fine as background; no need for a helicopter or falling chandelier in this one.The central idea also speaks Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When she announced her “surprise” 8th album on social media this week, Taylor Swift described its subject matter as a combination of “fantasy, history and memory” told with “love, wonder and whimsy”. For the listener, this hits home around track three. “The Last Great American Dynasty” tells the story of Rebekah, a “middle-class divorcée” who marries a heir to the Standard Oil fortune and spends her widowhood - and inheritance - on boys, ballet and annoying the neighbours of her Rhode Island mansion. And then? “It was bought by me,” sings Swift, turning the song’s misogynist refrain of “who Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I’m for sure getting rid of it,” 34-year-old Bridget (cool, understated Kelly O’Sullivan, who also wrote the script; she was creatively inspired by Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird) tells her younger, casual boyfriend Jace (an endearing Max Lipchitz) when she finds out she’s pregnant.Alex Thompson’s realistic debut feature, full of fine performances from relatively unknown actors and acclaimed at SXSW in 2019, busts taboos with a light touch. There will be blood: menstrual blood, lots of it from the start, more consistently featured than in I May Destroy You. After Jace and Bridget have sex – period Read more ...
India Lewis
"Alone at Alexandra Palace" is a gift of this time, no compensation but some sort of balm to a world that is still so interior, with a long time to wait until any concerts can resume. The film begins with an emphasis on aloneness that is sustained throughout, Cave reading a fairytale-like story as the soundtrack to his walk through the black and gold of the empty Alexandra Palace.Surrounded by a pool of sheet music, his grand piano stands in the middle of the space, lit with an almost nostalgic warmth. In contrast, the songs themselves, even when they are more major than minor, are inflected Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It is five years since Maria Schneider’s The Thompson Fields was released – and hailed as a masterpiece – so this new two-disc set has been eagerly awaited. It doesn’t disappoint. Data Lords is a major piece of work. This “story of two worlds” as the album’s strap-line has it, is two contrasting albums which inhabit very different emotional territory.The first of the two is entitled The Digital World. For many years, Maria Schneider has been an assiduous, forthright and highly articulate defender of the rights of creators in the face of the land-grab by the data companies. It is a subject on Read more ...
Owen Richards
Ever felt like you could express yourself more freely, if only you could get away from everything that made you who are? British romcom How to Build a Girl tackles this paradox in joyful fashion, using the 90s music scene as the backdrop for a journey of self-discovery, via every embarrassing mistake it’s possible to make.Based on Caitlin Moran’s semi-autobiographical novel, the film follows aspiring teen writer Johanna Morrigan, who dreams of leaving her Wolverhampton council estate for the bright lights of London. After winning the chance to review Manic Street Preachers for D&ME Read more ...