Reviews
Tom Baily
How could this story be told again? Director Todd Douglas Miller has found a way: strip away narrative and give the audience the purity of original record. The result is a gripping non-fiction experience that sits in a unique space between documentary, art, drama and dream.In collaboration with Nasa, Miller has unearthed hours of previously untouched film stock recorded during the first lunar mission in 1969. He has whittled the material down to a film of 93 minutes and combined it with Nasa audio recordings and an original synth-driven score by composer Matt Morton. No talking heads. No Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
So theartsdesk on Vinyl reaches its 50th edition. That’s at least a novels’ worth of words. Maybe two! But we’re not stopping yet. The heat of the summer has arrived but the vinyl deluge hasn’t dried up, so check in for everything from Germanic electro to Scottish Seventies pop-rock to Japanese minyo music reimagined. And much more. All vinyl life is here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHQuantic Atlantic Oscillations (Tru Thoughts)Will Holland – Quantic – has spent the past few years successfully indulging in his penchant for South American, living there and recording a multiplicity of releases Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Emanuel Ax here celebrated his 70th birthday with an all-Schumann recital. In fact, it was an all-Schumann marathon, a three-hour concert at Wigmore Hall featuring solo works, Dichterliebe with Simon Keenlyside, and, with the Dover Quartet, the Piano Quartet and the Piano Quintet. Ax has an unassuming stage presence, and blends easily into chamber ensembles. Even so, he remained the centre of attention here, with the other performers softening their tone and applying an extra level of grace in order to match the supple flow of Ax’s Schumann.The Arabeske, op. 18, began the concert, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As an aid to meditation, Professor Brian Cox’s latest series The Planets (BBC Two) could hardly be faulted. A majestic tour of the Solar System awash with computerised imagery, an eerie soundtrack and a travel budget the president of the United States might envy, it exerted a narcotic allure as Cox’s gaze roamed billions of kilometres into deep space. His whispery commentary is a bit like having a scalp massage.Mind you, you could probably glean most of the facts from assorted scientific publications or even Wikipedia, but Cox has a gift for making you feel that he’s telling the story for the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
According to the Manchester drag collective the Family Gorgeous, “drag should be for everyone.” And on the evidence of Drag SOS (Channel 4) , engagingly voice-overed by Hugh Bonneville, the British public is eager to embrace them in all their spangly, fantastical glory.The Gorgeouses visit different towns looking for volunteers to get out of that closet and undergo a ravishing, 360-degree drag makeover. They started in Dover, where their candidates included Shaun, a 55-year-old supermarket supervisor who they pulled off a rain-soaked football pitch, to the amazement of his old boy-buddies. Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“How much does she owe us?” So ponder the now estranged parents of a former tennis pro, as they calculate the very literal investment they’ve put into their daughter. This probing new play from Oli Forsyth – well timed for Queen’s and Wimbledon – examines the consequences of achievement by proxy and a familial relationship that becomes transactional.Construction worker Ade (Jonathan Livingstone) and carer Nina (Phoebe Pryce, both pictured below) think tennis is “for other people”, but when their daughter excels at a free trial, they encourage her to pursue it – and a leisure activity Read more ...
Owen Richards
Mari is one part kitchen sink drama, one part dance performance, bringing a refreshing take on bereavement and family. Dancer Charlotte joins her mother and sister at her dying grandmother’s bedside, and tensions rise as cabin fever sets in.Director Georgia Parris clearly understands how to film dance. The camera sways through rehearsals as bodies writhe in a cacophony of shapes. It’s hypnotic filmmaking, reaching crescendo in a dream sequence full of stark imagery. Her previous short films have focused on dancers, and this experience shows.Much of the film, though, is spent away from the Read more ...
David Nice
If ever there was an instance of the great being the enemy of the good, it happened after all the live singing on Saturday night. This year we all remember, with sadness for his early death and amazement at his burning, burnished talent, the Siberian baritone Dmitry Hvorostovsky (1962-2017), winner in 1989. He was up against Bryn Terfel, no less, and those clips of a few seconds' singing from each competitor, witnessed not just on television but also by the audience in Cardiff's St David's Hall, were electrifying. Nothing may have been quite on that level this year - the last time anything Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Politics, in case you may not have noticed, has been in the air of late: questions of escape, release, borders, refugees, things like that. So WNO’s June season of operas about freedom has been suspiciously well timed. We’ve had the dead man walking (Jake Heggie’s opera, but you may have your own candidate), we’ve had Menotti’s visa opera The Consul, Dallapiccola’s study of hope deceived in Il prigioniero, and Beethoven’s of despair conquered by woman in Fidelio. To fit Hans Krása’s children’s operetta Brundibár into this topical gallery takes some special pleading, because although the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Cut almost anywhere into the lesser-known seams of Handel’s oratorios and you may strike plentiful nuggets of the purest gold. It may not be quite the case that Handel's Belshazzar, its score studded with nearly-forgotten musical treasures, has entirely disappeared from view. A decade ago, the Berlin Staatsoper staged an all-star operatic version of this work from 1744, which later travelled to the Aix-en-Provence festival. William Christie and Les Arts Florissants have recorded a meticulous account, and given it in concert here.But as a fully-staged piece, as The Grange Festival’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It has become routine to accuse Brexiteers of wanting to bring back the British Empire (though obviously it's OK to run an empire from Brussels), but the charge might more accurately be levelled at ITV. They’ve brought the ratings rolling in with their saga of the early years of Queen Victoria, and Beecham House, set in late-18th century India, is being touted in some quarters as “The New Downton”, itself a relict of Edwardian pomp and ceremony.Though I must admit, Beecham House doesn’t look much like Downton Abbey to me. True, it’s full of spectacular palaces peopled with wealthy potentates Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. Anne Boleyn is number two on the list, so anyone who can remember even that much Tudor history can guess that Donizetti’s Anna Bolena is not going to end well. The overture has hardly ended before we’re told that Anne’s star is falling, and it’s not exactly a spoiler to reveal that our social climbing heroine is destined (in the words of a better librettist than Donizetti’s collaborator Felice Romani) for a short sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block. We already know where we’re going. The success of the opera Read more ...