Reviews
David Kettle
Increasingly, the Lammermuir Festival is – one audience member whispered conspiratorially to me – what East Lothian music lovers are switching to alongside the Edinburgh International Festival. It’s insidious to compare, of course – but still, you can see the attraction.In this part of the world, during August and September listeners are spoilt for choice. And with performers of the calibre of the Quatuor Mosaïques, Steven Osborne, Tenebrae, Alban Gerhardt, John Butt and more – all of whom appeared at this year’s event – Lammermuir is undeniably snapping at the heels of its far vaster, elder Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apparently this is the first time an Ian McEwan novel has been dramatised for television, but whether The Child in Time was the best choice for that singular honour is open to question. It’s watchable enough, but this version (made by Benedict Cumberbatch’s production company SunnyMarch) feels like a precis of the book with a lot of the original’s resonances and nuances only glimpsed from afar.Maybe a three-part serialisation might have worked better than this 90-minute one-off, but if you’re unfamiliar with the book (which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award) you may find yourself scratching Read more ...
David Nice
It’s official: Romanian master George Enescu’s four-act Greek epic lives and breathes as a work of transcendent genius. It took last year’s Royal Opera production to lead us further along the path established by the magnificent EMI studio recording with José van Dam as protagonist. But La Fura dels Baus’s brave and sometimes disorienting vision was incomplete, shorn of some bewitching dance-music, and fine young conductor Leo Hussain couldn’t hope to reach the total understanding and mastery of a unique style – or styles – that only Vladimir Jurowski could achieve with his musical partner of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
September and October see a deluge of new releases. Everybody and their aunt puts out an album as autumn hits, so theartsdesk on Vinyl appears this month (and next) in a slightly expanded edition. As ever, the fare on offer is as diverse as possible, from black metal to Afro-funk via film and TV soundtracks. All musical life is here, ripe and waiting.VINYL OF THE MONTHThe Television Personalities And Don’t The Kids Just Love It + Mummy You’re Not Watching Me + They Could Have Been Bigger Than The Beatles + The Painted Word (Fire)Usually theartsdesk on Vinyl has a rule that the VINYL OF THE Read more ...
Robert Beale
Juanjo Mena memorably began his tenure as chief conductor at the BBC Philharmonic with a Mahler symphony (the Second), and chose to enter his seventh and last season with them at the Bridgewater Hall with the Third. It was a testimonial to an era at the end of which he leaves with the orchestra in at least as good shape as he found them, and in some ways better still. His time has included wide-ranging repertoire, and apart from a Fifth at the Proms, I believe this was the only other Mahler symphony performance he’s directed since that September day in 2011. But it’s been worth waiting for, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Although he made his name with the generally upbeat grooves and licks of his Barrytown Trilogy, Roddy Doyle has often played Irish family and social life as a blues full of sorrow and regret. In his Booker-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, a bitter parental break-up shadows the wee hero’s passage through childhood. Domestic violence and the self-medication found in booze fuel The Woman Who Walked into Doors and its sequel, Paula Spencer. Nowhere, however, has Doyle pushed his bantering, motor-mouthed Dubliners further down into darkness than in this latest novel. The results may divide his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
That this year is the 40th anniversary of 1977, the year punk rock went mainstream, shouldn’t obscure the pub rock foundations underpinning much of what was supposedly new. The Clash’s Joe Strummer had fronted pub circuit regulars The 101’ers. In 1976, the Sex Pistols regularly played West London pub The Nashville Rooms. The Damned came together after Brian James and Rat Scabies scouted the audience at a Nashville Pistols/101’ers show for potential members of the band they intended forming. The Damned’s future label Stiff Records was run by pub rock movers and shakers. Their producer, Nick Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The title says it all, or at least quite a lot. Luminously intelligent, an exceptionally hard worker, bilingual in French, a gifted biographer, Claire Tomalin has been at the heart of the literati glitterati all her working life. Here she turns her forensic sharp eye on herself in a life that even her nonagenarian father characterised as hard, although she herself sees it as privileged.Of course, both are right. Her parents – a clever very young Frenchman, Émile Delavaney, infatuated by both the English language and its literature, and her mother Muriel Herbert, a gifted musician and composer Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi’s On Body and Soul (Testrol es lelekrol) opens on a scene of cold. It’s beautiful, a winter forest landscape, deserted except for two deer: a huge stag and a small doe react to one another in the snow, a tentative interaction of eyes and noses, nothing more. There’s a tenderness to what we see, the vulnerability of the female set against the power of the antlered male, but also a sense of somehow icy withdrawal.Enyedi is too subtle a director to treat this opening scene as a metaphor for what follows, the human dimension of her film, although its story is Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Royal Academy has a winning line in spectacular exhibitions that have become essentials in London, theatrically and dramatically revelatory presentations in themselves. Here is another winner, the American star Jasper Johns, a collaboration with the world’s newest gallery of contemporary art, the Broad in Los Angeles.Johns makes iconic objects from simple domestic items, from brooms and torches to the American flag (normally untouchable: in America’s officially secular society schoolchildren still swear an oath of allegiance to it). He even includes, as is perhaps inevitable, Read more ...
David Nice
Now look here, Giles Coren: immersion in a great play well acted can send you out of the theatre feeling very different from when you entered it – and I don’t mean stressed-out. In this case, light as air and sad as hell, simultaneously. You may still find it funny or contrived. Yet these things are true: when in 1976 Arthur Kopit, visiting his stroke-incapacitated father in hospital, met three strong women there, he transformed their experiences into a superbly structured, strikingly phrased poetic drama. And now, over 40 years later, Juliet Stevenson and the director who helped her to make Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Peter Phillips and the Tallis Scholars have nothing to prove when it comes to Renaissance choral music – few ensembles can match them for clarity, balance and purity of tone. They are perfect guides, then, for this tour of the late Italian Renaissance, an era, as they demonstrate, of surprising musical variety and fast-changing tastes.The choir is small, just 10 singers, and Cadogan Hall has a dry acoustic, at least compared to the vast basilicas of Northern Italy, so these were intimate readings. The broadly chronological survey began with Palestrina, whose opulent Laudate pueri lacked Read more ...