Reviews
Jenny Gilbert
1965 was a year of change in Britain. It saw the abolition of the death penalty and the arrival of the Race Relations Act. It was the year of the Mary Quant miniskirt and “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones. While cinema-goers queued around the block to see The Sound of Music (a critical flop), the Royal Opera House had another kind of hit on its hands. A new three-act ballet closely based on Shakespeare’s text, it presented Romeo and Juliet – in tune with the zeitgeist – as real, impulsive, hormonally charged teenagers. After the curtain, the standing ovation went on for 40 minutes.Sixty Read more ...
mark.kidel
Lizz Wright’s exquisite singing breaks all boundaries between soul, gospel and jazz. In so doing she channels many interwoven strands of the African-American experience. Wright thrives on singing to an audience: her recorded output is wonderful enough, but, a child of the church, the sacred ceremony of raising the spirit in myriad ways is undeniably her home ground.There’s a majesty here, and spiritual authority. Not just her stature, but the full-length blue dress, hand and arm movements nourished by the music, as well as leading it on - all of these evoke and reinforce a tradition of the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Wardruna are something of a modern musical phenomenon. Part Scandinavian folk revival, part prog rock epic and part pagan ritual, their wide-screen performances are a beautiful and mesmerising celebration of repurposed ancient traditions, the natural world and the power of singing together.Their audience is usually a suitably diverse crew of metalheads, silver-haired goths, fishermen’s friends folkies and more than the odd cosplaying Viking, as it was at the magnificent Symphony Hall. However, their crowd was firmly of the Generation X and Boomer age group and there were certainly very few, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With qualifying about to begin for the soccer World Cup, and England sporting a brand new manager, it’s fitting that James Graham’s Olivier-winning celebration of the previous boss returns to the National. Unusually for a play, Dear England comes with a new ending, one that wraps up Gareth Southgate’s eight-year tenure, to now include the fourth major tournament in which his team competed – and the final near-miss in an accomplished, laudable, but for many frustrating period. I didn’t see the first iteration, but it appears that this fictionalised account of the Southgate Read more ...
Saskia Baron
I so wanted to like Flow. I’d heard good things from usually reliable critic friends who’d seen it already and told me it had enchanted them and their pets.There’s no dialogue and as real animal calls were apparently used on the soundtrack, I enlisted Lenny the cat to help write the review. He’s been known to prick up his ears and take a well-aimed swipe at a screen if the yowls and miaows are convincing enough. Lenny is particularly happy when David Attenborough serves up suitably small squeaky mammals and chirping birds for his viewing pleasure.In addition, the story that Gints Zibalodis Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A dictionary definition of adolescence is “the transitional phase of growth and development between childhood and adulthood”, but in this four-part drama it looks more like a nightmare zone of uncontrolled rage, anxiety and sexual confusion.Created and co-written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (also one of its stars), Adolescence is the story of how 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested for the murder of Katie, a fellow-pupil at Bruntwood Academy in an unspecified Yorkshire town.Obviously this hurls his parents, Eddie (Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), into a state of blind panic and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Writer Ariel (Ayo Edebiri; The Bear) has worked at a music magazine for three years but in spite of coming up with great ideas, she never gets assigned stories.“You’re middle as fuck,” says her boyfriend, by way of explanation, as they eat Japanese food together in New York. She’s only 27, not interesting or experienced enough to land the big interviews. And her lazy editor Stan (Murray Bartlett) just takes advantage of her fine research.Nothing terribly unusual about that, perhaps, but it’s the only premise that makes sense in director Mark Anthony Green’s debut feature. He worked for years Read more ...
David Nice
Few symphonies lasting over an hour hold the attention (Mahler’s can; even Messiaen’s Turangalîla feels two movements too long). Wynton Marsalis is a great man, but his Fourth, “The Jungle”, is no masterpiece, not even a symphony – a dance suite, maybe, with enough bold textures to recall wandering attentions. We needed less of this, and more of the Duke Ellington selections superbly played by the 15-strong Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in the first half.Right at the start, clarinettists Sherman Irby and Alexa Tarantino blew us away in "The Mooch". Trumpet solos flamed; the saxophones had Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There’s a lot to be said for the planning that clearly went into this concert by the Cardiff-based new music ensemble, Uproar. Starting with Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, it added three new commissions for (more or less) the same band and a fourth, existing piece previously composed to go with the Ligeti.The risk, I suppose, is that plenty of the model work, as well as its actual scoring, will rub off on the new pieces. All but one of the four did indeed give the slight impression of having filtered through Ligeti’s originally startling combination of ambient cosmic noise and passing musical Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Memorably described by Gramophone magazine as the “new kids on the classical block…with lavish pocket money”, Apple’s London-based label Platoon is busy cementing its street cred with an ongoing concert series at Kings Place.If BIS (bought by Apple in 2024) remain the old-school, traditionalist offering, then Platoon are the edgy, digital younger sibling. So far the roster includes violinist Daniel Pioro, rising violin star Stella Chen, conductor Dalia Stasevska and now the Grammy-winning American Attacca String Quartet, whose new recording of the Ravel String Quartet put them in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After scoring a hit in 1966 with the distinctive folk-pop of her jazz-inclined debut single "Walkin' my Cat Named Dog," US singer-songwriter Norma Tanega (1939–2019) seemed to melt away. Three follow-up 45s weren’t hits. Her album wasn’t a strong seller. Latterly, though, one of its tracks, “You're Dead,” has been heard as the theme of the TV and cinema versions of What We Do In The Shadows.There was, despite the lack of subsequent commercial success, a second album. I Don’t Think It Will Hurt If You Smile was recorded in the UK and issued in 1971. Sales were low and it ostensibly attracted Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Collective, now very much a part of the establishment world of new music, are still enlarging their territory. For this set, performed in Leeds and Manchester and repeated in Liverpool, Nottingham and the Southbank Centre, they are revisiting some ground but have a world premiere, commissioned by themselves, to offer too.On one level, with co-artistic director Rakhi Singh as lead violin, it’s a programme exploring the range of the classical string quartet (with or without percussion and/or electronics, and in one item down to a trio), but on another it’s a journey into almost Read more ...