Reviews
Jonathan Geddes
Props designed like flowers were scattered across the QMU stage for English Teacher's performance. A fitting choice given the Leeds group are evidently in full bloom these days, with an upgraded venue in Glasgow due to demand and, of course, a Mercury Music Prize collected along the way for debut album “This Could Be Texas”. Stepping up in size has not fazed them, though. The props were a nice backdrop but more eyecatching was singer Lily Fontaine, who fizzed with excitement all night and carried herself like she was born to be on a big stage. That isn't the most obvious setting for the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kemah Bob is a regular on television and radio panel shows and well established on the comedy circuit, but Miss Fortunate is her full-length debut. And what a debut; a personal story – ostensibly about the holiday from hell – that manages to riff on mental health, sexual adventure and cultural assumptions. And be funny.Bob, a Texan transplanted to London for the past eight years – “Because I hate sunshine and love abortion” – is a great storyteller, dropping a detail here, an interesting fact there (asides on weird animal genitalia pepper the show) as she recounts a tale about a Thai holiday Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Not just a backstage musical, a backroom musical!In the 70s, Follies and A Chorus Line took us into the rehearsal room giving us a chance to look under the bonnet to see the cogs of the Musical Theatre machine bump and grind as a show gets on its feet. But what of the other room, the writers’ room, where the ideas emerge mistily and the egos clang in conflict? [title of show] pulls back the curtain behind the curtain, behind the curtain.“More meta?” I hear you ask, a little wince in the voice. But, rather than an exercise in smartypants critiquing of cultural production from the inside-out ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The word “mahashmashana” – महामशान in Sanskrit – translates as “great burying ground.” Co-opted as the title of Josh Tillman’s sixth album as Father John Misty, its use might reflect a concern that the contemporary world is facing its demise. Or it may be due to its onomatopoeic quality. Perhaps both.Mahashmashana the album opens with its lush, strings-suffused title track. The lyrics mention the “next universal dawn” and “the corpse dance.” Here, truth “ain’t the kind of thing you can tell.” The song’s narrative seems to pivot on leaving a milieu populated by “rich assholes” for Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
For 30 years, La Serenissima have re-mapped the landscape of the Italian Baroque repertoire so that its towering figures, notably Vivaldi, no longer look like isolated peaks but integrated parts of a spectacular range. The ensemble founded by violinist Adrian Chandler delves deep into the archives to recover neglected music not just as a nerdish passion (though there’s nowt wrong with that) but the basis for practical performing editions that restore these lost sounds to life.At the Wigmore Hall, their “Giro d’Italia” series will span the 18th-century peninsula. It began with a seven-course Read more ...
Jack Barron
Jon Fosse talks a lot about thinking. He also thinks – hard – about talking. His prolific and award-winning career in poetry, prose, and drama, might be said, in fact, to unfold a digressive single thought, uttered always in a characteristically reflective and deceptively simple grammar: "thinks" and "says" are the main verbs of this thought, the syntactic centres around which he constructs his gently serious investigations into the life and limits of various verbal worlds.His books – "novel", "novella", or "short story" can seem aptly unjust – make repeated returns to the edges of Read more ...
David Nice
Is this the same Roman Rabinovich who drew harp-like delicacy from one of Chopin’s Pleyel pianos, and seeming authenticity from a 1790s grand which may have belonged to Haydn, both in the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands, Surrey? He clearly cares about the possibilities of any instrument on which he plays, so the natural consequence is maximum sonority on a modern Steinway. Too cultured to deafen, as Beatrice Rana did in this small space, he still compels you to listen to every note.You feel that Haydn would have loved the startling fullness with which the Sonata in F, HXV1/29 began. Rabinovich Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Carmina Burana isn’t a masterpiece: it’s primarily a bit of fun; fun to listen to, fun to play, really fun to sing.Few and far between are the performances where it ever manages to be much more than that, though this RSNO concert came close, mainly thanks to the conducting of Marzena Diakun, making her debut with the orchestra. The faster, louder sections were kept on an admirably tight leash so that the opening two "Fortuna" choruses really crackled, and the rumbustious choruses in the tavern were a hoot, the percussion giving it what can only be described as “welly.”The bite and precision Read more ...
mark.kidel
Kenny Barron, revered as the best jazz pianist around, is a perfect gentleman and a master of “cool” – a quality once described in great depth by the American Africanist Robert Farris Thompson, in an article originally published in African Arts in 1973.The term has today lost most of its original meaning. It evokes the ability to be totally present without showing off, to do more with less, and to evoke a kind of spiritual purity and healing. In Yoruba culture, as the New York priest John Mason once told me, the cool is the domain of the god Obatala, the one who tempers with judgment rather Read more ...
Robert Beale
Anna Clyne’s This Moment had its UK premiere at Saturday’s BBC Philharmonic concert. She’s the orchestra’s composer in association, and this seven-minute piece was first played by the Philadelphia Orchestra last year.Inspired by the calligraphy of the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Zen Master and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh, it’s (in the words of the composer) “a response to our collective grief and loss in recent years” and very much a meditation on death. Not too cheerful a subject, you might think, but Thích Nhất Hạnh said that when you meditate on death you love life more, and that was Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The British writer and Africa specialist Michela Wrong recently wrote a whistle-stop summary of the upheavals that afflicted Congo in the early 1960s:“A botched independence swiftly followed by army mutinies and attempted secession by two renegade provinces, egged on by a colonial power. A charismatic black leader who comes to a sticky end, aged just 35. A first-of-its-kind UN military operation climaxing in a mysterious plane crash and the secretary-general’s death. Cold War skullduggery of the most nefarious kind, with a poison vial stowed in a safe. Not one, but two, coup d’états.”These Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It has been nearly 25 years since Russell Crowe enjoyed his Oscar-winning finest hour as Maximus in Ridley Scott’s thunderous epic, Gladiator, and now Sir Ridley has brought us the next generation. Stepping up to the plate is Paul Mescal as Lucius (now known as Hanno), who finds himself an enslaved gladiator in Rome after an Imperial fleet has conquered his homeland of Numidia (Algeria, more or less).Like the original film, which is specifically quoted several times, this one opens with a spectacular set-piece as Roman general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) leads his massed triremes towards Read more ...