Reviews
graham.rickson
Vincenzo Galilei: The Well-tempered Lute Žak Osmo (lute) (Hyperion)Bach's Well-tempered Clavier wasn't the first major musical work designed to demonstrate the advantages of an equitable, scientific approach to intonation. Vincenzo Galilei's Libro d'intavolature di liuto was published in 1584, a hefty collection of pieces composed for lute, some of which demonstrate the instrument's capability to transpose pieces to any pitch of the well-tempered scale. Galilei was a polymath who approached the study of music with scientific zeal, and his best-known son was the astronomer Galileo. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Two years after its brilliant second series, which put Keeley Hawes's DI Lindsay Denton through the wringer with harrowing intensity, Jed Mercurio's bent-coppers drama is back. This time it's Daniel Mays, as Sgt Danny Waldron, sitting in the crosshairs of Ted Hastings and his AC12 anti-corruption team.This was only episode one, but already it had you gasping for breath while you waited for your head to stop spinning. One thing we already know – this isn't going to be a whodunnit, because we saw Waldron's transgressions in full-scale, unambiguous close-up. The opening sequence followed Waldron Read more ...
Andrew Cartmel
Although this evening began with an introduction by film director Ben Wheatley (responsible for Clint Mansell’s latest soundtrack commission, High-Rise), Mansell’s most frequent collaborator has been Darren Aronofsky. Among the movies they’ve fashioned together is 2014’s Noah, the music from which provided tonight’s opening salvo.Giant, menacing chords lumbered across a sparse soundscape with a pulsing clash of cymbals from Eric Gardner on drums. Ululating, haunting electronic keyboards were played by Clint Mansell himself. The sound clotted into a dense, menacing texture with sustained Read more ...
Saskia Baron
These are sensitive times when it comes to playing anyone on screen with a mental health condition, particularly when it’s a comedy with Kristen Wiig. But Welcome to Me pulls it off, skittering nimbly along a tightrope between offensiveness, surreal humour and mawkishness.Wiig plays Alice Klieg, a failed veterinary assistant first diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her teens and now living on disability benefits, mandatory therapy and medication from her controlling therapist (Tim Robbins, pictured below right). He considers her to have borderline personality disorder (BPD) and certainly she’ Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Sequel-itis has spread to the stage. There’s no caped crusader, but the troubled quartet of Neil LaBute’s latest will be familiar to anyone who caught Reasons to be Pretty at the Almeida in 2011 – as will Soutra Gilmour’s industrial crate set. We even begin the same way: in the middle of a foul-mouthed shouting match between relentlessly combative Steph and sometime-paramour Greg. But nostalgia value aside, this melancholic reprise is generally a case of diminishing returns.Three years have passed, and Steph (Lauren O’Neil) and Greg (Tom Burke) are now exes. The source of her fury is the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Amazing, isn't it, how the good ol' comic book is inexorably swallowing the planet. With the Marvel empire running rampant through all media, DC Comics are racing to catch up with their DC Extended Universe. It debuted with Zack Snyder's Man of Steel in 2013, and continues here as Snyder returns to helm this bloated yarn of superheroes at loggerheads.However, devotees of this same Snyder will perhaps find that it's his earlier film, 2009's Watchmen, that springs to mind here, with its story of a group of jaded, retired superheroes trapped in a satirical Cold War dystopia. In this new movie, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is set in “a world midway between Elizabethan pageant and haute-couture catwalk”, a programme note for Scena Mundi's production says, and the initial signs certainly point to that. The aisle of the glorious Grade I-listed French Protestant Church in Soho Square – one of the few remnants of England's rich Huguenot history – is covered with a vivid blue plastic sheet running most of its length, as if in a fashion show runway, and the cast, some dressed to the nines, make their entrance in a sort of dumbshow with heightened dance steps and arm movements.But thankfully, that's the last we Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Recently, I’ve been meeting some pretty hyper people in the theatre. Fictional people. On stage. Lots of hyper women; lots of hyper agonised women. And men. Hypercative kids; hyped-up teens; hyper-Alpha adults. A lot of these encounters have been monologues; a few have been two-handers. Several have had a public health agenda.And the latest is another monologue, previously seen in Edinburgh last year, by Jim Cartwright, who, after writing the classic Road in 1986 and the equally brilliant The Rise and Fall of Little Voice with Jane Horrocks and Alison Steadman in 1992, has been a bit absent Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Vinyl now accounts for almost 6% of the money made from music distribution, more than is accrued through free ad-backed streaming services. In the US last year vinyl sales rose to $416 million. Clearly these sort of figures are no threat to the likes of Spotify but then, there is no need for them to be. The fact is that vinyl is re-established as a boutique format and, culturally, its desirability is reaching a peak. Dismiss this as trendiness at your peril. Whatever buyers’ motivations for buying vinyl and digging their record players out of the attic, it benefits all vinyl lovers, from Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Recovery depends on honesty, but Emma – not her real name – lies for a living. Duncan Macmillan’s searing play, getting a well-deserved West End transfer from the National, complicates the familiar story of addiction and rehab by making its protagonist an actress. The dissociation, self-delusion and pathological deceit that frequently accompany the disease are reframed by this sometimes dizzying metatheatricality, which, in Jeremy Herrin’s vivid Headlong staging, plunges us into the abyss.Rightly, much of the coverage of People, Places & Things has centred on Denise Gough’s revelatory Read more ...
David Nice
Art can inspire music, and vice versa. When concert (as opposed to theatre or film) scores are accompanied by images, however, the effect dilutes the impact of both; above all, the imagination stops working on the visual dimension created in the mind's eye. That had to be the case last night, though given Olivier Messiaen's tendency to outstay his welcome by at least three movements in his orchestral epics, Deborah O'Grady's nature photography carried on with its capacity to surprise and stun long after the music, in this second event of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Barbican mini-residency Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“It's a really bad word,” Jena Friedman says as she opens her show, American C*nt. “...American.” And so begins an evening of ultra-dry, drawled-out and darkly feminist wit that encompasses everything from recent atrocities in Belgium and Donald Trump to abortion and Hamas.Friedman, as befits someone who has written for, among others, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and David Letterman, can write a sparkling line, and is not short of opinions or the self-possession to deliver them unapologetically. The show's segment on abortion – “the abortion portion” – takes no prisoners. She suggests Read more ...