Reviews
David Nice
It was a massive but never overbearing three-parter, a three-and-a-half hour celebration, a mini-festival of youth and experience. Wouldn’t we all want to mark a major birthday in the company of friends of all ages? Elisabeth Leonskaja, much-loved torchbearer for the comprehensive manner of mentor and duo-partner Sviatoslav Richter, played with them all – members of the Doric Quartet, genius composer and most vivacious of clarinettists Jörg Widmann, Vienna Phil double-bass doyen Alois Posch and, most bracingly of all, three of her own acolytes making their very distinguished ways in the world Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Arena is the longest-running arts documentary programme for television at the BBC, and perhaps the world: as the BBC itself phrases it, this compendium celebration presented 24 hours in 90 minutes for 40 years, marking the show's latest anniversary. Conceived by the ever-creative and energetic Humphrey Burton all that while ago, Arena has made over 600 films, looking at high and low culture with equal curiosity, alacrity and even audacity.This visual anthology was a slightly queasy trip down memory lane, dizzying and provoking as we heard TS Eliot himself reading The Waste Land to visuals Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Saga saga has come round for a third turn of the wheel. Much water has flowed under The Bridge since series two. Without wishing to provoke a visit from the spoiler Stasi, it is safe to reveal that Martin is no longer in the picture. He is currently enjoying Her Danish Majesty’s hospitality, and over the water in Malmö Saga is partnerless. Indeed in the Copenhagen police force, her reputation is no longer just as an oddball with no sense of humour, communication skills or empathy. She’s the one who ratted on her closest colleague.So series three is all about palling Saga Norén (Sofia Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries are currently filled with a hauntingly beautiful sound installation by Susan Philipsz (main picture). The Scottish artist won the Turner Prize in 2010 for a sound piece that didn’t really work at the Tate. Intended to be heard under the bridges spanning the River Clyde in Glasgow, the recording of Philipsz's fragile voice singing sad folk songs was largely drowned out by ambient noise.This time, though, she has been able to design the installation especially for this awesome space, which stands empty for the occasion. A central line of speakers hanging from the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1973, alone and with an acoustic guitar, Marc Bolan recorded the revealing “This Is My Life”. Over its five minutes, a strummed elegy akin to the T Rex B-side “Baby Strange” evolves from a finger-picked blues. The lyrics name-check B.B. King, Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B Goode” and mention a visit to New York State, playfully rhymed with steak. “Everything I did when I was going to school was just an imitation of Carl Perkins singing ‘Don’t be Cruel’,” he sings, no doubt well aware the Elvis Presley hit did not figure in Perkins’ usual repertoire. Once Presley hit big, Perkins was firmly Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
It does not seem like 12 years since the organ in the Usher Hall was restored to full working order. That may be because, in the minds of many Edinburghers, the recent years of untroubled service are still eclipsed by the many decades in which Norman and Beard’s monumental instrument sat silent, reproaching the City Fathers for their parsimony. Another reason, of course, is that in common with most concert hall organs, it is only infrequently called upon by the standard orchestral repertoire to provide that magical extra ingredient in the ensemble.Which made this concert by the Royal Scottish Read more ...
Tim Cumming
How, exactly, are you supposed to review a Keith Jarrett concert – solo, completely improvised, just one man and his Steinway, audience on all sides, ushers walking up and down the aisles bearing signs forbidding any record of the evening's music?“Someone asked me, ‘How do you know what to play?’” he said to us between one of the half dozen improvisations of the first half of his first-ever concert for the EFG London Jazz Festival. Long pause. Good question. He looked down at his instrument. “This is a really good piano.” In the second half, he had more: “Here's how I do this.” Long pause. “ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Janáček: Sinfonietta, Dvořak: Symphony No.9 Anima Eterna Brugge/Jos van Immerseel (Alpha Classics)Jos van Immerseel's last period-instrument excursion took in Orff's Carmina Burana, so this latest release is a chronological back step. Though Janáček's insane Sinfonietta, written in 1926, still sounds uncannily modern, a work full of abrupt jumps, unpredictable harmonies and loopy rhythms. The best performances make no attempt to smooth over the rough joins, and Anima Eterna Brugge's playing is suitably ripe. The fanfares which open the work are bright and pungent, the period brass Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Howard Blake fans, look away now. Am Himmel wandere Ich isn’t a back translation of the hit song from The Snowman. Though the Marxist-Adornist supporters of the party line at Darmstadt’s summer course of 1971 could hardly have thought less of Stockhausen’s song cycle when they heard it and then circulated a dismissive pamphlet. ‘Saint Stockhausen’, they called him.The culture wars have moved on and found other targets. With the benefit of hindsight it seems obvious that Stockhausen was true to the rallying call he made at the time: “In every work there must be something that makes it utterly Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In the world of dramatic rediscoveries, half a century may not count as a long time. Slightly more, in fact, with Robert Bolt’s first performed play Flowering Cherry, which premiered in 1957 with Ralph Richardson and Celia Johnson in the leads as the eponymous husband and wife, Jim and Isobel Cherry. That production ran for 450-odd performances, allowing Bolt to give up teaching for the writing career that would see his best-known work, A Man For All Seasons, appear in 1960, as well as his momentous screen collaborations with David Lean over the decade that followed.The reviews were full of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
An evening of Rameau was never going to be a neutral event. Last Friday all things French became painfully, irretrievably politicised, and while there were no speeches or acknowledgements last night, when Christian Curnyn dispatched the opera’s final ensemble not in fanfares and crescendos but the slyest of diminuendos, it was the perfect response –a Gallic shrug of a gesture, defiant in its charm and wit.Castor and Pollux shouldn’t work in concert – especially not, as in St John’s Smith Square, without surtitles. Rameau’s music describes and emotes, but never really dramatises, relying on Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
With real live birds fluttering across the stage, and a sweetly happy ending – hurrah for young love! – Frederick Ashton's 1961 The Two Pigeons can look like mere frothy fantasy, precisely the kind of trivial, uncomplicated ballet plot that the young Kenneth MacMillan was reacting against in his own work in the early 60s. Is its return to the repertoire after an absence of 30 years just the Royal Ballet pandering to the escapist fantasies of its audiences – who, director Kevin O'Hare reveals, have been clamouring for this revival?O'Hare's announcement before curtain- Read more ...