Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Who can explain the mystery of the solitary wolf who has taken up residence on an archipelago off Vancouver Island – the Discovery and Chatham Islands to be precise – and has developed his own unique hunting methods while patrolling his self-contained personal turf? His behaviour runs totally contrary to the close family bonding typical of wolves, but if anybody can shed some light it’s wildlife photographer and environmentalist Cheryl Alexander, who (as we saw in this BBC Four film) has been carefully studying Takaya (it means “wolf” in the language of the indigenous Songhees people) for the Read more ...
David Nice
Fine-tuning piano sound to Wigmore acoustics can elude even the greatest. Add a second Steinway and a wide range of percussion instruments, and the risks would seem to be hugely increased. So it was amazing to witness what seemed like sonic perfection throughout yesterday's Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert from the back of the hall. Not only that, but a refined imagination from all four players that came as close to perfection as you could ask for. Pavel Kolesnikov, who so often seems to be associated with London’s most original concert programmes, joined up again with partner Samson Tsoy, a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The O2 is usually a bright, sterile space before the bands come on. Its starkly lit US sports event ambience is accentuated by humanity milling around layered plastic seating clutching giant tubs of soft drink. Not so tonight. The venue has been open for three hours before the headline act is due. The lighting is purposefully dingy as 2ManyDJs and James Holroyd spin techno-flavoured sounds, warming up the crowd. The aim may be to reimagine this corporate space, with its horrid placards shouting Sky, Coca Cola, etc, into a warehouse party. The balconies are a black skyline with phone lights Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
There are encores and encores – most a friendly, minimal farewell gesture from the soloist; some a jolly, festive unwind after a particularly taxing piece. And then there’s the luxury free gift that Sir András Schiff bestowed on us during the second of two Barbican concerts with Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra. Jaws quietly dropped as we realised that Schiff intended to follow up Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto (both gigs formed part of the Barbican’s Beethoven 250 season) with the Allegro con brio first movement of the Waldstein sonata.Surely, this was munificence beyond the Read more ...
Tom Baily
Writer-director Jennifer Kent knows that Australia’s colonial past shouldn’t be beautified, and she drives that fact home in every gloom-drenched shot of The Nightingale (her second feature after The Babadook from 2014). This is an immensely ambitious film and an unrelenting long haul of suffering that confronts themes of sexual violence and Indigenous dispossession.Set in 1825 during the genocidal British colonial rule in Tasmania, the film follows Irish convict Clare (Aisling Franciosi) who launches a personal revenge mission against the colossally sinister Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Natasha Khan is ending this intimate UK tour where her dreams first took shape. Study at the University of Brighton began 12 years in the bohemian town, and her twice Mercury-nominated, mythology-minded pop life. She could sometimes be found here in St Bartholomew’s, a vaulting Victorian temple with the supposed dimensions of Noah’s ark, all sunken shadows and glinting gilt, tucked just off London Road’s grubby shopping bustle. It was “a church I used to sit in and have a quiet moment”, Khan tells us. With only a second keyboardist sharing the stage, tonight is a very personal homecoming.Khan Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This family concert – “Total Immersion: Lift Off!” – was basically a small-scale rerun of this year’s CBeebies Prom, that one entitled “Off to the Moon”. The Prom had a space theme, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and this Barbican concert just came in under the wire, still in the anniversary year, even if the commemorative events from the date itself, back in July, now seem distant.The CBeebies Prom was more celebrity driven, notably with Justin, aka Mr Tumble, dominating proceedings. This time round, Faith Omole (pictured below by Dom Graham-Hyde) was master Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Andy Parsons is a comic known to like a good old rant, particularly on a political issue. But in Healing the Nation he takes a calmer, more conversational approach as he tries to do what it says on the tin in a show that he fully expected to be performing after the UK left the EU – but more of Brexit later.In trying to dig down into what it means to be British in 2019, he starts with seemingly more mundane stuff about issues that may divide us in theory but in practice don't lead to us gouging each other's eyes out, such as transgender issues or the badger cull, and how easy it is to make Read more ...
David Nice
"Sadler's Wells! Any more for Peter Grimes, the sadistic fisherman?," a cheery bus conductor is alleged to have called out around the time of this towering masterpiece's premiere in 1945. The side of a "Grimes bus" today would probably proclaim over Britten and the work itself the "brand" of two stalwart perfomers - conductor Edward Gardner and leading protagonist Stuart Skelton, dominant forces of the opera over the last ten years.With English National Opera and more recently presenting his Bergen Philharmonic as one of the finest orchestras in the world - last night's concert performance Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Elizabeth Strout is fond of plain titles. Much as her stories are interested in subtlety – the quiet complications and contradictions of ordinary life – her books advertise themselves by means of telling understatements. Olive, Again follows ten years on the heels of her Pulitzer Prize-winning “novel in stories” Olive Kitteridge, which painted a resonant, emotionally complex portrait of a community in fictional Crosby, a small coastal town in Strout’s native Maine. Via 13 interlinking short stories, Strout refracts glimpses of her eponymous character Olive, a retired maths Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the liner notes to the new reissue of 2001’s All is Dream, Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue says it is “a weird astral album musically, and yes the symbolism lyrically runs many layers down and deep – different coloured layers of rock, soil and ash on an archaeology dig.”More straightforwardly, Mercury Rev’s other mainstay Grasshopper explains “All is Dream was a continuation of ideas we hatched during recording [previous album] Deserter’s Songs – and [its predecessor] See You on the Other Side – but we were bolstered by the excitement that Deserter’s Songs generated.”All is Dream was Read more ...
Sarah Collins
“Truth was further from safety than two islands at opposite ends of the earth,” proclaims the narrator of ‘Lake Like A Mirror’, the titular short story in Ho Sok Fong’s intoxicating new collection. When a young Chinese Malaysian literature tutor inadvertently falls foul of the university committee after a recital of an ee cummings poem is uploaded online, she begins to feel bored with herself, and bored of “drawing the line” that determines appropriate and inappropriate, fatigued with self-censorship in the pursuit of safety. Ho’s startling prose viscerally conveys the quiet, stifling fear Read more ...