Reviews
Robert Beale
Edward Gardner was back amongst friends when he opened the Hallé’s Thursday series concerts. This was the place where he made his mark, as the Manchester orchestra’s first ever assistant conductor (and Youth Orchestra music director), and he’s been a welcome visitor ever since. There’s an air of personal authority to him now, and a physical style a little less reminiscent of Sir Mark Elder – from whom he undoubtedly learnt a lot in those early days – and both the Hallé Orchestra members and the Hallé Choir gave him of their best.Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra was characterized by Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Edinburgh Fringe does throw up some oddities – in comedy shows, of course, but also in its dishing out of awards. And so it was that Ciarán Dowd's marvellous Don Rodolfo deservedly gained the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer, even though he's an old Fringe hand. But as his previous work was as part of the sketch troupe BEASTS he was eligible for this, his debut solo show.Don Rodolfo is a famed swordsman, in both senses of the word, swashing his buckle throughout the land in 17th-century Spain, and Dowd presents a wonderfully daft, energetic hour of storytelling as Rodolfo hunts Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
One marker arrived on 1 August 1981, when MTV began broadcasting. With its format based around screening pop videos, American radio had a competitor and would lose the edge it once had. And due to the lack of local product, a significant proportion of the videos seen by US TV viewers were British rather than American – America had some catching up to do if it is was going to compete with the UK’s dandified, polished and television-ready exports.Another marker was the arrival of digital instruments, digital recording and – with the CD – digital playback. Vinyl hung in there but daft formats Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What an ambitious project! Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde looks at over 40 couples or, in some cases, trios whose love galvanised them into creative activity either individually or in collaboration.The best thing about the exhibition is that it blows out of the water the traditional notion of the artist as a lone (male) genius who draws inspiration from a supportive but essentially non-creative muse, usually his lover. At last, the role of women as essential partners in many creative relationships is being acknowledged and explored. A typical example is that of Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Imagine an orchestral concert made up exclusively of contemporary works by living composers: a programme in which every note was written within the last two decades. Imagine not only that this concert is sufficiently popular to fill a 2,000-seat hall with a noticeably youthful and diverse crowd, but that its format is already being replicated regularly by pretty much every major UK symphony orchestra. Now ask yourself how much critical attention such a concert would receive? You wouldn’t be able to pick up the Sunday review supplements for sheer weight of coverage, would you?Well, apparently Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
After exhausting years of financial and artistic crisis-management at the Coliseum, English National Opera urgently needed an ironclad, feelgood success. This season’s opener, a somewhat idiosyncratic take on Strauss’s Salome, was unlikely to fit that bill. Despite a couple of niggles, however, I’m happy to report that James Robinson’s full-throttle production of Porgy and Bess steers the rocky boat of St Martin’s Lane home in splendid style. Surprisingly, George Gershwin’s 1935 score – with brother Ira’s, and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s, lyrics – has not played in its full operatic glory on Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Ferenc Török is firmly aiming at the festival and art house circuit with his slow-paced recreation of one summer day in rural Hungary. A steam train stops at a rural siding, two Orthodox Jewish men descend and with minimal speech, oversee the unloading of two boxes onto a horse drawn cart and start their long walk into town. The station-master sets off on his bicycle to warn the inhabitants of the imminent arrival of these strangers. It’s not long after the end of hostilities but Japan has yet to surrender. This little Hungarian town is in limbo, liberated from the Germans but not yet Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of French author and transgressor of social mores Colette has been told before on screen and in song, but this new film version (shown at London Film Festival) from director Wash Westmoreland not only zings with zeitgeisty relevance, but gives each of its stars, Keira Knightley and Dominic West, one of the meatiest roles of their respective careers. As Colette, Knightley grows before your eyes as she evolves rapidly from sheltered country girl (she was born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Saint-Sauveur, Burgundy) to fearless denizen of the salons, boudoirs and stages of Belle Époque Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There was no synopsis in the programme for the Royal Opera’s concert performance of Handel’s Solomon. Maybe that was an oversight, but perhaps it’s simply because there really is no plot to summarise. Handel’s oratorio, set to an anonymous libretto (who would willingly claim such doggerel?), takes a handful of Biblical books as the basis for a work that’s more cantata or masque than anything else – a splendid, tuneful meditation on love, faith, kingship – oh, and interior design. More time is spent contemplating the spec of Solomon’s palace (cedar coated with gold, FYI) than most Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s difficult to tell whether Press (BBC One) came to praise newspapers or to bury them. The slugfest between preachy liberal do-goodery and mucky market-led skulduggery ended in a score draw, with the main protagonists living to fight another day and speak to their ever more polarised silos. Any sensible viewer might have concluded that the plot was stark-raving amphetamine-enriched baloney. You don’t, for example, need the omniscient snooping of Resonance to know that no woman would ever leave her handbag lying around in a bar as she popped off to the ladies. It was scarcely credible from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Echoes of Phil Kaufman’s 1983 classic The Right Stuff resonate through Damien Chazelle’s new account of how Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. The Right Stuff ended with the conclusion of America’s Mercury space programme in 1963, and First Man neatly picks up the baton by taking us through the ensuing Gemini and Apollo missions, peaking with the “giant leap for mankind” of Apollo 11.First Man plots Armstrong’s progress from test pilot to astronaut with all the training and preparation that entailed, though fans of the earlier film may find themselves missing its comic, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Write about what you know, every nascent novelist is told. So you can't fault writer/director/actor Desiree Akhavan, Iranian-American creator of Appropriate Behaviour (2015) and The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018), which explore divergent sexuality and who has now written (with Cecilia Frugiuele), directs and stars in The Bisexual – about a lesbian woman who decides she wants to try out men for the first time.Akhavan is Leila, a lesbian in a 10-year relationship with Sadie (Maxine Peake), who is also her business partner in a fashion company. Their romance hits a snag when Read more ...