Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Beware the hidden powers of the cellphone. When in Never Here New York conceptual artist Miranda Fall (Mireille Enos) finds a stranger’s phone, she uses it as the basis for her next art show, tracking down and interviewing the owner’s contacts, listening to his music and using his GPS history to retrace his steps. She lives in a private bubble of self-regard, and is shocked when her subject is hurt and angered by her crass exploitation of his privacy. “You’ve done a bad thing,” he tells her at the show’s launch party.Miranda comes out with fatuous nuggets of pseudobabble like “circumstances Read more ...
David Nice
Cinderella as opera in French: of late, the palm has always gone to Massenet's adorable (as in a-dor-Ah-bler) confection, and it should again soon when Glyndebourne offers a worthy home to the master's magic touch. The Cendrillon of Maltese-born honorary Parisian Nicolas Isouard, aka Nicolò, clearly had its day after the 1810 premiere, but it was eclipsed by Rossini's La Cenerentola coming along seven years later, and with good reason. The muse assigned to Rossini did not visit mostly pedestrian Isouard, though his approach is compact and briefly steps out of the generic with two pretty Read more ...
Katherine Waters
It’s night, and the woman (Leanne Best) is waiting for a phone call. She’s desperate for the voice of her lover – or rather ex-lover: they split three nights ago. Both have secrets they will disclose over the course of their final conversation. Both have positions to defend. The scene is set for a coupling of melodrama and banality. In Daniel Raggett’s version of Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine, everything is somehow generic – grief included.Sarah Beaton’s set reeks of suburban claustrophobia and the woman on stage is nothing special either. She’s in her pyjamas on the sofa, hair Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Winterreise brings out the best from Ian Bostridge, and the worst. His dedication to understanding and communicating its complex and harrowing text is everywhere apparent, and this was an emotionally draining evening. But his style of delivery has always been controversial – some say distinctive, others eccentric – and all of those characteristics were heightened here, inspired (or provoked) by Schubert’s psychological drama. Much of this performance was enjoyable, but it was punctuated by moments so exaggerated and ghoulish as to overwhelm the many moments of elegance and beauty.Bostridge Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might consider it odd that a man whose wife spends half the year in Hong Kong without him hasn’t managed to get around to catching a plane from Heathrow to visit her in the Far East, but that is the case with Jonah Mulray, the stressed-out protagonist of Strangers. Jonah’s excuse for his marital negligence is that he’s “scared of flying”.In last week’s opening episode, he was forced to conquer his terror of leaving the ground by the traumatic news that his wife Megan (Dervla Kirwan) had been killed in a road accident. As soon as he arrived in Hong Kong, everything looked exceedingly fishy Read more ...
David Kettle
Of the Edinburgh International Festival’s three productions by 2018’s resident company, Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, The Prisoner is the most gnomic, the most baffling, and, frankly, the most disappointing. Which is a great shame, of course, because it is also the one possibly most hotly anticipated, being co-written and co-directed by the Bouffes du Nord’s guiding light across several decades: the legendary elder statesman of the theatre Peter Brook who, astonishingly, is 93.We’re in an unnamed foreign land – judging by the sun-scorched trees, dusty rocks and heat- Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
It is a pleasure to report on the continuing success of the Saffron Opera Wagner project. The organisation was formed in 2013, and since then has presented concert performances of the Ring cycle and Meistersinger, and now Parsifal, all with an amateur orchestra and chorus and a cast of mostly lesser-known professionals. As this Parsifal demonstrated, the casting choices have generally been superb, and the amateur forces all well prepared, the results dramatically convincing, even in concert performance.The orchestra here was committed and well into the style of the music. But there were no Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What lunatic would ever have the idea of turning War and Peace into an opera? Well, maybe if you, a composer, had found yourself in Moscow in June 1941 when news of the German invasion reached the Soviet capital, you might have decided to mount an Operation Barbarossa of your own, and that’s in all but name what Prokofiev did. The project occupied him on and off for the rest of his life (he died in 1953 on the same day as Stalin), and it never quite reached a definitive form.In his new production for WNO, David Pountney has had to take a somewhat intricate view, with the help of the Prokofiev Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A tradition seems to have been invented. First nights of the LSO’s seasons with Sir Simon Rattle as its Music Director start with a concert of music by British composers. The first one last year had Helen Grime, Thomas Adès, Birtwistle, Knussen and Elgar. This year’s selection was Birtwistle (again), Holst, Turnage and Britten. Rattle described the formula as a mixture of the brand new, the undiscovered and an "established masterpiece". As with most things going on in this fissile country at the moment, there were some very fine moments, but it left mixed feelings.The inclusion of Birtwistle Read more ...
graham.rickson
Puccini’s Tosca isn’t a subtle work, and this, Opera North’s fourth production since the company’s founding in 1978, is occasionally too loud and crude. But it’s undeniably powerful. Edward Dick’s 2017 Hansel and Gretel left me a little nonplussed, but this Tosca is miles better, a colourful update which manages to juggle plenty of schlock with sound artistic nous. He’s helped by conductor Antony Hermus, making his Opera North debut and securing some terrific, full-throated orchestral playing, much of it at the upper end of the dynamic scale.Nab a seat near the front of the stalls and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It may be a sign of the times that the two lead performances in Killing Eve are female, with Jodie Comer fizzing hyperactively as shape-shifting assassin Villanelle and Sandra Oh (from Grey’s Anatomy) as British intelligence officer Eve Polastri (pictured below). Yet simultaneously, the show has a comic campness and air of fantasy that feels Sixties-like, reminiscent of such timewarp delights as The Avengers or Modesty Blaise. Amazingly, they had female leads back then too.My crystal ball (alias BBC Previews) tells me that the cracks start to show as Killing Eve works its way through its Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
During their original 1980 to 1984 lifespan as a recording unit, Soft Cell issued three albums, a mini-album, eleven singles and EP. There were also compilation appearances, bonus tracks on discs included with albums or singles (such as the 12-inch of Jimi Hendrix cover versions accompanying The Art of Falling Apart) and extended tracks which appeared on 12-inch singles. Everything could probably be collected on six CDs.The new box set Keychains & Snowstorms: The Soft Cell Story features 10 discs, one of which is a DVD. The albums and the Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing mini-album are not Read more ...