Reviews
Concerto/Enigma Variations/Raymonda Act III, Royal Ballet review - time to cheer the corps de ballet
Jenny Gilbert
As a mood-lifter, it’s hard to beat the opening of Concerto. Against a primrose sky, figures in daffodil, tangerine and brick form lozenges of fizzing colour, foregrounded by a leading couple so buoyant their heels barely ever touch down. Kenneth MacMillan’s response to Shostakovich’s sunny Second Piano Concerto makes a brilliant start to the first mixed bill of the new Royal Ballet season, a bill that unites three productions first seen at Covent Garden in the mid-1960s, although from their wildly contrasting styles you would never guess.In its outer movements Concerto gives the whole Read more ...
David Nice
There are now two septuagenarians playing Schubert at a level no other living pianist can touch. Imogen Cooper celebrated her 70th birthday on 28 August, and marked it at the Wigmore Hall last night with a two-interval epic, poised but full of inner fire and deepest pathos, not long after 74-year-old Elisabeth Leonskaja had touched the heavens playing Beethoven's last three sonatas in a late-night concert and joined with Liza Ferschtman and István Várdai in Schubert's two late piano trios.Leonskaja has also programmed the Schubert triptych of the composer's last year in a single concert, and Read more ...
Ellie Porter
There’s no getting around it – it’s very surreal indeed to be in the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and see an eye-wateringly famous movie and TV star rocking out on stage. But it’s a testament to Kiefer Sutherland’s commitment to his musical side-project that this never overwhelms what turns out to be an entertaining, enjoyable evening of bluesy, rootsy country shenanigans.Tonight’s gig rounds off the latest leg of this tour, which was recently disrupted due to a Sutherland vs tourbus steps mishap that saw the singer, actor (and, as we learn, former professional rodeo cowboy) forced to postpone a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This terrifying but gripping BBC Four series about Northern Ireland’s savage sectarian war reached its conclusion with a meticulously detailed account of how hostilities were eventually brought to a close by the Good Friday Agreement, which came into effect in December 1999. In the end, it resulted from a combination of politics, compromise and a realisation that the interminable violence was an obstacle to change rather than a way to achieve itAmerican senator George Mitchell, who chaired the all-party peace negotiations, declared: “This agreement proves that democracy works. We can say to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Even the mighty Almeida is allowed the occasional dud and it’s sure as hell got one at the moment with Vassa. Maxim Gorky’s 1910 play (rewritten in 1935) about a matriarch in extremis some years back proved a stonking West End star vehicle for Sheila Hancock. It offers a chance to go hell-for-leather that should set the pulse racing. That same role was to have been played this time out by Samantha Bond, who bowed out and has been replaced by a game if not ideally cast Siobhan Redmond: her breathy exhalations tire after a while, and one misses the whiplash authority required of a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What’s the most ridiculous programme that Channel 4 has ever made? Sex Box? The Execution of Gary Glitter? Extreme Celebrity Detox? Whatever, The British Tribe Next Door is up there vying for supremacy.The Moffatt family, from Bishop Auckland, have travelled to Otjeme in Western Namibia for a month, to live alongside the semi-nomadic Himba tribe. This is because Scarlett “Gogglebox” Moffatt – daughter of Mark and Betty and sister of Ava-Grace – is about 12 percent of a celebrity. They won’t be living in the Himba’s distinctive huts, but instead in a perfect replica of their own two-storey Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Playing our monarch and her husband in The Crown has made actors Claire Foy and Matt Smith into TV drama royalty, so reuniting the pair onstage guarantees a hot ticket. What’s less clear is why Lungs, Duncan Macmillan’s rather thin 2011 play, merits a major revival at the Old Vic. A two-hander charting the evolution of a couple’s relationship as they grapple with the prospect of parenthood and the future of the planet, it recycles well-worn themes, and its tone and viewpoint are as middle-class, conventional and, frankly, about as dramatically exciting as a weekly shop in Waitrose.There’s a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
At a point in history where – yet again – a few misplaced words from English politicians could wreak havoc with Irish lives, this is a welcome revival of Ian Rickson’s stunning production which first played here to rapturous reviews last year. Brian Friel’s 1980 play reveals itself once more as a simultaneously raw and poignant tragicomedy, which deftly demonstrates how any abuse of the complex relationship between language and identity can all too easily lead to bloodshed.The audience enters the Olivier to witness a landscape on which the low-lying clouds and reddish sky create a sense that Read more ...
David Nice
We have John Eliot Gardiner to thank for an unconventional diptych of Czech masterpieces in the London Symphony Orchestra's current season. He had to withdraw from last night's concert - he conducts Dvořák's Cello Concerto and Suk's "Asrael" Symphony on Thursday - but his replacement, Kazushi Ono, was no second-best. Familiar to us in the UK mostly as an opera conductor, firm and clear-headed in the three vivid narratives of the evening, he provided the ideal security for orchestral playing and stunning singing to fly.The programme proved, as always, that there's no slack in Janáček's mature Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Focusing on twelve women who played a key role in the lives of Pre-Raphaelite painters like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, this timely exhibition begins with a whimper and ends with a bang. First up at the National Portrait Gallery is Effie Gray whose marriage to art critic, John Ruskin was annulled after six years for non-consummation. The story goes that, having only seen classical Greek sculptures, he was horrified by her pubic hair!Gray then married Millais and assumed the traditional role of supportive wife. This involved keeping house, bearing and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
"Revelatory": it’s one of those words which is now completely devalued through having been carelessly dropped into a thousand press releases. And yet it perfectly describes the results Miklós Perényi achieved in a pair of superb concerts of Beethoven’s works for cello and piano at Wigmore Hall, which were also live-streamed.The Hungarian cellist has an unshakable sense of mission. He stays as literal and as close as he can to Beethoven’s musical intentions, and the trust which he places in the works always seems to find a perfect justification. Now aged 71, Perényi has lived with these Read more ...
mark.kidel
Tom Morris’s production of Cyrano starts with a procession of nuns, some of them bearded, chanting verses from the medieval mystic Hildegarde of Bingen. In this original and lively version of Edmond Rostand’s late 19th century classic, Morris has played fast and loose with the original text, translated here and brought up to date by the poet and theatre maker Peter Oswald.In the original story, Roxanne, Cyrano’s great and unreachable love, is found in a nunnery, reflecting on the tragedy of her life. Morris and Oswald have skilfully opened and closed the narrative in the convent, so that the Read more ...