Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.” So promise Dryden and Purcell in their hypnotic song, a high-stakes closer for Andreas Scholl and Tamar Halperin’s "Exquisite Love" recital. But beguiling away cares on the eve of a national return to work is a big ask, even in the other-worldly surroundings of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and something that, on this occasion, the countertenor himself couldn’t quite deliver.Scholl’s has never been the biggest of voices – it simply hasn’t needed to be. Where others use vibrato and volume to project, Scholl has always relied on the bladed Read more ...
graham.rickson
The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain’s standard of playing is consistently impressive, so much so that it’s easy to forget that the ensemble is effectively reconstituted from scratch each autumn. Last night’s fresh incarnation, deftly conducted by Nicholas Collon, sounded as if they’d been playing together for decades, though without any sense of complacency which that might bring. When you’ve 163 teenagers squeezed onto a stage, the worry is that the details will get lost in a blurry soup of sound. But no; this account of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony was immaculate.Collon’s flowing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
January 1966 is a half a century back but some of the music released 50 years ago this month remains fresh, vital and timeless. With its biting invective and energy, Bob Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl out of Your Window” will never lose its visceral edge. Dusty Springfield’s joyful, kinetic “Little by Little” is eternally alive. Author Jon Savage goes further and pinpoints the whole of 1966 as “the year that shaped the rest of the century”. His proposition uses the year’s pop music as evidence for 1966 as a year like no other: one which was pivotal and irrevocably changed the world.Savage Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since Benedict Cumberbatch is now one of the world's most in-demand actors, and his sidekick Martin Freeman isn't doing too badly either, getting them on a set together is like trying to get Simon & Garfunkel to do a reunion. Hence Sherlock fans now have just this one-off New Year special to slake their Cumberlust.To compensate, writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat (pictured below) had laboured feverishly to cram as much as possible into this swirling 90-minute ride. The novelty du jour was to whisk the sleuthing chums back to the 1890s, into which they slotted so slickly that you Read more ...
graham.rickson
Roger Doyle: Time Machine (Heresy Records)Roger Doyle’s Time Machine is a suite of 11 linked pieces, its starting point being the composer’s archiving of telephone messages recorded while living in late 1980s Dublin. Younger readers won’t know what an answering machine is, let alone understand the joys of living in a world without smartphones. One where calls could only be made or received if you were actually at home, and people turned up punctually to meetings. Happy days indeed. Doyle half-thought that his cassettes might eventually come in useful, and began to assemble the work from 2010 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Look what they make you give," as Clive Owen's dying assassin puts it in The Bourne Identity, and the way that success is as much a matter of taking the blows and dragging yourself to your feet again as it is about inspiration or even perspiration is part of the message of Joy. It's based on the real-life story of Joy Mangano, inventor of the self-wringing Miracle Mop, and not the least of the film's accomplishments is the way it manages to turn the QVC shopping channel into a cockpit of high drama.Whether the real Ms Mangano is able to radiate the same aura of self-belief, tolerance, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Tweaked and polished to within an inch of its life, The Danish Girl is the latest shamelessly awards-seeking effort from British director Tom Hooper, whose last two period films The King’s Speech and Les Misérables were certainly showstopping pieces of cinema. Yet, despite the latter’s ostensible grit, both specialised in human anguish prettily presented for your viewing pleasure; Hooper’s unapologetically indulgent, highly embellished approach isn’t to everyone’s taste but you’ve got to admire his bravado.The Danish Girl is based on David Ebershoff’s fictionalised account of the life story Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It was business as usual in the British dance world in 2015. Looking back over the year, theartsdesk's dance critics see the industry's many talented, capable people continuing to do their jobs well, but we don't recall being shaken, stirred or surprised as often as in other years, or at least not by new works: our top moments of the year are concentrated in the farewells of great dancers Sylvie Guillem and Carlos Acosta, and in classic productions of classic ballets.What follows is our personal map of 2015's dance uplands. As usual with such lists, it doesn't tell the whole story. For Read more ...
theartsdesk
It's hard to disagree with Matthew Wright, in his brisk analysis of the shortcomings of British crime drama (see below). He notes how flashes of inspiration are smothered by skimpy budgets and the timidity of commissioning editors. The disastrous anti-climax of London Spy was a classic example. A British Sopranos seems further away than ever.But all is not lost, and as our picks of the year show, there has still been plenty of great stuff to watch, from the finely-woven historical drama of Wolf Hall to the dark and daring Jessica Jones or the comic touch of Mackenzie Crook and Peter Kay. Read more ...
David Nice
How ironic that English National Opera turned out possibly the two best productions of the year after the Arts Council had done its grant-cutting worst, punishing the company simply, it seemed, for not being the irrationally preferred Royal Opera. And while 2015 has been as good as it gets artistically speaking for ENO, 2016 may well see confirmation of the first steps towards its dismantling by a short-sighted management – for what is a great opera house without a big chorus or a full roster of productions, both elements under threat?Meanwhile, let’s celebrate the positive. Both the outgoing Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Say what you will about London theatre during 2015, and by my reckoning it was a pretty fine year, there certainly was a lot of it. I can't recall a year that brought with it a comparable volume of openings, not least during September and December, this year's pre-Christmas slate of major press nights roughly double the same time period in 2014. And as proof that people were actually attending the stuff on offer, empirical evidence as ever was the best guide. One late-November Saturday on my way to an evening show, I counted six House Full signs while weaving through the West End, and for a Read more ...
David Nice
None, or two? Only the tiniest whiff of spoiler is involved in pointing out that while the stage version, or at least the one I saw with an actor friend playing an early victim, settled for a semi-happy ending, this magnificently brooding adaptation in three parts – just the right length, surely – dooms us to ultimate discomfort, as an especially merciless Agatha Christie intended. The bare essentials of what may well be her masterpiece, with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Endless Night close contenders, were all professionally bolted in place, and the embroideries in a faithful 1939 setting Read more ...