Reviews
Richard Bratby
By the end of Act One of The Yeomen of the Guard there's been a jailbreak, a clandestine marriage, a swapped identity and a cancelled beheading. The chorus sings, halberds are brandished, and a jester jests. Even by Gilbert and Sullivan standards, it’s one heck of a tangle. And then, in John Savournin’s touring production, the stage clears and, true to Gilbert’s directions, Elsie faints in Fairfax’s arms while silhouetted behind them, masked and motionless, stands the grim figure of the executioner. At which point you start to realise that the only way Gilbert’s going to be able to solve his Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Just when fans were beginning to think it would never appear, Act IV of Cardboard Computer’s arthouse point ‘n’ click adventure, Kentucky Route Zero has appeared like a lonely delivery truck on a misty highway. Have you played Kentucky Route Zero?You can check out our reviews of earlier episodes but here is a quick precis: Conway, an ageing delivery man is trying to make one last delivery for an antique company run by an exilover. He stumbles upon a cast of unusual characters and end up traversing the mysterious lost highway of the title. Surreal encounters and allegorical musing on death, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
"Jazz,” said Keith Jarrett once, “is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple." For an audience, it produces a never-to-be repeated event: yes, you were there, and you didn’t miss it. One of the pleasures of seeing a group at the peak of contemporary jazz like The Impossible Gentlemen is to witness that joyous, open-minded and defiant spirit. In six years of existence, and now presenting their third album, the trust between the members of the group has visibly deepened. There is also a sense they are evolving, that they can and will go still further.The rhythmic Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Aurora Orchestra’s gimmick at Prom 21 was the same as in the last two seasons: playing a major classical symphony from memory. This was touted as an “astonishing feat” by the concert’s on-stage presenter Tom Service but, although unusual, is it really that extraordinary? When I go to the opera I am not moved to congratulate the singers on performing without music. In fact, the lingering on what should be an incidental feature was in danger of obscuring a more interesting point: the excellence of the orchestra’s actual playing.In terms of difficulty, Mozart’s Symphony No 41 was less of a Read more ...
David Nice
Like Prokofiev in his full-length ballet a century later, Berlioz seems to have been inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to bring forth his most compendious score. John Eliot Gardiner, who knows and loves every bar of light and shade in this great Berlioz kaleidoscope, offered even more of it than usual at last night's Prom.As on his unsurpassable recording with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, where they appear as supplements, we also got the second Prologue for semichorus omitted from the final version, orchestrated by Oliver Knussen, and the extra bars of the Latin Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As the album featuring Simple Minds’ first Top Twenty single, “Promised You a Miracle”, 1982’s New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) was aptly titled. After the success of the next single “Glittering Prize”, it hit number three in the album charts. Five albums in and three years after their first single, Simple Minds were indeed touching gold.Whether their breakthrough into the mainstream was a miracle or not depends on how the band is seen. The album preceding New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) was actually issued as two separate records: Sons and Fascination and Sister Feelings Call. Each featured a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
"If you know anything about dance," I was told last night by an aged balletomane at the Royal Opera House, "you know that Russian ballet companies are the best." If this is true then the Bolshoi Ballet, biggest of the Russian companies, in Swan Lake, that most quintessential of ballets, must be awe-inspiring.In many ways, it is, and deliberately so. Yuri Grigorovich's production may be less bombastic than his Sleeping Beauty, but it's still heavy on grandeur and light on naturalism. Instead of a forest or pastoral setting for Act I, Grigorovich presents a dignified, ruthlessly scripted and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,” sang John Cale in the droning voice of Major Tom. Whether the spirit of David Bowie was indeed hovering over the Albert Hall for this impromptu memorial late-night Prom is not easily answered. The shape-shifting Bowie who stayed ahead of the game was honoured in a set lasting nearly two hours and covering 47 years of music-making from 1969 to 2016. But anyone hoping to catch a spacemobile back to 1973 was not to be humoured. Those who turned up with lighting-bolt faces should have been warned: this ain’t rock’n’roll, this is contemporary classical.The set was Read more ...
David Nice
Few 87-year-olds would have the stamina to conduct over 100 minutes of Mahler. Bernard Haitink, though, has always kept a steady, unruffled hand on the interpretative tiller, and if his way with the longest of all the symphonies, the Third, hasn't changed that much since his first recording made half a century ago with his Concertgebouw Orchestra, there's still reassurance in the sheer beauty of the music-making. Not the excitement, mania even, you might expect from younger conductors in the outlandish opening movement, but it's quite something to know at the start that the end, in the form Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), which has been re-released, is one of the most stately costume dramas films ever made. It is also a monument to tedium, a tale told so deliberately, ponderously, and humorlessly that it raises the question, as do Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut, of whether their maker was a genuine master or is a sacred cow. In his adaptation of William Thackeray’s 1844 The Luck of Barry Lyndon especially, Kubrick’s meticulously achieved “realism” (which avoids the squalour of the poor), lugubrious grandeur, Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Think of Holly Golightly, and it’s more than likely that the face you’re picturing is Audrey Hepburn’s. And, while this adaptation by Richard Greenberg of Breakfast at Tiffany's is much closer to Truman Capote’s novella, it doesn’t have an ounce of the appeal of Blake Edwards’ famous film. Directed by antiseptic efficiency in a Leicester Curve production by Nikolai Foster, it’s numbingly dull – a dreary, inert tale of brittle, dislikeable people, inhabiting a tastefully designed bubble that is rarely pricked by events from the outside world.The war gets an occasional mention, but no one Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What happened was this. I found my way, not without difficulty, to the Barry Memo Arts Centre, got my ticket, had a chat with the librettist, stopped to order an interval drink, then turned round to discover that the entire audience had disappeared, as if eliminated by a Star Wars de-atomiser, or whatever those things are called. Two or three of us ran outside, looked this way and that, and after a few panic-stricken minutes tracked down the audience, who had gone right round the building in a crocodile and re-entered it by a door on the far side.Yes, you’ve guessed it. It was a “promenade” Read more ...