Reviews
Sarah Kent
A neon sign over the Barbican’s Silk Street entrance reads Scandinavian Pain. Following its victory over us in Euro 16, it seems that Iceland is now drenching us with its special brand of melancholy. Things are not that simple, of course. In his work, Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson indulges his penchant for sorrow with such bitter sweetness that, with many a gentle sigh, emotional pain morphs into something more akin to pleasure.In any case, he is hard pressed to distinguish real emotion from its ersatz other, since he was born into an acting dynasty and, as a child, spent many hours Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It is interesting to note how, in the space of a few short decades, so-called “period instrument” performances of classical music have moved from edgy experimentation to the mainstream of the tradition. In last night’s Prom, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE), born in 1986, was paired with the choir of King’s College Cambridge, tracing its origins back to 1441, to largely happy effect.The programme was dominated by two very different mass settings: Haydn’s Mass in Time of War, marking a period of political uncertainty, and Fauré’s Requiem, offering gentle solace in the face of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Happy returns of various kinds last night at the Wigmore Hall, where hall regulars the Brook Street Band (violins Rachel Harris and Farran Scott, cellist Tatty Theo and harpsichordist Carolyn Gibley) took to the stage along with a number of musical friends for a 20th birthday celebration concert. An all-Handel programme paid tribute to the composer whose London address gives the group its name, expanding outwards from the opening intimacy of trio sonatas and suites to finish with soprano and baritone cantata Apollo e Dafne.The Trio Sonata from Saul offered an overture of sorts, previewing all Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Royal Opera’s Boris Godunov production made the short trip from Covent Garden to South Ken for the company’s appearance at the 2016 Proms. The opera (here in its original 1869 version) is a good choice for concert presentation: as Antonio Pappano writes in the programme, much of its music approaches oratorio. That is particularly true of the choral numbers, and the work is a tour de force for the Royal Opera Chorus. But every aspect of the music is this production is strong, so the gains balanced the losses, despite the minimal visual presentation.Little of Richard Jones’s visual Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
July last year saw the publication of Sick on You: The Disastrous Story of Britain’s Great Lost Punk Band, Andrew Matheson’s chronicle of his band The Hollywood Brats. The essential book was impossible to put down. It took in picaresque encounters with Sixties pop star and songwriter-turned impresario Chris Andrews, Andrew Loog Oldham, Keith Moon, Cliff Richard, a pre-Sex Pistols Malcolm McLaren and more.At the book's core was a band convinced of its greatness, yet painted so excessive and ham-fisted that they were bound to fail. The Hollywood Brats formed as The Queen in 1971 and fell apart Read more ...
Richard Bratby
It’s impossible to get the measure of the Cheltenham Music Festival in just one day. Lasting more than a fortnight, this is the festival that made the running in postwar British music: that helped put Malcolm Arnold and Robert Simpson on the map and defined a genre - the “Cheltenham Symphony”. Times change and financial pressures increase, but under the artistic directorship of Meurig Bowen, Cheltenham is still a powerful (if undervalued) force in contemporary classical music. Of the 120-odd composers in the 2016 Festival, at least one third are alive. The programme boasts 15 world premieres Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The first notes of the first night of the Proms weren’t the ones expected. Instead of either “God Save the Queen” or simply the start of the Tchaikovsky, the “Marseillaise” rang out into the Royal Albert Hall, the Tricouleur projected in coloured light across the organ. Everyone stood. A fervent tribute to the tragedy of Nice, it set the tone for a strange and startlingly appropriate season opening.In one of those supreme ironies, given that it was planned ages ago, the programme couldn’t have been better for the occasion. Even if the Tchaikovsky Fantasy-Overture “Romeo and Juliet” was Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Once confined to the concert hall, it’s a rare oratorio these days that doesn’t duck under the fence and sneak into the opera house. Bach’s Passions and most of Handel’s religious works have already made the transition, but this season it’s the turn of Haydn’s Creation. Rejecting the classic staged route, Garsington Opera have invited Mark Baldwin to choreograph it for his Rambert dancers. Add a trio of superb solo singers, Garsington’s own chorus and orchestra and artist Pablo Bronstein as designer, and you have an extraordinary hybrid conception.But any opera-goers expecting an oratorio Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Crime and detective drama often shows us who we think we are. Despite typically baroque plotting, and murder statistics in which the sleepiest of rural settings shades downtown Aleppo, there’s a sense that in how we respond to poisoning, stabbing and strangling, a quintessential national characteristic emerges. Be it Sarah Lund, Hercule Poirot, or any of Ray Winstone’s gravelly felons, television’s criminals and detectives hold a mirror to the soul. In the case of French crime show The Hunter, broadcast as part of All4’s festival of European TV drama, Walter Presents, it feels as if the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar orch. Donald Fraser: Piano Quintet, Sea Pictures English Symphony Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Rodolfus Choir/Kenneth Woods (Avie)Donald Fraser's orchestration of Elgar's expansive Piano Quintet was prompted by a 1918 entry in Lady Elgar's diary, describing a chance overhearing of her husband composing "wonderful new music... which should be in a War Symphony." It certainly feels symphonic, and Fraser's uninhibited transcription serves the work brilliantly, the more florid moments taking their cue from Elgar's own 1921 orchestration of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue. You'll be Read more ...
Florence Hallett
This programme was not ironic, humorous or in any way lighthearted. I’m fairly sure of that, but worry that perhaps I’ve missed the joke. A withering take-down or a meaty exposé of the corruption and excess of the extremely wealthy would have served a purpose, but this was neither. It pretended to offer a salacious glimpse behind closed doors but instead delivered a congratulatory slap on the back to the villains we love to hate – it seemed, in fact, to be a straightforward “Banker’s Guide to the Art Market”.Nevertheless, the realisation that the narrator was Stephen Mangan, the actor Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Set at the beginning of the 1970s, Catherine Corsini’s Summertime (La belle saison) is a story of love in a political climate, one in which the post-1968 assertions of a changing society have infused the public context in theory but do not ultimately translate into liberation for the film’s two lead women characters. The restrictions of tradition, especially in the rural world in which the greater part of Summertime is set, finally prove too strong for their relationship.Delphine (Izïa Higelin) has grown up on the land, the only child of smallholders in Limousin: it’s a beautiful, sparsely Read more ...