Reviews
Gavin Dixon
With Andris Nelsons now moved to pastures new, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is without a chief conductor, so for this performance in Saffron Walden (repeating a programme given in Birmingham) it worked with a guest at the podium, the young Israeli Lahav Shani. At only 27, he’s something of a prodigy, winner of the prestigious Bamberg competition and now making his debut appearances with the world’s great orchestras.Technically, Shani is an accomplished leader, with excellent baton technique and clear ideas about the sound he is looking for. He also has an excellent ear for detail Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You might think that the combination of a play about one of the funniest comics of the second half of the 20th century, written by his biographer and directed by a member of Monty Python would be a winning one. But sadly Robert Ross's Jeepers Creepers: Through the Eyes of Marty Feldman is anything but.For younger comedy fans, Feldman might be merely a footnote in history, but his CV was extraordinary. He was a writer, performer and director, his writing credits include Educating Archie, Round the Horne, At Last the 1948 Show and The Frost Report (where he co-wrote the "Class" Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Painting the Modern Garden explores the interstices between nature and ourselves as revealed in the cultivation of gardens, that most delightful and frustrating of occupations, and an almost obsessive subject for many artists. About 150 paintings from the 1860s to the 1920s, gathered together from private and public collections in North America and Europe are on view, amplified by letters, plans, documents, photographs and illustrated books on horticulture.The exhibition embraces not only artists’ responses to gardens from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, but obliquely the new Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
In recent performances of the First Symphony under Markus Stenz and the Seventh under Jaap van Zweden, the LPO have burnished their credentials as London’s best Beethoven orchestra. With the low-key oversight of Vladimir Jurowski, they took the Sixth to another level, perhaps the level at which the twentysomething tyro Berlioz heard the symphony and said, "I must write that for myself". And with the Symphonie fantastique, he did.So much was unremarkably right. The speeds, just a notch under the composer’s metronome marks, proceeding at a gentle canter with the steadiest of pulses that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Of all the idiosyncratic artists coming through the door opened by punk, Adrian Sherwood remains one of the most singular. Reggae had been given a new platform and Sherwood, though he has never done anything remotely musically akin to punk rock, comfortably found a place alongside boundary-crossing post-punk individualists like The Pop Group and Public Image Ltd. The former’s Mark Stewart and the latter’s Jah Wobble went on to record with Sherwood’s On-U Sound label.Although Sherwood would deconstruct and then reassemble hip-hop with Tackhead and similarly explore various forms of electronic Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Toward the end of Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, a tough-as-nails Hollywood diva played by Jane Fonda informs Harvey Keitel’s creatively spent director that television has supplanted cinema as the home of screen drama. True or not, this has been the industry consensus for about five years, but Sorrentino demonstrates there’s life in cinema yet by orchestrating a flow of effortless-seeming sequences that combine widescreen grandeur with whimsicality.A one-time lothario has a disturbing dream about an erotic nocturnal encounter with a voluptuous modern Venus on a causeway crossing the glittering Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Communities function in different ways depending on their constituencies, to note just one of the many salient points made by the deeply compelling and equally disturbing Spotlight. The Catholic church in Boston for years closed ranks and shut its eyes so as to enable the systemic culture of child abuse that a cadre of Boston Globe journalists in time uncovered, winning a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for their work: one societal sector pitted against the other only for the scribes' sleuthing to emerge triumphant alongside a legacy of damage that time will never fully put right. The Globe's Read more ...
graham.rickson
Debussy: Starry Night – Préludes Book 1 and Other Works Michael Lewin (piano) (Sono Luminus)Michael Lewin's earlier Debussy anthology was excellent, and this second volume also hits the spot. In the first set of Préludes, Lewin gets just about everything right, each piece flawlessly characterised. Take “Des pas sur la neige”, its halting footsteps just desolate enough, followed by a truly furious “Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest”. “La fille aux cheveux de lin” is coolly understated, and all the more beautiful for it. “La danse de Puck” and “Minstrels” glitter. Colin Matthews' clever orchestral Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Caryl Churchill is a phenomenon. Now 77 years old, she remains not only prolific but also immensely inventive, having notched up more than 35 original plays, many of which have been innovative in form and imaginative in content. Added to this, she has penned dramas for radio and television, as well as adaptations of the classics. She also retains the power to annoy: the National Theatre staging of her Here We Go last autumn provoked walkouts and howls of critical derision. So what’s her latest like?In common with some of her other most intensely vivid plays – I’m thinking of Far Away, Drunk Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The French composer Henri Dutilleux would have been 100 last Friday if he had lived that long, which in fact he very nearly did; he was 97 when he died in 2013. Five years before that he had been awarded an honorary doctorate at Cardiff University, amid pomp and ceremony and performances of several of his works. So it made sense that Cardiff, including the university, should have been at the forefront of his centenary celebrations this past week, including a pair of concerts by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and a symposium on Dutilleux put on by the university’s enterprising School of Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
If you thought circus acrobats and Shostakovich were a daring combination, try circus acrobats and Monteverdi. While the spiky harmonies and vivd dynamics of 20th-century Russian string quartets sit pretty nicely with circus show-offery, surely Baroque music, with its steady continuo basses, its measured rise and fall, is a world away from tumbling tricks and strongman stunts?Virtuosic Australian troupe Circa certainly can't be accused of staleness in their pairing of circus arts and classical music. Their new show The Return, which opened last night at the Barbican Theatre, differs from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Seventh series (★★★★) of the superior legal drama (still perversely tucked away on the obscurantist More4), and Alicia Florrick is having to get back to legal basics. Having been blown up by a political landmine in series six, as she made an ill-fated attempt to become State's Attorney, she's now trying to start her own law firm from home and scuffling for work.Thus she found herself on the cab-rank of hard-bitten bar attorneys down at the bond court, waiting to be lobbed a sheaf of the day's drink-and-drugs cases by the abrasive Judge Schakowsky (Christopher McDonald). Some comic value was Read more ...