Reviews
Bernard Hughes
The heart of Prom 33 was Brahms’s massive German Requiem, a piece that eschews Christian dogma and Day-of-Judgment terrors for a humanism focusing on consolation of the bereaved. It feels very much like a requiem for our times as much as the composer’s, and last night’s performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Richard Farnes, although very traditional in style, had a striking immediacy.But first came Thea Musgrave’s Phoenix Rising, the Proms premiere of a 20-year-old piece. In the year the Proms committed to increasing its representation of women composers it is also marking Read more ...
David Kettle
Coriolanus Vanishes ★★★★ Writer and director David Leddy was himself the original solo performer in his Coriolanus Vanishes when it premiered in Glasgow in 2017. But in this powerful, visually stunning outing as part of the Traverse’s very strong festival programme this year, its actor is Irene Allan. It’s a change of gender that casts the work in an entirely new light (and in fact, you can’t help but imagine Leddy’s fragmented monologue from a male perspective), but one that simultaneously changes nothing.As with so much of his work, Leddy’s Coriolanus Vanishes dovetails the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Dark Web has an intriguing sound about it. Like something out of JRR Tolkein or JK Rowling, it suggests a netherland peopled by strange creatures, and maybe even dangerous monsters. As indeed it is. Television writer Alex Oates’s 60-minute monologue, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe and made history in 2014 as the first show to be crowdfunded by, among others, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, has an richly evocative title and now, after an outing at the Vaults in January, makes an appearance in the West End. The fruit of Oates’s interviews with online drug dealers, it explores the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Prom 31 featured an American orchestra playing an all-American programme – until the final encore dived thrillingly into a completely different musical tradition. But one of the principal features of American music – its joyous risk-taking – was undermined by conductor Osmo Vänskä’s cautious tempos, and the orchestral playing only periodically caught fire.This started with a somewhat routine performance of Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant Candide overture. In recent times it has been heard more at the Proms as an encore than a curtain-raiser, and perhaps does work better as a glorious sign-off, Read more ...
David Benedict
“It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations.” Oscar Wilde was being ironic when he had Gwendolen contemplate the sound of her beloved’s drab name in The Importance of Being Earnest, but he had a point when it comes to composers and poetry. With their own “vibrations”, great poems rarely warrant musical interference; bad poetry, meanwhile, can resist even the finest scoring. Choosing poetry that can be richly enhanced by music is not always a trick composers have pulled off, so it’s to Sarah Connolly's and pianist Joseph Middleton’s enormous credit that they created such an eloquent Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Catherine Bohart ★★★★Catherine Bohart tells us at the top of the show that she is the bisexual daughter of an Irish Catholic deacon, which is, when you consider it, a niche description. Oh, and she has OCD. That’s quite an introduction, and she more than lives up to it in this debut show, Immaculate.Her style is conversational as she rattles through her realisation about her sexual preferences and her mental health, as well her father’s reaction to them. She is very close to him, and a story about his childhood is a neat throughline in the show.His story, of emotional neglect, is of an Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A complex Swedish product to unpack, this one. Someone in the BBC must have worked out that it could do with a detailed instruction manual to help people with the task: the programme booklet duly ran to a full 50 pages.There were two sets of components: firstly, all six of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, performed by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and soloists. Plus, alongside each concerto, a newly commissioned companion piece by a prominent composer. The 12 works, six by Bach plus the six new pieces, were spread over two Proms on Sunday. Time required for complete assembly of the finished Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Anyone who came to the National Youth Orchestra’s annual Prom in the hope of hearing some roof-raising feelgood blockbuster might have slunk out disappointed into the tropical night of Kensington. What an ambitious, high-concept menu Sir George Benjamin slated for the teenaged regiment – over 160 of them at full strength – and how confidently they served (almost) all of it. If this was big-band music, then it took the form of a suite of pieces that often demanded that the orchestra march – or perhaps, swim – in several directions at once. From Mussorgsky (as arranged by Rimsky-Korsakov) in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Theatre critics tend not to experience an 140 percent increase in their financial assets within 21 minutes. So on that remarkable front alone, the London premiere of the Belgian £¥€$ (LIES) is giddily immersive fun, at least up until such time as the Ontroerend Goed production shifts gears and sends the financial world, and our momentary prosperity, crashing down. Staged within an Almeida Theatre transformed for the occasion to accommodate gambling tables instead of rows of seats, the show is certainly cheaper than a trip to Vegas and contains a lot more cautionary oomph. By their Read more ...
David Nice
"Sounds like an opera by Handel," said a friend when I told him that I was going to see Vanessa at Glyndebourne. Possible – the name first appeared in print as "invented" by Jonathan Swift in 1723 – had Handel not stuck to mythological and Biblical subjects, The title in fact has an incantatory ring in an overheated piece of hokum concocted by Samuel Barber and his long-term partner Gian Carlo Menotti for the Met in 1958. Glyndebourne often felt too small a space for its blowsy histrionics, but conductor Jakub Hrůša, director Keith Warner and a splendid team of singers did it proud. I won't Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The post-modernists have taken over the asylum. At least, that's what I thought twice this week. Once when I saw Vlad Putin on YouTube doing karaoke to an adoring audience. The other was seeing Brazil’s latest contenders BaianaSystem, who played to a sweaty packed-out house at the Village Underground. "Post-modern" in the sense of beyond defineable genre and with a dose of irony thrown in, and not quite beleiving what is in front of your eyes.Of course, there have always been interesting musical mixes in Brazil, especially in Bahia in the North-East where they come from. The state has been a Read more ...
David Kettle
Ulster American ★★★★★ David Ireland’s brand new, brutally incendiary black comedy gleefully tosses a grenade into any lazy liberal sensibilities at the festival (and, let’s face it, there are plenty of those). Race, gender, rape, prejudice, all and more are mercilessly prodded, provoked and picked apart in this viciously hilarious farce of ideas.Timid director Leigh (a wonderfully nervy, squirming Robert Jack) has miraculously enrolled obnoxious, swaggering Hollywood A-lister Jay (Darrell D’Silva) to star in the West End premiere of a shocking new play on the Troubles. But its Read more ...