Reviews
Veronica Lee
Rob Brydon, Lee Mack and David Mitchell are the host and team captains respectively of Would I Lie to You?, the long-running BBC One panel game. Now they are touring together in Town to Town, which is family-friendly fun (with occasional naughtiness from the delightfully sweary Mack).Brydon takes the stage first and nicely guys the audience with his trademark insincere flattery of them and the town, and does it while running through a few of his excellent impressions, including Hugh Grant and Mick Jagger. Then Mack and Mitchell join him for a quiz based on how much they know or can guess Read more ...
Ellie Porter
You might think that being first on the bill with a half-hour slot at 1.15pm would be an affront to a band who’d had a 12-times platinum album and ruled the 90s airwaves, but if they are offended Simply Red aren’t showing it. A weatherbeaten Mick Hucknall and his beaming companions are kicking off BBC Radio 2’s annual "Festival in a Day", a highly civilised affair (you can pre-order 80-quid picnics and it finishes at 9.30pm) featuring sets from huge pop names and chatty links by cheerful Radio 2 presenters.Despite the early start, Simply Red have attracted a gigantic crowd, who lustily sing Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
While the Proms were ringing out the old season, the Wigmore Hall ushered in the big celebration of 2020: the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth. The venue’s year-long festival (actually longer – the actual birthday is December ‘20) kicked off with a Beethoven weekend with more than just Beethoven in it. What stood out was how astoundingly good Beethoven sounds compared to almost anybody else. I went to the first three concerts of the first day.To begin, the cellist Steven Isserlis and the fortepianist Robert Levin did give pure Beethoven such a run in the park that we could Read more ...
David Nice
Any festival would be proud and honoured to end with the great Elisabeth Leonskaja playing the last three Beethoven piano sonatas. Here the Everest was swiftly scaled as the tenth concert of a packed Wigmore Hall weekend. How I wish I could have heard more than the final two on Sunday evening, all-Beethoven unlike some of the predecessors reviewed above by Jessica Duchen, but they served up the perfect contrasts: breathtaking sheen in the lighter earlier Beethoven from young players alongside the best in their middle years followed by poleaxing profundity. There can be no pianist alive who Read more ...
Katie Colombus
For a band mostly known as a brilliantly ludicrous cocktail of other’s people’s sound-styles, the Simulation Theory tour is proof that Muse have become musical legends in their own right.Yes, their progressive rock is the combined conglomeration that would result of you threw Queen, The Darkness, Prince and Radiohead in the tumble dryer and they came out crackling with static. But while there are intelligent and irreverent references to elements of the above, the bombastic futuristic narrative and preposterously prophetic wisdom of Muse’s lyrics combined with instrumental genius and Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Simon Rattle has a knack for unearthing large-scale orchestral works that pack a punch. Olivier Messiaen’s Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà … (Illuminations of the Beyond …) was completed in 1991, a year before the composer’s death, and is both a reflection on mortality and a summation of his life’s work. Quotations from the Book of Revelation head many of the movements, and Messiaen envisions the heavenly world through expansive string movements, with muted violins intoning long, plaintive melodies. Huge percussion and brass sections provide weight and colour, though the mood remains serene.Best of all Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Pere Ubu are much like The Fall in their dauntless explication of one man’s vision, and commitment to an individual, primal rock’n’roll, initially called punk, but pushing far past its limits. Where Mark E. Smith’s alcoholic dissolution hampered his later years, Pere Ubu’s sole constant, David Thomas, has if anything tightened his focus on a post-industrial, clanking, ruined Americana, all rust, dust and diners, recalled for decades now from unlikely self-exile in Hove. I visited him there 20 years ago, an imposingly vast man ensconced in the corner of a pub, discussing cricket with a whippet Read more ...
mark.kidel
It is a truth perhaps not quite but almost universally accepted that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, beloved of GSCE English Lit examiners, and often adapted for the screen, is a part of the canon, waiting to be re-interpreted according to the fashions of the day. The part-musical, part-ironic pastiche, created by the Glasgow companies Blood of the Young and Tron Theatre, written by Isobel McArthur and directed by Paul Brotherston, takes the novel’s proto-feminist theme and concern with social inequality, and conjures a lively yet strangely heartless comic remix, with and all-female cast Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One question springs immediately to mind on hearing that Romesh Ranganathan’s new stand-up show, The Cynic’s Mixtape, is touring: how does he find the time? Ranganathan has overtaken Jack Whitehall as Britain’s most media ubiquitous comic, with a deluge of TV shows and appearances, a column in the Guardian newspaper and even a recent autobiography. However, his TV CV is hit’n’miss, which leads to a second question: can he still cut it in the live arena?In short, yes, he can. With able support from Jake Lambert - who is heckled by that rarest of creatures, a Brighton Brexiteer – Ranganathan is Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The BBC put social and ethnic diversity at the heart of this Last Night programme. The concert opened with a new work, by Daniel Kidane, called Woke, and the first half was dominated by the music of black and female composers. In the second half, mezzo Jamie Barton waved a rainbow flag during her "Rule, Britannia!" The Proms is clearly in the vanguard for inclusivity among classical music organisations, although the fact that Kidane stood out as one of the only non-white members of the huge audience suggests there is still a long way to go.Woke is a dynamic concert opener, energised by Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This is a book about experiences that go beyond reading about art. Martin Gayford’s 20 short essays about press trips and self-motivated travel concern meetings – in the flesh, in real time and space – with art that includes murals, sculptures and glacier waters, and with artists through interviews and studio visits. For a book whose title is a riff on Nancy Mitford’s touching novel, The Pursuit of Love, it is also a subtle paean to the enormous variety of objects, buildings and paintings that we deem art, as well as its history and practitioners.The reader is of course at a remove and in a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Martinů's The Greek Passion is a bold choice as a season opener, all the more so given that Opera North are staging the rarely-seen original version of his 1957 opera. Commissioned for Covent Garden then shabbily ditched, this is faster moving and more cinematic than the radically rewritten edition performed in Zurich two years after Martinů's death in 1959. Based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s bestseller Christ Recrucified, it’s now alarmingly pertinent, a tale of refugees arriving in a small Greek village preparing to stage an Easter Passion play.Christopher Alden’s powerful, spare staging has many Read more ...