Reviews
David Nice
John Adams, let's face it, was the reason many of us came to hear the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Their performances and recordings as dedicatees of his labyrinthine First String Quartet and Absolute Jest, in which the four players function as soloist with orchestra, led to high hopes for the UK premiere of a second quartet. As it turned out, the yield was smaller beer than expected. What really hit home, for those of us who don't spend as much time as we should with the first and most varied quartet canon in the literature, was an early Haydn masterpiece.Not the curtainraiser, Op. 20 No. 1 Read more ...
David Kettle
Thirteen-year-old Aishopan desperately wants to be an eagle hunter. The problem is, she’s a girl. And in the traditional Mongolian nomadic community where she lives, rearing a golden eagle chick to hunt foxes for their fur is very much the preserve of men.British director Otto Bell’s sumptuous film is certainly an inspirational story of struggle and triumph, and it’s set against an arrestingly unfamiliar context – the icy peaks and frozen rivers at the crossroads between Mongolia, Kazakhstan, China and Russia. It’s a warm-hearted offering, almost to a fault – indeed, its set-pieces and lavish Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Theatre conventions are a funny thing. Today, it’s actually quite difficult to see a modern classic dressed in the clothes and performed on the set of its specific historical period. It has to be in contemporary dress. And in a contemporary setting. It’s almost as if producers and directors no longer trust audiences to use their imaginations – poor public, it has to be spoonfed. Ivo van Hove, perhaps the most exciting theatre director since Katie Mitchell, has taken Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 masterpiece and, with help from playwright Patrick Marber, updated it. He’s also cast Ruth Wilson as Hedda, Read more ...
David Nice
Add three natural trumpets, flawlessly wielded, to chorus and standard period-instrument orchestra, and the seasonal spirit will flow no matter the context. It's true that Bach's Magnificat is not that common a visitor at this time of year - according to the Lutheran church calendar, July is the time to celebrate the pregnant Mary's paean to the Lord, though this spectacular also featured at Christmas in Leipzig with four interpolations - but then its rarity may also be because it challenges all but the best. Which John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists still Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Dirk Gently’s shtick as a detective is interconnectedness. Everything happens for an incalculable reason, there’s no such thing as chance, and all neural pathways lead randomly to the correct outcome. It's a philosophy paper gussied up as a whizzbang entertainment. “I will eventually solve the mystery merely by doing whatever,” says Dirk, having introduced himself as a detective.The history of Dirk Gently as a brand concept is similarly subject to haphazard forces. The not necessarily psychic detective was the less loved (by the punters) second child of Douglas Adams, the creator of The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Anyone who expected a simple robots-versus-humans confrontation, like in Michael Crichton's original Westworld movie from 1973, had another think, or bunch of thinks, coming. The final episode of the Jonathan Nolan/JJ Abrams Westworld was more like a sci-fi manifesto for a post-human world.It was further proof of how the new wave of long-form, big-budget television is developing vast horizons way beyond what even filmmakers can now envisage. While they get about two hours to get their message across, here auteur Nolan (along with his wife and co-writer Lisa Joy) has already had 10 and a half Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It is appropriate that this exhibition of Zaha Hadid’s early drawings and paintings should be shown at the Serpentine’s Sackler Gallery, which adjoins the restaurant she designed in 2013. The white, curvilinear extension was one of the first permanent structures she was able to build in London. And looking at her visionary drawings and paintings, it becomes clear why she had to wait so long for her work to be accepted here.Take a project she carried out as a fourth-year student at the Architectural Association in 1977. She borrowed Kasimir Malevich’s Architekton – a building-like sculpture, Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Advent is as profitable for choirs as it is tricky to programme. How to delight the palates of carol-hungry audiences while offering them new treats? How to reconcile the fairy-lights of ubiquitous consumption and satiation with the Biblical call of the season as a time to wait, take stock and look forward?Without a "Ding-Dong" in earshot, Siglo de Oro appeared at the Spitalfields Music Winter Festival and brightened up a wet and windy evening in east London with unfailingly polished accounts of Advent antiphons at either end of a half-millennium. Pearls of 16th-century polyphony gleamed in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Cities, the fastest growing habitats in the history of the world, provided the subject for the sixth and final programme in Planet Earth II, the series that came a decade after the original Planet Earth programmes set new standards for television coverage of wildlife and nature.The follow-up confirmed that they are still being set, even though we have become accustomed to intrepid cameramen getting close to subjects never seen before, and tight narrative editing that gives us both visible and verbal comprehensible sequences, all anchored by the comforting familiarity of David Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
This would have been an intriguing recital at any time. But in the context of Brexit, a programme of songs in a second language, of music expressing composers’ fascination with another country, another landscape, another sound-world, had a poignancy that was hard to ignore.We heard German composers tackle Italian, Russians swap their covered vowels for England’s more open ones, and even Italians trying their hand at Scottish folksongs. The results weren’t always fluent, sometimes struggling to manoeuvre themselves into the borrowed culture, but they were telling, especially when delivered by Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
When asked about her most famous short story, "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson said, “I hate it. I’ve lived with that thing 15 years. Nobody will ever let me forget it.” Sixty-eight years later, it’s seared into the American psyche and has been a set text for decades. It was published in the New Yorker in 1948 and generated more mail – about 300 letters, mainly horrified - than any work of fiction the magazine had published.It’s still chilling, this calmly told story of everyday villagers who have a yearly ritual: that of stoning one of the members of their close-knit community to death. Some Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anthologie 1953–2002 is a monster. A 20-disc set spanning almost 50 years, it tracks one of France’s most beloved singers and songwriters. Gilbert Bécaud died in December 2001, but songs from his posthumously released Je Partirai album are included. Fitting, as his music lives on and the release of this box set marks the 15th anniversary of his death.Outside France, Bécaud is less well known. Though his “A Little Love and Understanding” single charted in Britain in 1975, he did not make a Charles Aznavour-style crossover to mainstream recognition in the Anglophone world. He’s never been given Read more ...