Reviews
Peter Quantrill
For some of us, Siegfried is a perfect opera. Like L.627 it stubbornly observes the Aristotelian rules of space and time to cut a generous slice of life. There are almost no set-pieces to break the flow of one-on-one conversations, accusations, confessions, arguments. These encounters are inevitably stifled by a concert staging, where singers address themselves to us, never to each other. Peter Mumford’s video projections set the scene with trees and glowing embers like a piece of slow TV on YouTube or BBC4.Wisdom also holds that Siegfried is the Scherzo of the Ring. Maybe not only for its Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Notes on Blindness is an extraordinary film that wears its original genius lightly. The debut full-length documentary from directors Peter Middleton and James Spinney, it may seem complicated in its assembly, but has a final impact that is luminously simple. And to speak of a film whose immediate subject is the loss of sight – and by extension, of the visual element that comprises cinema itself – in terms of luminousness is finally no paradox at all.It’s the story of John Hull, an Australian-born theologian whose acclaimed 1990 book Touching the Rock recorded his experience of going blind. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Scriabin and Stockhausen: Light Vanessa Benelli Mosell (Decca)Scriabin and Stockhausen are both associated with excess, so it's pleasing to report that Vanessa Benelli Mosell's second Decca disc goes over the top in some areas: there's a bonkers sleeve image and some bizarre photos in the booklet. Due credit is given to Mosell's fashion designer and to Luxury Living magazine, and you suspect that neither composer would have objected. Mosell's set of Scriabin's Op. 11 Preludes is very fine indeed, largely because she's so good at nailing the character of each one. The fireworks present no Read more ...
Alison Cole
The opening image of this new David Hockney exhibition – a sketchily painted portrait of a seated man, slumping heavily forward, his head buried in his hands – could be a portrait of Brexit despair. In fact it is Hockney’s portrait of his close friend and studio manager J-P Gonçalves de Lima – painted at a time when Hockney was himself at a particularly low ebb, depleted by illness, the tragic death of a young studio assistant, and the gargantuan effort that had gone into making his 2012 Yorkshire landscape exhibition at the Royal Academy such a blockbuster success.In this sense, this opening Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Why does Natalia Osipova, one of the world's best classical, dramatic ballerinas, want to start a sideline in contemporary dance in the middle of her career? Two years ago, when she mounted her first self-commissioned contemporary triple bill with her then newly-ex-fiancée Ivan Vasiliev, I was willing to believe that it was for the love of trying new things, pushing her own boundaries, and taking all aspects of her artform seriously.Though that show delivered two utterly forgettable pieces alongside the memorably black Facada by Arthur Pita, Osipova herself admitted that she had Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Recently the television historian Bettany Hughes, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, energetic, enthusiastic and rather astonished, has tramped across the continents on our behalf, making a clutch of hour-long documentary introductions to the individuals with the most profound influence on human society. For this third and final film (made in association with the Religion and Ethics department of the Open University), she had as her quarry the medical man whose insights, however intuitive rather than scientific in the modern sense, formed and still form our view of ourselves.Yes, it was he: Sigmund Read more ...
David Nice
Enter the human - and superhuman demands for at least four of the singers - in the second, towering instalment of Wagner's Ring cycle. It says so much for Opera North's achievement so far that no one fell in any way short of the sometimes insane vocal demands. There were only varying degrees of characterisation and commitment, none of them less than fine.Bad luck, perhaps, that the lower, though not exactly low, temperatures came in the first act as we meet the hero Wotan has fathered as free agent, or so he thinks, and the heroine sister whose incestuous love is a case, as the chief god puts Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Not every Glastonbury can be blazing summer. 2016 was hard work, with real world gloom permeating the already damp party bubble. But, as your teachers used to say, you only get out what you put in. The only way to take things was to go hard or go home, no quarter given and pay later.Thus, this report comes way after the rest. The contemporary media is focused on putting content online as fast as possible. A response after the event is commercial suicide, no longer an option. But how can you smear yourself in Glastonbury’s madness if you spend half your time in the Media Tent, a dead zone of Read more ...
Marianka Swain
For those in sore need of a theatrical pick-me-up, jazz square your way over to Bugsy Malone. Last year’s smash-hit opener of the redeveloped Lyric has been given a well-deserved encore, with Sean Holmes’s production once again nailing the beguiling blend of Alan Parker’s 1976 film: children performing musical mobster pastiche, smartly knowing in their deconstruction of adult absurdities, but sidestepping cloying precocity.There’s a ramshackle feel to this Bugsy – some garbled dialogue, accents meandering between broad New Yoik and distinct south London – that actually adds to its charm. No Read more ...
David Nice
They promised Wagner for everybody at the Southbank Centre, and so far they're delivering. Community events cluster around a livescreening of each Ring instalment in the Clore Ballroom. We privileged few in the Festival Hall wondered how newcomers might be reacting out there, but there was no interval in the two-and-three-quarter-hour Das Rheingold to go and test the waters. I'm hoping that Tolkein lovers enjoyed the mythological gimmicks of the tetralogy's "preliminary evening" opera even if it offers the driest speech-song and the least knock-out impact of the four in terms of human emotion Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Oh dear. I could have sworn I had a book about Irish playwright Brian Friel somewhere. But I can’t find it. Or maybe I never bought it. Maybe I just thought I might have bought it. Maybe it’s a false memory. Better ask my wife. Now at least I’m in the zone, that place called ambiguity that is, aptly enough, one of the characteristics of Friel’s 1979 play, Faith Healer, which is being revived with a starry cast at this boutique venue. With its themes of miracle cures, bitter exile and fallible memory, this tale is as resonant as ever. Suddenly it feels like the ideal post-Brexit play.Frank Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This new series by Ashley Pharoah is dramatically different from his previous efforts in Ashes to Ashes and Life on Mars, though he still likes travelling though time. His method here was to saw off chunks of Far From the Madding Crowd, stir in some shavings from Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and then, having donned protective clothing, to squirt in a distillation of The Exorcist. All that remained was to stand clear and watch the concoction explode.The story so far: it's 1894, and Nathan Appleby (Colin Morgan), a man at the cutting edge of the new-fangled science of psychology, has Read more ...