Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Although The Kinks’ world was turned upside down from the moment “You Really Got Me” hit the charts in August 1964, the band’s main songwriter Ray Davies still had songs to spare. Some of his compositions ended up with singers like Dave Berry, Leapy Lee and Mo & Steve. Ray’s brother Dave even found that one of his songs was recorded by Shel Naylor. This extra-mural world fascinates Kinks fans.Even more enticing are the recordings by other artists to which The Kinks actually contributed. Leapy Lee’s 1966 single “King of the Whole Wide World” featured Dave, Pete Quaife and maybe Mick Avory Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Once you’ve seen him, you can’t forget him. Taken in 1951, Paul Strand’s black and white portrait of a French teenager sears itself onto your retina. He stares unflinchingly back, and looking into his eyes, you feel almost scalded by his exceptional beauty and the piercing intensity of his gaze. With his chiselled features, Roman nose, curled lips and leonine shock of hair, he could be a classical Greek sculpture; and as though to affirm this association, his skin has the sheen of burnished bronze. The textures and patterns are all-important; his denim boiler suit and knitted woollen Read more ...
graham.rickson
Copland: Orchestral Works 1 BBC Philharmonic/John Wilson (Chandos)There are sensational things in the first volume of John Wilson’s projected Copland series, but his disc suffers from being released too soon after Andrew Litton’s thrilling Colorado Symphony anthology. Litton scores by allowing us to hear Billy the Kid and Rodeo in their uncut original versions, and his orchestra play with a muscular grace that’s matched by BIS’s widescreen sound. Wilson’s hard-working BBC Philharmonic are more than capable, but many of Copland’s brasher moments are too restrained. El Salón México is a case in Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night’s concert at the Barbican focused on the theme of dreams and night-time, centred around the UK premiere of Dream of the Song by George Benjamin. But the one piece on the programme that did not fit with the theme stole the show. Stravinsky’s American-period masterpiece Symphony in Three Movements supplied the energy and rhythmic impetus lacking elsewhere.George Benjamin’s Dream of the Song combined arrestingly beautiful poems translated from medieval Spanish with fragments of Lorca, scored for solo countertenor (Iestyn Davies) accompanied by a small orchestra and women’s chorus (the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The fourth production in Branagh’s Garrick season is the revival of an odd-couple romp he brought to the Lyric, Belfast in 2011. Sean Foley (best known for his superlative Branagh-directed Morecambe and Wise tribute The Play What I Wrote) adapts and directs this nostalgic English version of Francis Veber’s 1969 French farce, which wastes no opportunity for dropped-trousers, door-slamming, mistaken-identity slapstick.Branagh’s debonair hitman and Rob Brydon’s sad-sack Welsh photographer are in adjoining hotel rooms – the former commissioned to take out a witness testifying at the courthouse Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s unbelievable how hard it is to retell the greatest story ever told. And yet dramatists still feel the urge. The BBC had a big Easter binge a few years ago with the Ulster actor James Nesbitt playing a sort of Prodius Pilate. Now here’s a film financed by producers of a missionary bent. It’s called Risen and it’s essentially a sermon disguised as a sword-and-sandals epic.Still reading? Risen’s closest cinematic forebear is possibly Ben Hur in which a non-Christian is drawn into the benign orbit of an unkempt Nazarene pauper with healing powers. In this case the benighted pagan is Roman Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
I expect that there will be a sense of mild disappointment within the ranks of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra that its great Brahms season did not come to quite the conclusion intended. As readers will know from last week’s review of the Fourth Symphony, a herniated disc meant that Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati had to pull out of both that concert and also last night’s performance of the Deutsches Requiem (he has also withdrawn from Glyndebourne performances of Wagner's Die Meistersinger).Principal Guest Conductor Emmanuel Krivine agreed to stand in for both concerts but in the event he Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Grime is having an ongoing moment. The current profiles of Skepta, Wretch 32, Stormzy, Novelist and others make this very clear. There at the beginning, along with Wiley and Dizzee Rascal, was Kano, as his new album Made in the Manor reminds us, harking back with bittersweet nostalgia to the scene’s earliest days as if they were decades ago. Brighton’s tight-knit urban hip hip hop community loves him for it and they’re out in force at the Concorde 2 tonight, representing as loudly and energetically as possible. The bullish ardour with which they greet him is something to behold. Whoops, “ Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s another military centenary, and another conundrum for broadcasters – how to tell a sombre story in an engaging way. The 1916 Dublin Easter Rising is an iconic event, but if we’re honest, not one many viewers will know in detail. The televisual warhorses for this kind of reminiscence – black-and-white portrait photos, sombre brass bands, and many talking heads atop camphor-scented tweed – are respectful but just a little bit dull. But to spice it up by choosing a paunchy, cross-dressing comedian in a curly wig to present? Dangerously flippant, surely? Comedian Brendan O’Carroll is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) feels he’s “living in a future that had already taken place”. Director Ben Wheatley, too, has made a late-arriving Seventies exploitation pic from JG Ballard’s 1975 novel. High-Rise is a highly sexy and violent look through a distorting lens at both that familiar past, and the way we live now.Like many similar Ballard tales, its dystopia is cleanly simple, with architect Royal (Jeremy Irons) living in Bourbon splendour with wife Ann (Keeley Hawes) at the top of his new, self-sufficient tower-block. In lower floors, like a concrete Titanic, malfunctions Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s easier to say what Jane Horrocks’s new musical dance-drama isn’t that what it is. Horrocks makes a short speech at the beginning and the end about the mysteries of love, as depicted in her selection of Mancunian heartbreakers from Gang of Four, Joy Division, Buzzcocks and The Smiths, among others. But there’s no narrative, as such, or individual characters, and the songs are only connected with a series of semi-abstract dance routines usually performed at the front of the stage, and often involving Horrocks herself. It’s not a musical or a play, and while it is a kind of covers gig, it Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Infidelity, hypocrisy, disillusionment, betrayal – and yet this is by far the lightest of French playwright Florian Zeller’s current London hat trick. Premiering in 2011, and thus sandwiched chronologically between the bleak pair of The Mother (2010) and The Father (2012), it takes a comparatively sunny approach to the fracturing of trust and deconstruction of the moral ideal of truth.Michel (Alexander Hanson) is married to Laurence (Tanya Franks) and also sleeping with Alice (Frances O’Connor), wife of his best friend Paul (Robert Portal, pictured below with Hanson). Michel is a firm Read more ...