Reviews
David Nice
Make Arvo Pärt the bulwark of any concert and you can surprise as well as delight the full house he’s likely to win you with the rest of your chosen programme. This was a beautifully planned showcase for the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under its Latvian conductor Kaspars Putniņš, poised between the introspective and the extrovert both within the all-Pärt first half and what followed after the interval, where Estonian composers no less precious than Pärt to their compatriots framed the late Jonathan Harvey’s mesmerising seraphics. And this Estonia 100 concert represented not just Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Fresh from Celtic Connections in Glasgow, I’m With Her stepped out at Bush Hall in west London for their only England date before embarking on a major US tour. Sarah Jarosz, who plays guitar, banjo and mandolin, Aoife O’Donovan, guitar, and Sara Watkins, a mean fiddler, are being described as “a folk supergroup” – and seeing, and hearing, is indeed believing. It’s no hype: these three thirtysomething women, each with their own successful solo career, make a beautiful noise.The concert was sadly short, little more than an hour, and served as a showcase for I’m With Her’s debut album, See You Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Jörg Widmann writes fast. He is also one of the few young German composers who can write distinctive and idiomatic music without feeling the weight of his country’s musical heritage on his shoulders at every turn. Surprisingly, then, his Clarinet Quintet, which here received its UK premiere at Wigmore Hall, was eight years in the making, and was initially abandoned because "music history ... suddenly appeared as a great burden". Typically, though, his return to the project at the start of 2017 marked a period of intense creativity: "I felt that the music was simply pouring out of me."Widmann Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Titian! Mantegna! Rubens! Dürer! Veronese! Van Dyck! Raphael! Velazquez! About 140 works which were once part of Charles I’s 2,000-strong collection are reunited in a sumptuous collaboration between the Royal Academy and the Royal Collection. It is a marvellous selection covering the 15th to the 17th centuries, the Northern and Southern Renaissance and the baroque. Charles I may have been a wretched king and politician, but he was an outstanding and original connoisseur collector and commissioner of art. Among the greatest hits exhibitions, there are even surprises: take Rembrandt' Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With Dunkirk and Darkest Hour threatening to storm the Oscars, it seems there’s suddenly plenty of mileage in portraits of the British at war. There have been several film and TV versions of RC Sherriff’s World War One play, Journey’s End, since it debuted on the London stage in 1928 (featuring a young Laurence Olivier), but director Saul Dibb’s new incarnation is a fine testament to the lingering potency of the piece.Its timing is immaculate, since the action depicted took place on the Western Front almost exactly 100 years ago, and later this year we’ll be remembering the 1918 Armistice. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The American family has seldom looked more desperate. Will Eno’s The Open House depicts a gathering of such dismal awfulness that it surely sets precedents for this staple element of American drama. Yet for viewers who relish humour in its most pitch-black form, and enjoy a dramatic turn-around that is as unpredictable as it is accomplished, the writer’s 2014 play (which won him the playwriting Obie award that year) is deliciously scalding.Eno introduces his five characters, assembled for the parents’ wedding anniversary, not by name but by their role in the family, suggesting something Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When I began studying art history, my Bible was Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. The reproductions are mostly in black and white and, thumbing through my dusty old copy, I find a photograph of the Jesuit church in Rome, whose ceiling was transformed by the painter Giovanni Battista Gaulli into a glorious vista of the heavens teaming with cherubs, angels and saints. The reproduction is less than 13 x 17 cms, so Gaulli’s throng is reduced to an ecstatic tangle of tiny monochrome swirls comprising limbs, drapery, clouds and shafts of celestial light. The content is abstracted, yet the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chris Rock, another fine alumnus of the comedy factory known as Saturday Night Live, rarely comes to these shores, so his short arena tour was welcome. He last visited the UK 10 years ago as he had been busy with, among other things, presenting the Oscars, voicing Marty the Zebra in the Madagascar films and bringing up a family.The last subject was part of a lot of personal material in his 90-minute set, much of it about the break-up of his marriage, of which more later. First, though, he addressed the post-Harvey Weinstein world we now live in, assuring us that he no longer touches any Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Vinyl matters. It matters to theartsdesk on Vinyl, clearly, as the name may hint. And it matters to many of you. But why? Why does it matter? We all have our own reasons for playing records, some practical, some sound-related, some personal, some ritualistic, some nostalgic, and many more that are harder to define. But for those who wish to dwell at greater length, Brit-based Californian music enthusiast and academic Jennifer Otter Bickerdike has put together “a manifesto from musicians and fans”, a chunky hardback book entitled, simply, Why Vinyl Matters. Within it the matter is chewed over Read more ...
David Nice
Vladmir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra have been to the bottom of the Rhine before, but in 2015 only did a whistlestop tour of the rest of Rheingold's terrain with an extensive array of excerpts. Having worked with the players on Tristan und Isolde and DIe Meistersinger at Glyndebourne, their ever-thorough and brilliant music director decided that the time has come to tackle the most daunting of Wagner's music-dramas, one opera a year up to 2021 when the river will finally burst its banks and the fortress of the gods goes up in flames.Water and fire already play an impressive Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
From his debut Metroland, right up to the Man Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending, the prospect of a road not taken has haunted the mild and mediocre narrators of Julian Barnes’s novels. Like Tony Webster in The Sense of an Ending, “average at life; average at truth; morally average”, they tend to prefer, or at least settle for, a comfy seat in the stalls as life’s high dramas unfold in front of them. True, the novels often shatter this detachment and, with gentle ruthlessness, wreck their hard-won equipoise. Yet The Only Story, although it initially slips into the well-woven tweed of the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A macchiato may never taste the same again. If you’ve ever wondered about the politics and history behind your cup of designer coffee, The Monk of Mokha will answer all your questions, and more.This is the prolific Dave Eggers’s third semi-biographical work: What is the What tells the story of one of Sudan’s “lost boys” and his journey to America; Zeitoun is the dramatic story of a Syrian American survivor of hurricane Katrina. In both of these works of reportage, Eggers gets close to his subjects and exposes trauma, injustice and prejudice. And both are page-turners, just as many of his Read more ...