Reviews
David Nice
Why go to hear a cello-and-piano recital in a large hall, and a rather unsatisfying programme (delayed without explanation for 15 minutes, incidentally) spotlighting a transcription of a work which was created for the violin? Two good answers would be Gautier Capuçon and Yuja Wang, sophisticated artists right at the top their respective leagues, communicative in a way that can reach out, tone-wise, into big spaces or pull you in to another, magical world.Capuçon the cellist didn't solve all problems in Jules Delsart's arrangement of Franck's A major Violin Sonata - a work ideally played by Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The soap-opera saga of the House of Windsor may not have been what the executive director of the London Mozart Players had in mind when she announced from the stage that Sheku Kanneh-Mason “is completely relevant for us”. Four years on from winning BBC Young Musician and two years since playing at the wedding of the wantaway Duke and Duchess of Sussex, the 20-year-old cellist bears an impossibly heavy burden summed up in another dread phrase, “the future of classical music”. Yet he wore it lightly and with some style last night, playing the First Cello Concerto by Saint-Saëns to a full house Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Scrounger is no comfortable evening in the theatre, for reasons both intentional and inadvertent. Athena Stevens’ new play recounts her 2016 battle with British Airways and London City Airport, who subjected her to the humiliation of being taken off a flight to Edinburgh because they couldn’t fit her custom-built electric wheelchair into the hold. Injury was added to insult when in the process of trying to cram the wheelchair into the plane, it was irreparably damaged. And all this happened despite the fact that Stevens had given them its dimensions well in advance. In the absence Read more ...
David Nice
Not everyone who flocked to Day Two's evening concert in Kings Place's year-long Nature Unwrapped: Sounds of Life celebrations will have realised that they were catching parts two and three of a trilogy. The masterpiece had come earlier, in a 5pm screening: Phie Ambo's poetic documentary Good Things Await, about the tenacity of eccentric Danish biodynamic farmer Niels Stokholm and the obstacles he faces from rigid authorities. There's choral music in there, from Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, performed on the soundtrack by Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices, whose first soprano Else Torp Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s a good few years since Judy Collins last toured Britain and Ireland, though in the US she’s rarely off the road. Over the last couple of years she has notched up more than 100 concerts (and an album) with Stephen Stills, who famously celebrated their 1960s love affair in the magnificent “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”. Her latest album, Winter Stories, with Jonas Field and Chatham County Line, had American critics reaching for superlatives and put her in the charts once more.Her eyes are still as blue and even up close you’d never guess she celebrated her 80th birthday last May Day. The pink Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A mixed bill rarely pleases all comedy tastes – whether in style or content – and so it proved at the launch of the Leicester Comedy Festival, which starts next month. In a line-up of eight comics that had few star names, the best came last – but more of that later.The gala was presented by the hugely likeable Charlie Baker, a Devonian who gets great mileage from his home county, approaching middle age, being married for nearly 20 years and liking his food too much. And while there was a lot of cheeky interaction with the front row along those lines, he was always the butt of the joke; Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
According to Gabrielle Aplin, the delicate piano ballad which closes, and provides the name of, her first album in over four years was written as a letter to herself; and one penned at a particularly turbulent point in her life. “It’s not easy for me, but I know that I’m close,” she sings, as if willing the emotion into being.Dear Happy – which arrives on Aplin’s own Never Fade label following her 2017 split from Parlophone – is full of little moments like this: of resilience, reflection and recovery, providing a consistent through-line on a record which ranges from bubblegum pop and electro- Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Supernatural and Gothic stories have always haunted the misty borderlands between high and popular culture. The finest manage to hover between page-turning genre tales and what counts as respectable or “literary” fiction. This place in a perpetual limbo can offer the authors of yarns about borderline beings and in-between states an exhilarating kind of freedom. Their readers will know and recognise the usual weird or uncanny signposts, but writers can then point them towards almost any destination, thematic or emotional, that they desire. In Britain, the most recent wave of neo-Gothic Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You can see the temptation. With three different versions and four different overtures to choose from, as well as all that spoken dialogue to cut, substitute or omit, Beethoven’s Fidelio has always been a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of opera – a work, like Hamlet, that we shape and reshape in our own image. With so much agency available, so many fissures and footholds in this troubled piece, perhaps it was inevitable that someone would go all the way, jettison the score entirely and start from scratch.This is exactly what Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang has done. His prisoner of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In July 1961, the first issue of the Liverpool music paper Mersey Beat put three items on its front page. One was a surreal article by John Lennon titled Being a Short Diversion on the Dubious Origins of The Beatles. Another was a photo of Gene Vincent “at the Rialto Ballroom earlier this year, [signing] autographs for two young Liverpool beauties, Mary Larkin and Terry Shorrock.” The third was a piece on “Swinging Cilla,” “a Liverpool girl who is starting on the road to fame.” She has, readers were told, sung with The Big Three and the Hurricanes.Exactly two years after she became front page Read more ...
Charlie Stone
Nathalie Léger’s superbly original Exposition is a biographical novel meditating on the nature of biography itself. Its plot – if indeed its 150 pages of intense reflection bordering continuously on stream of consciousness can be called a plot – is an account of the life of Virginia Oldoïni, better known as the Countess of Castiglione. Specifically, the narrator (a half-fictional version of Léger herself) is fascinated by the visits Castiglione made to be photographed in the same Paris studio over four decades – turbulent years which saw her reach the height of power and influence and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
An idyllic Scottish classroom full of happy children making sponge paintings of flowers with two enthusiastic young teachers – clearly, doom is in the air. Here comes that sense of dread again a little later at a ceilidh in a village hall, with everyone trying a little too hard to look happy. And it’s soon confirmed in a flash-forward to a pathologist wiping down an autopsy table.The first of the four episodes of C4's Deadwater Fell, written and created by Daisy Coulam (Humans, Grantchester) and directed by Lynsey Miller, is gripping and disturbing, with a strong cast, though some of the Read more ...