Reviews
Peter Culshaw
Jamie Cullum has been perceived as the Tim Henman of Jazz. Talented, technically great, a successful career, excellent voice and top-notch pianist, and a nice guy you could take to tea with your mum, but not really challenging or world-beating. Yet there were interesting flashes of greatness in last night’s concert.Cullum did a well-received Prom in 2010 and it was easy to share his enjoyment at having lots of musical toys to play with again – the Heritage Orchestra, the 100-strong Roundhouse choir, not to mention his choice of guest musicians. The very first thing he did showed him at his Read more ...
David Kettle
Alix in Wundergarten ★★★★Think Alan Ayckbourn on acid: a commonplace (well, almost) set-up, exaggerated further and further beyond what we’d ever anticipate. In François Pandolfo’s wild, freewheeling and hugely entertaining satire on the acting world, delivered by Cardiff-based difficult|stage theatre company, it’s a gaggle of hammy actors who occupy a studio to make an audio recording of Alice in Wonderland – before the whole thing degenerates into chaos and spins off in entirely unexpected directions. Pandolfo himself is wonderfully nervy and needy as the assistant director, attempting to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Johann Friedrich Meister: Il giardino del piacere Ensemble Diderot/Johannes Pramsohler (dir. and baroque violin) (Audax Records)Misplaced distrust of fellow Europeans is nothing new; Reinhard Goebel’s enjoyable sleeve note points out that 17th-century German court musicians objected to taking orders from imported French dancing masters. Still, assimilating foreign musical trends “took place silently as part of day-to-day life”, and this engaging set of trio sonatas by one Johann Friedrich Meister reflects the influence of French composers on German secular chamber music.Baroque violinist Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Most casual gamers are familiar with the open world gameplay ethic, where you can, within reason, travel anywhere within the gameworld at any time. From driving through a sprawling city in Grand Theft Auto V to sneaking through a tropical jungle in Far Cry 4, open world adds exploration, a feeling of anything being possible and brings a sense of reality to the gameplay, where invisible walls are a thing of the past.No Man’s Sky takes the open world idea and runs through the horizon with it, presenting a bravely ambitious open universe sci-fi game based around the anchor themes of exploration Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is too other-worldly to have anything as mortal as a musical heartbeat. Pulsing through it instead are musical quivers, jolts of eerie energy first heard in the opening cello glissandi. Denaturing the instrument, transforming it from a voice so nearly human to one of harmonic and textural androgyny, Britten cuts away the safety cables of Shakespeare’s framing court scenes, plunging his young lovers straight into the fairy forest where anything is possible and nothing is as it seems. As a theatrical sleight of hand it’s almost impossible to match, but Peter Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Forty-one years since Jaws chomped its way into celluloid history comes a new addition to the shark film genre with The Shallows, in which Gossip Girl star Blake Lively plays a Texan surfer who goes mano a mano with a hungry fish. How much more does one really need to know? Not a whole lot beyond the inevitable truism that trouble starts brewing from the very moment our plucky heroine tells some new-found friends that she's "gonna be all right". At which point, cue the gradual isolation of the grieving Nancy, who has recently lost her mum, once an innocent swim in a remote corner of Read more ...
Barney Harsent
If you’re going to go toe-to-toe with Daredevil and Jessica Jones, the first two series in Netflix’s supremely realised and blood-spattered depiction of Marvel Comic’s Hell’s Kitchen, it’s as well to do it with conviction. By hosting Preacher, based on the comic book series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Amazon went in swinging – low and hard, fighting dirty from the off.WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS!The series concluded on the streaming service this week, but even before it had aired there were concerns about whether it could ever do the comics justice. In fairness, the story of a man of the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It is sobering to think that the medieval and Renaissance paintings that fill our galleries represent just a fraction of the artistic output of that period. Panel paintings – not to mention exquisitely fragile wall paintings – have for the most part succumbed to the ravages of time, and those not destroyed by fire or flood, acts of war or vandalism, or abortive attempts at restoration have simply faded, darkened or discoloured.Safely tucked away in libraries, illuminated manuscripts have survived in far greater numbers and, as such, form the most substantial, if most easily overlooked, legacy Read more ...
aleks.sierz
If you like the feeling of leaving a show, surrounded by the gently glowing faces of happy fellow audience members, then this is one for you. It’s a musical evening full of joyful singing – mixing classics by Mendelssohn and Bartok with a best-of chunk of the back catalogue from the Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lynne – that transports you to a different world. Adapted by Billy Elliot author Lee Hall from the 1998 novel Sopranos by Alan Warner, it delights with its onstage music and raucous lust for life, and offers an exceptionally exhilarating explosion of swaggering joy and rampaging Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
So much has happened since the first of June when Versailles flounced on to our screens with its flowing locks and flashing cocks. The British people have voted to widen the Channel, the Conservatives have a new leader, Labour doesn’t have one and Christopher Biggins has been expelled from the Big Brother house. As Louis XIV might have said: plus ça change…The title song (Now and Forever by M83) became increasingly haunting as the weeks and wigs (often with heads still attached) rolled by. The series lost interest in sex as more and more bricks were laid, the palace took shape and glory shone Read more ...
David Kettle
The big yellow banners proclaiming "Welcome, world" are out. And judging by the seething, heaving crowds, a fair portion of the world has indeed descended on Edinburgh, where the annual August festivals season has now been up and running for just shy of a week.For the Edinburgh International Festival, the city’s big brother event – as opposed to its unruly and far fatter sibling the Fringe – it’s been a very strong start, with a universally adored Bellini Norma starring Cecilia Bartoli (pictured below) kicking things off, and audio-visual son et lumière extravaganza Deep Time illuminating Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There are memorable appearances from two great actors playing close to the top of their game in Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love, but they’re almost upstaged by something else. Nothing human – though their reunion and interaction in the film is being “directed” by an absent third party – but rather the environment in which they find themselves: the stark desert beauty and almost unbearable temperature of California’s Death Valley.The fact that they are played by Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu, who play characters named Isabelle and Gérard, themselves two actors of a certain vintage Read more ...