Reviews
Thomas H. Green
Camp Bestival 2015 was bathed in four days of glorious sun, a rare window of idyllic weather in this most cantankerous of summers. It took place, as it has since it began in 2008, amid the hilly, verdant and well-kept grounds of Lulworth Castle in Dorset. Run by DJ Rob da Bank, his wife Josie and their team, it remains the country’s premier family festival, attended by some 30,000. Those are the facts, yet Camp Bestival is a curious creature, tricky to encapsulate. I went with my girlfriend and two daughters and, like most families there, much of our time was spent as if on a camping holiday Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
English choirs and early music ensembles have a bad reputation for stiffness, formality – nothing wrong with the music, just the presentation. But with this dramatic and Italianate Orfeo, John Eliot Gardiner, his English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, reminded us just what is possible when you combine English musicianship with a looser, more instinctive presentation.Gardiner and his forces have previous form; their 2012 Monteverdi Vespers at the Proms exploited every acoustic and spatial possibility of the Royal Albert Hall, and here once again their semi-staging inhabited the entire Read more ...
aleks.sierz
On contemporary stages, absence is a constant presence. This is very odd if you consider how corporeal and concrete theatre is. Unlike film, which is just light shining on a screen, or books, which are just letters on the page, theatre is live performance that is irreducibly there in the same space as you are, breathing the same air. Yet many playwrights – led of course by Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp – have explored the notion of absence on stage.In this revival of BAFTA award-winning writer Abi Morgan’s lightly feminist play, which was first seen at the Traverse in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Marshland is set on possibly the last section of the Andalusian coastline which doesn’t have high-rise condos planted all over it. Imagine the Kentish marshes of Great Expectations, but with a harsh sun cracking the parched earth, while overhead the sky throngs with geese and flamingos. It’s in this inhospitable corner of Spain that young women keep disappearing, apparently lured away to the big city, never to be heard from again.Two detectives team up to investigate the disappearance of a pair of sisters. Both policemen wear extravagant moustaches, for this is 1980, with Francoism a recent Read more ...
David Nice
You never quite know whether a new work by James MacMillan is going to veer towards the masterly or the overblown. His magnificent chain of concertos has arguably yielded masterpieces, but the Third Symphony at the Proms in 2003 sounded like an unwieldy impersonation of the monumental. Twelve years have passed, and he’s shied off writing a Fourth until he felt he had something to say. And while this most worthwhile of the BBC commissions may have its moments of excessive rhetoric – so, too, does the second movement of Mahler’s Fifth, also on the programme – it measures up to its ambition, as Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Don’t on any account be late for the first couple of minutes of the woolly mammoth that is Russian director Alexei German’s last film, Hard to Be a God, since the opening narrative voiceover gives a rare suggestion of explanatory background to a work that, put mildly, does not greatly trouble itself, over a lumbering length of just under three hours, with much in the way of plot explication.That opening snatch gives a gist of the wider context that German and his co-scriptwriter (and now widow) Svetlana Karmalita largely discarded from the eponymous 1964 novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A sterling case is made for the lost art of letter-writing in Michael Simkins’ dramatisation of Roger Mortimer’s missives to his wayward son. Mortimer’s inimitable turn of phrase, preserved in epistolary form, is the highlight of a genial show notable more for its casting of a real father and son than provision of gripping drama. It’s cosy as a pair of bedroom slippers, best enjoyed with a glass of Mortimer-approved sherry, but hasn’t entirely transitioned from one medium to another.The deliciously waspish letters of Mortimer Senior, “racing hack and long-suffering father”, were collated by Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A weekend of extremes at the Proms took us from stark solo Bach on Saturday to the massed forces of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, gathered under Donald Runnicles for Verdi’s Requiem. As a showcase for the kinds of repertoire the awkward Royal Albert Hall really does do well, it was pretty nigh perfect.It’s always good (and far too rare) to see Donald Runnicles in London. The chief conductor of the BBCSSO announced his arrival by immediately wrong-footing his audience. Refusing to fulfil the promise and expectation of his massed musical forces Read more ...
emma.simmonds
People who live in glass houses should be careful who they antagonise. That's the superficial starting point of The Gift, the directorial debut of actor Joel Edgerton, who takes the cuckoo-in-the-nest thriller template – which became ubiquitous in the early '90s with films like Pacific Heights, Unlawful Entry, Single White Female and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle – and, by introducing psychological depth and a streak of social conscience, fashions an intriguing morality tale.Jason Bateman (pictured below right) and Rebecca Hall play Simon and Robyn; prompted by his fancy new information Read more ...
David Nice
It only takes one outstanding musician with links to an out-of-the-way place to gather his or her top-notch friends and give a mini-festival of international quality. They’re springing up all over the UK: guiding lights that come to mind are violinist Anthony Marwood in Peasmarsh and tenor Toby Spence at Wardsbrook Farm. Now another leading British tenor, Ben Johnson, has set up a Young Artists' Programme and a band of the brightest and best young string players in the village of Southrepps, less than two miles from the beautiful North Norfolk coast. What I heard in two of the seven concerts Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
What would you expect of an ensemble performance played from memory? That the odd lapse, entirely understandable over the span of a 40-minute symphony, would be more than offset, perhaps, by gains in intimacy and flexibility as the players could look around and phrase together, respond to a conductor’s nudge and turn on a sixpence.In the event, the Aurora Orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony didn’t turn out like that. It was fast, loud, not quite together and not very well in tune. The tempi weren’t problematic in themselves, close to the composer’s metronome marks and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Cocteau Twins: The Pink Opaque, Tiny Dynamine/Echoes in a Shallow BayThe current fad for all things vinyl is of course, in general, a good thing. It has also meant that a column with CD in its header has, inevitably, broadened its scope. There might be careless major-label abominations like the Marvin Gaye box set reviewed in a recent Reissue CDs Weekly, but there are also gems like the enhanced-sound Mission of Burma albums covered last week.But what to make of new vinyl-only editions of releases where original copies sell for less than the reissue? A first-press of the US vinyl album Read more ...