Reviews
william.ward
It has long been a mystery why no new production of Semiramide should have been staged at Covent Garden since 1887: un offesa terribile considering that this splendid melodramma tragico should have been the inaugural production of the Royal Italian Opera House (our current theatre’s predecessor) in 1847.In fact much of Rossini’s repertoire, both comic and tragic, fell out of favour worldwide from about the time of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, partly as a disappearance of such star lead sopranos such as Adelina Patti and Nellie Melba. So with the exception of a couple of propaganda-driven Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A fair few Edinburgh Fringe shows are just that – things that work perfectly in the “let's do the show right here” spirit that permeates the festival, in a tiny (and often grotty) venue that adds hugely to the vibe. That's all well and good during August, of course, but come later in the year when a show moves beyond the festival confines it can lose much of its spark.So it's a delight that Rob Kemp's The Elvis Dead, which was a word-of-mouth hit before it deservedly gained a best newcomer nomination in the lastminute.com Edinburgh Comedy Awards, has made the journey south for a late-night Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The great and good of the London music scene were gathered at English National Opera last night for the unveiling of American Wunderkind Nico Muhly’s new opera, Marnie. Although it was commissioned by the Met in New York, somehow ENO managed to wangle the world premiere, which has been widely hyped and was ecstatically received by a packed house. But for all that there was much to enjoy, it hardly deserved such rapture, and there were problems with both piece and production.Marnie is a 1964 psychological thriller by Alfred Hitchcock, based on the Winston Graham novel of 1961. The opera looks Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
One of these years, Javier Marías will probably win the Nobel Prize in Literature. If and when that honour happens, critics may well discuss the Spanish writer’s fiction, in all its “intensity, complexity and power to convince”, in much the same terms as he applies to one of his favourite works of art. This evergreen marvel is “not just extraordinarily complex as regards narrative and time, it is also chillingly ambiguous; and it does not attempt to explain anything about the grave matters it touches upon: identity, being and not being, the real and the hypothetical, memory as not something Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So, if you’re reading this you probably trudged all the weary way to the very end of I Know Who You Are. Or you didn’t but still want to find out what the hell happened. After 20-plus hours of twisting, turning, overblown drama, long-service medals are in order for all who flopped over the line. We are probably all feeling as drained and battered as half the cast: black-and-blue Santi Mur, anaemic Ana, slapped-up Pol, smashed-to-smithereens Heredia.The bloated brace of concluding episodes took up three and a quarter hours of BBC Four’s Saturday night schedule. There was so much crime-solving Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Precious to me” is a high-carat gold nugget. A guitar-pop song with cascading, lush Everly Brothers harmonies drawing on The Searchers’ version of “When You Walk in the Room”, its immediate tune instantly lodges itself in the head.Instead of being from the Sixties, “Precious to me” was a US hit in Spring 1981, a period when punk had given way to the acceptable face of new wave. The commercial door for concise, classically styled songs was open. Phil Seymour, the song’s writer and singer, had a pre-punk résumé, knew all about pop and rode the moment. His music fit the power pop profile: the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Tina Brown’s first Christmas issue of Vanity Fair in 1984 had this to say about “the sulky, Elvisy” Donald Trump: “…he’s a brass act. And he owns his own football team. And he thinks he should negotiate arms control agreements with the Soviet Union.”Trump stalks these gripping, funny pages like a virus (and indeed, AIDS is just tightening its grip on New York). In 1990 a damning piece in VF reveals he has a collection of Hitler’s speeches in his office; the last entry of 1991 has him pouring a glass of wine down the writer’s back at a party in revenge and then sneaking away. The diaries – a Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
For a band as big as Depeche Mode, in a venue as big the 21,000-capacity Manchester Arena, on a tour as big as their current Spirit tour, it almost doesn’t need saying that the pre-gig atmosphere is buzzing. A major presence on the British music scene since their 1981 electropop debut Speak and Spell, they’ve since tried their hand at goth, new wave, rock’n’roll, industrial music, and classical piano, all of which has helped birth this year’s politically-influenced Spirit. Now, stood before hordes of people who grew up with their music, they’d be praised no matter what they played. That doesn Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Icelandic writer-director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson has made an impressive feature debut with this story of crossing the threshold from childhood to young adult experience. Heartstone acutely and empathetically catches the path from innocence to experience of its two 14-year-old protagonists, Thor (Baldur Einarsson) and Kristján (Blær Hinriksson), in which the film’s twin themes, coming of age and coming out, become uneasily intertwined.Gudmundsson opens his story at a leisurely pace – and, at a few minutes over the two-hour mark, there’s no calling its rhythm hurried – as we discover the Read more ...
peter.quinn
As moments of transcendence go, Laura Mvula’s guest spot at Robert Glasper’s EFG London Jazz Festival show provided one of the year’s most transporting musical moments.Powered by the huge harmonic slabs carved out by keyboardist Travis Sayles and the vast backbeat of bassist Derrick Hodge and drummer George “Spanky” McCurdy, Mvula’s delicately outerspacious “Bread” was recast as a 10-minute meditation. The mantra-like repetitions of the refrain "Lay the breadcrumb down so we can find our way", together with the uniquely affecting timbre of Mvula’s voice, succeeded in uniting and lifting up 2, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Finland is celebrating its centenary this year and the National Gallery's exhibition of four paintings by Akseli Gallen-Kalela (1865-1931) of a very large lake in central Finland is a beguiling glimpse of the passion its inhabitants attach to its scenic beauty, in winter darkness and here, summer night. Finland possesses almost 190,000 lakes, depending on your definition. When flying over its vastness that calculation is profoundly believable, as the view is almost of more water than forest, in a country replete with ponds, streams, rivers – and lakes. Many of the lakes are very, very deep, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Screen biographies are tricky things to pull off when the person portrayed has left behind an indelible screen presence. It was hard to love Michelle Williams dragging up for My Week with Marilyn; Grace of Monaco was Nicole Kidman refracted through the eyes of Madame Tussaud. But Annette Bening is wholly mesmerising in her reincarnation of Gloria Grahame, the Oscar-winning femme fatale who became a jobbing actress in late 1970s England.Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool is based on actor Peter Turner’s slim, self-deprecating memoir of his love Read more ...