Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
You start off fighting it. Those arpeggios, the insistent reduction, simplification, repetition, the amplification of the smallest gesture into an epic. Then something happens. Somewhere among the slow-phase patterns pulsing on ear and eye, you surrender to Glass-time and the hypnosis is complete.Akhnaten is opera as therapy, as cocoon, as mindfulness exercise, clean as Marie Kondo’s living room and every bit as consoling. When you reduce your musical possessions to the barest minimum (hell, even the violins get jettisoned in this deliciously grainy score, along with the surtitles) you throw Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Imagine for a moment that you are at, say, the Derby. It’s pretty good. But then in flies Pegasus, the mythical winged horse. What happens?We need to talk about these rare moments of almost inexplicable magic in concerts, because unless I’m massively mistaken, that is one crucial factor that keeps us going to them. Perhaps you’ve witnessed one. Something happens. Some might say that a spirit descends. An atmosphere comes to surround us and we all sense it, musicians and audience alike, and we lose ourselves in it together. Welcome to Milton Court’s evening with the Doric String Quartet and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The end of series five of Endeavour found PC George Fancy shot dead, Cowley police station closed and the old crew dispersed. With Led Zeppelin on the soundtrack (it’s 1969), the sixth series opened minus WPC Trewlove, but with Fred Thursday demoted and shunted off to Castle Gate police station. As for Sgt Morse, they’d put him in uniform, given him a dinky little blue-and-white Austin 1100 and parked him in the leafy wilderness of Woodstock.However, screenwriter Russell Lewis cheered us up with a comical little skit starring Chief Super Bright (Anton Lesser), now the star of a TV commercial Read more ...
David Nice
Schumann revitalized by John Eliot Gardiner and the London Symphony Orchestra last year left us wanting more: namely two of the four symphonies (transcendently great, as it turns out from these revelatory performances). But those concerts also guaranteed that the ones a year later would be the most vital tonic imaginable for grey, damp early February. And so it proved with the joybursts of the Third (“Rhenish”) and, finally, the First (“Spring”): if anything could send you dancing away, the latter's lightly tripping vernal finale and the encore played on both evenings, the even more airborne Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I interviewed Don McCullin in 1983 and the encounter felt like peering into a deep well of darkness. The previous year he’d been in Beirut photographing the atrocities carried out by people on both sides of the civil war and his impeccably composed pictures were being published as a book. Some of these photographs are included in Tate Britain’s survey of his 60-year career, one of the darkest but most compelling exhibitions you are ever likely to see. There’s the group of young musicians approaching the body of a Palestinian girl lying prone in a bombed out street – celebrating her death Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Why is Un Ballo in maschera not as popular as the trio of Verdi masterpieces – Rigoletto, Traviata, Trovatore – that, with a couple of digressions, preceded it in the early 1850s? Its music is scarcely less brilliant than theirs, and if its plot is on a par of absurdity with Trovatore’s, it is at least, on the whole, more fun. One problem might be a certain thinness in the portraiture, as if Verdi was more interested in the incidents than in his characters. In his new production for WNO, David Pountney seems to interpret this as a sort of meta-theatricality, an opera watching itself being Read more ...
David Nice
"In our country the capable man needs luck," belts out Shen Te, the Good Person of Szechwan in the most powerful song of Brecht's epic "parable play" of 1941. "Only if he has powerful backers can he prove his capacity." Never was that more true than in Russia today; note that the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre has been resident at the Barbican for five days "with the generous support of Roman Abramovich". That puts Brecht's lyrically stated take on poverty and destitution into a certain perspective; this is a production of essential spareness but with some lavish visual effects largely alien to Read more ...
Robert Beale
Berlioz called it a "concert opera". His telling of the Faust story is in scenes and highly theatrical, but a bit of a challenge to put on in the theatre, with its marching armies, floating sylphs, dancing will-o’-the-wisps and galloping horses. It seems he expected it to be a kind of giant cantata, and that’s the way the Hallé and Sir Mark Elder perform it. But it’s still operatic in concept, and that very theatricality demands much of its chorus as well as its soloists – the assembled choir has to represent "peasants, penitents, drinkers, gnomes, sylphs, soldiers, students, will-o’-the- Read more ...
howard.male
Even the most ardent Bowie fan might dismissively sum up their idol's pre-fame years with just these three words: The Laughing Gnome. And so it's hardly surprising that the director of Bowie: Finding Fame, Francis Whately (who also made David Bowie: Five Years and David Bowie: The Last Five Years), found himself wondering if there was enough meat on this particular bone for another 90 minutes' worth of enlightening information and entertainment.But he needn't have worried. The Bowie he uncovered turned out to be just as compulsive in his greed for creating identities, just as keen to move on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Picture this. You’re sailing in the Timor Sea with family and friends on your luxurious yacht, hoiking the occasional plump fish out of the ocean to provide a ready meal washed down with Aussie plonk, when you suddenly chance across a decrepit, broken-down fishing boat crammed with mostly Iraqi refugees. What do you do?There are too many of them to fit on your yacht, so you can either try to tow them to where they want to go (Australia) or, since you’re currently out of radio range of coastguards or police, leave them while you go in search of rescue. Other options might have been tow them Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Of the 20-plus names gathered on the superbly packaged Kankyō Ongaku, it’s likely that only Yellow Magic Orchestra and their members Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto are familiar to most non-Japanese listeners. Initially, it seems a big ask to hope buyers will fork out for compilation tracking potentially uncharted musical territory but the full title stresses that what’s heard isn’t so perplexing.Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980–1990 collects exactly what it says. “Kankyō ongaku” translates as environmental music. Nothing here is unapproachable. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
All may be true but not much is of interest in this Kenneth Branagh-directed film that casts an actor long-steeped in the Bard as a gardening-minded Shakespeare glimpsed in (lushly filmed) retirement. Seemingly conceived in order to persuade filmgoers of the man from Stratford's greatness (does that really need reiterating?), the movie benefits from the inestimable presence of Judi Dench and Ian McKellen, the latter in a sizzling cameo that briefly lifts proceedings to a different level. But Ben Elton's eye-rolling script pays homage to the Bard's "beautiful poetry" one time too many and Read more ...