Reviews
David Nice
From Sakari Oramo’s riveting Nielsen symphonies at the Barbican to Thomas Dausgaard kicking off the Proms’ Sibelius cycle, the two Nordic immortals are well served in their 150th birthday year. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, whose reins Dausgaard takes over from the great Donald Runnicles in 2016, may not have the sheer heft of the Berlin Philharmonic strings we heard earlier this year in Rattle’s Sibelius. But the Glasgow-based players get much deeper under the skin, and prove so much lighter on their feet when the Danish conductor takes flight. Sibelius’s hard-to-handle treasury of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Ian Levine’s Stax Soul SensationsTaking 41 years to follow up a successful compilation is perhaps not sound in commercial terms. No matter. Ian Levine’s Stax Soul Sensations is not about marketability, but instead about celebrating the music heard. This new collection of tracks drawn from the Memphis operation and its related imprints comes not-so-hot on the heels of 1974’s Solid Soul Sensations, another Levine-compiled set, which was dedicated to the associated Scepter and Wand labels.Beyond his fascination with Doctor Who, Levine has dedicated his life to soul music. Read more ...
David Nice
You don’t know Homer’s Iliad until you’ve heard it read aloud, all 24 books – not quite every line, but almost – and 16 hours of it. Yesterday's marathon was surely something like the events in which the Athenians kept the oral tradition going during their great Dionysiac festivals - in most things, at least, except the original feats of memory.For “you don’t” above, read “I didn’t”, since despite having studied several of the later books for ancient Greek A-level, then the first 12 over one university year, it wasn’t until Simon Russell Beale started invoking the muse in the Read more ...
David Kettle
On paper it looked like it would be very much a concert of two halves. James MacMillan’s energetic, glittering Second Percussion Concerto was unveiled last year and received its first UK performance in London last December, and it was getting its premiere in the composer’s homeland at this Edinburgh International Festival concert from its dedicatee, percussionist Colin Currie, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. And in the second half, something entirely different: Sibelius’s rarely performed, hugely expansive choral symphony Kullervo.What brought the two contrasting works together – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The TV series on which Guy Ritchie has based his new spy-buddies movie first appeared on the small screen (in black and white) in 1964, when Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin welcomed us into their secret lair in New York and introduced themselves as "enforcement agents" for U.N.C.L.E., apparently a sort of UN/CIA hybrid. The grandfatherly Mr Alexander Waverly, resembling a retired bank manager in venerable tweed, announced himself as their boss.The TV show was facetious, frivolous, and crammed with seductive women and outlandish villains. Saving the world was never more than a smooth Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
St Petersburg Ballet Theatre is a phenomenon of the new Russia: not anchored in centuries of history or state patronage like its neighbours the Mariinsky and the Mikhailovsky, but founded as a commercial venture in 1994 by Konstantin Tachkin, a wannabe impresario with no balletic training. It tours widely, and evidently has no difficulty selling out foreign theatres – including the Coliseum for Swan Lake last night – with a combination of recognisable productions and "Russian ballet" cachet.The centre of the company's hard sell is their prima ballerina, Irina Kolesnikova, who on this London Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Pairing Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony with John Foulds’ Three Mantras was a smart piece of programming: established modern classic and obscure novelty sharing an inspiration from Indian music and philosophy, and both perfectly designed for showing off a very fine orchestra to its best advantage.Before this concert I knew little of John Foulds (1880-1939) other than as a composer of light music in a blandly appealing style. The Three Mantras proved him to be a far more interesting and arresting composer. Originally preludes to the acts of a Sanskrit opera Avatara, which the composer later Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The appeal for commissioners of turning Rob Temple’s superb Very British Problems Twitter feed into a TV show is easy to see. The account has more than a million followers and the planning discussions will, no doubt, have included the words, “brand”, “awareness” and “maximise”. Probably “leverage” as well, but used wrongly, and by an idiot. Presented here as an extended collection of talking heads, it’s also cheap. Julie Walters will have cost a few quid for the voiceover – as will the contributors – but even when you add on the cost of the crew and the petrol to get to each of the houses for Read more ...
Matt Wolf
People talk at and not to one another in Mistress America, the latest collaboration between director Noah Baumbach and actress Greta Gerwig and the first to make me wonder whether the unarguably gifted real-life couple might benefit from an outside eye to let them know when enough is enough.A tribute to the life force here embodied by Gerwig as a go-getter New Yorker who may be less confident than she lets on, this short film (less than 90 minutes) starts out entertainingly enough but soon wears out its welcome on the way to an ending suggesting Baumbach and co may love this Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The epic and the intimate combine impressively in Jordanian director Naji Abu Nowar’s debut feature Theeb. The epic is there is the scale of the stunning desert landscapes that are the backdrop – though the desert itself almost feels like a character here, and generic allusions to the Western abound – to his World War One story of complicated Bedouin loyalties played out on the edges of the Ottoman Empire. The intimate is found in the close bonds that dictate characters’ behaviour, and particularly in the very subtly textured role of the film’s eponymous main character.Abu Nowar has drawn out Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The pulling power of the BBC Proms was in action last night, as a virtually full Royal Albert Hall settled down at 6.30pm, and braced itself for 22 testing minutes of restless, angular, unforgiving 1960s Boulez.The audience had been lured in by the gentler fare that was to come in the second half, but Boulez's Figures - Doubles - Prismes, under the taut control of its pulse by François-Xavier Roth, definitely left its mark.This work, receiving its Proms premiere, and constituting the entire first half of the concert, had been the composer's measured and controlled response to Stockhausen's Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Bridget Christie, The Stand ★★★★Bridget Christie, the comic credited with bringing feminism to the fore with her 2013 Edinburgh Comedy Awards-winning show, broadens her target for withering political analysis and to great effect.In A Book For Her (also the title of her recently published book) Christie guys herself in her opening line, telling us that 11am is the perfect time for comedy about gender-based violence - "or at misogynists' funerals, widows love it" - and that she's not really a feminist, as that was done for marketing purposes to sell the book.There's a masterful take-down of Read more ...