Reviews
Marina Vaizey
Grayson Perry is at it again. The Turner Prize winner, Reith lecturer, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, curator, writer, British Museum trustee, CBE, RA – plus Britain's and the art world’s favourite transvestite – is trying to find sense in things and events, or, as he has put it, invent meaning in a meaningless world.Channel 4 is devoting four hours to Perry’s investigations of rituals and ceremonies for our secular world, as well as those discovered from worlds rather less secular. We started with death at what might usually be taken as the end, after birth, coming of age and Read more ...
Hannah Greenstreet
Dear RashDash,I know you don’t like critics because Abbi read out a lot of reviews of famous Chekhov productions very fast, wearing a ruff and sequined hot pants. But I promise I won’t rate you out of five or patronise you with a gold star or give you a quotable soundbite to put on your posters. Even though I know you got four stars from The Times and the Guardian and the Stage because it says so on the back of the play text, which I bought because I had to take a piece of the show away with me.I’m not going to write what happens because nothing happens in Chekhov and by getting rid of the Read more ...
Prom 54, Richter, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer review - independent-minded Hungarians return
David Nice
Two heartening facts first. Iván Fischer's much-loved crew remains one of the few world-class orchestras with an individual voice, centred on lean, athletic strings adaptable to Fischer's febrile focus (perfect for Enescu and Bartók, not quite so much for Mahler). And though the Budapest players remain Hungary's greatest musical ambassadors, the anti-Orbán stance of their eloquent chief conductor means that they will never be propaganda tools of the new nationalism; we can welcome them back to the Proms unreservedly.Fischer is not only something of a hero for saying what's right; he's also a Read more ...
Marina Gerner
On a recent visit to the Royal Academy, I noticed a tall, elegantly dressed man who spent quite some time admiring a square object attached to the wall. I wondered whether to tell him that far from being Russian avant-garde art, which was the theme of the exhibition, it was in fact the temperature and humidity control box.Many visitors to Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 will recognise world-famous works of art by Soviet artists such as the archetypical red horse in Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s Fantasy and Marc Chagall’s romantic couple in Promenade. A hundred years after the Russian Revolution, Read more ...
David Kettle
La maladie de la mort ★★★ Toxic masculinity in all its appalling variety is a hot topic across Edinburgh’s festivals this year – just check out Daughter at CanadaHub and even Ulster American at the Traverse for two particularly fine and shocking examinations.But few works can provide quite as clinical and uncompromising a dissection of the male gaze as the International Festival’s La maladie de la mort, written by Alice Birch and directed by Katie Mitchell, based on the 1982 novella by Marguerite Duras, and one third of the residency from Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Read more ...
David Nice
Those of us schooled in the English choral tradition know and love Hubert Parry's "My soul, there is a country", but few have sung or heard it live as the first of a mighty cycle. Parry completed the six Songs of Farewell not long before his death 100 years ago. In the sensitivity of their word-setting and the harmonies used to underline the text, they are as much of a collective masterpiece in their way as Strauss's Four Last Songs of 44 years later – featured, with astute Proms planning, in the evening Prom – and they need a fine conductor to marshal their speech-melodic flow. It must have Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Hegel, Kant, David Hume, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Leibniz are all adduced, referred to, and paraphrased, and that’s just for starters. Add Rameau, Schubert, Beethoven, Benjamin Britten and the contemporary composer David Matthews (who is also a friend) into the mix for Professor Sir Roger Scruton’s odd and uncategorisable series of essays on music and – especially – listening to music. Underneath it all is a kind of call to arms about how to listen. Scruton is a self-declared conservative, scholar, philosopher, polemicist, prolific writer, teacher and musician – both player and composer – as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The cover images of the four albums Teenage Fanclub issued on Creation Records suggest ambivalence. While Bandwagonesque’s title acknowledges the hopping onto trends endemic in pop, the graphic of a bag with a dollar sign recognises the related collateralisation of music. Thirteen's mismatched halves of a ball hints towards oppositionality as well as, with the sporting reference, competitiveness. Grand Prix features a Teenage Fanclub-branded sports car. More awareness of competition, then. Songs From Northern Britain transports a closed fairground ride into a forested landscape, a Read more ...
David Nice
Who is the greatest British conductor in charge of a major orchestra? It's subjective, but my answer is not what you might expect. Jonathan Nott has done all his major work so far on the continent. He left the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in excellent shape to another of the world's best, Jakub Hrůša; and now he is, as we learned from two long-term players in the Proms Plus talk, liked and respected across the board at the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. Continuity with the first major Swiss orchestra founded by Ernest Ansermet 100 years ago was underlined last night in Debussy, Ravel and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Initially, this month’s theartsdesk on Vinyl began with the sentence after this one, but it's so dry readers might drowse off, so I started with this one instead and would advise moving through the next one, just picking up the gist quickly... Discogs, a key hub for global record sales in physical formats, recently presented its Midyear Marketplace Analysis and Database Highlights for 2018, which reckons vinyl sales are up another 15% over the last year. Very boringly stated but good news, right? The biggest seller was Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon which is predictable but it’s Read more ...
caspar.gomez
One of the biggest crowd roars of the night comes right at the start when Jake Shears runs onstage. He is wearing a grey top hat, a white tail-jacket with glittered lapel-edging, silver glittery trousers, a tight black sequinned vest top, and a bow tie on his bare neck. The 600 capacity Concorde 2, right on Brighton's seafront, is sold out. The audience had been singing along loudly with the immediate pre-show tune, “All That Jazz”, then cheered when the band walked on looking snappy in matching zig-zagged suits like tropical pyjamas. The bassist is songwriter/sometime pop star Mr Hudson and Read more ...
David Kettle
Orpheus ★★★★ This unashamedly sentimental storytelling show got its premiere a couple of years back in the back garden of a cheese shop in Cromarty, before touring the Scottish Highlands, we’re told. With its lo-fi, minimalist aesthetic, which strips theatre right back to its essentials of story and song, Orpheus could pitch up anywhere and charm with its captivating collision of present-day beery nights out and ancient Greek myth.Dave is nearing 30, and only sees the world in shades of grey, until he encounters Eurydice and his life magically transforms to vivid colour Read more ...