Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
While Friday night’s triptych of solo Bach began and ended in a sombre, contemplative place, the arc created for the second sequence by pairing the final sonata for solo violin with the second and third partitas is altogether more dramatic. In Ibragimova’s ordering we opened with the monolithic D minor Partita, warming through the C major Sonata before ending joyfully with the E major Partita.As a complete cycle of six works it makes sense, treating the D minor, with its weighty Chaconne, as the central point of climax. In terms of performance, however, it left Ibragimova faced with the task Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Axed by the BBC at the end of 2013 after its second series, ostensibly because of poor viewing figures, Ripper Street found a new home on Amazon Prime, where the third series began streaming in November last year. With a fourth and fifth series already commissioned by Amazon, the BBC is making up for lost time by airing Series Three. Perhaps the Top Gear bunch will be back on the Beeb yet.Happily, the change of address has done Ripper Street no harm at all, and this powerful opener centred on a train robbery gone wrong in London's East End. Masked hijackers set out to steal a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
I can’t be alone in often leaving a Proms violin concerto convinced that the Bach encore was the best bit. The Royal Albert Hall is a chameleon space, capable of dwarfing the largest orchestra and muting the weightiest of Wagnerian singers, but also of amplifying solo performances, lending them a clarity, an intimacy, unique to this unlikely venue. It’s a well-documented phenomenon, which makes it all the more surprising that so many of Bach’s solo works for violin are receiving their complete Proms premiere this weekend.2015 is the year of solo Bach at the Proms. Schiff’s Goldberg Variations Read more ...
David Nice
This is the real Greek, bloody-fantastical thing. After the fascinating but flawed attempt to bring Aeschylus’s Oresteia into the 21st century, the Almeida has turned to a more tradition-conscious kind of experiment with Euripides’ last and greatest masterpiece. James Macdonald’s production daringly fuses operatic settings of the essential Bacchic choruses by Orlando Gough, stunningly executed by 10 women, a mostly faithful translation rather than a “new version” by Anne Carson blending irony with pure poetry, and a central performance by Ben Whishaw surpassing expectations as an ideally Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stepping in for Brad Bird, who helmed 2011's Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, director Chris McQuarrie has brought a high-speed sheen and effortless technical assurance to this fifth outing for the franchise. In so doing, he at least partially erases memories of his previous directing job with its star Tom Cruise, 2012's misfiring Jack Reacher. Perhaps it's a shade lighter on the mind-warping trickery-within-chicanery effects seen in previous Missions, but on the other hand the interplay between the characters achieves a lightness of touch rare in your average blockbuster, and the script Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Roger Wright may be gone from the BBC Proms, replaced for now by a committee, but his legacy lives on. His zeal to recover areas of English musical culture that may be considered the festival’s birthright resulted last night in a first Proms performance of Sancta Civitas, which Vaughan Williams late in life accounted the favourite of his choral works.Not so much unperformable as unprogrammable, Sancta Civitas (1923-5) requires forces hardly shy of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, yet lasts barely half an hour – or a little longer than that in this solemnly monumental if well-prepared performance, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Satire may famously be what on Broadway closes Saturday night, but last night's concert performance of the Gershwin brothers' Of Thee I Sing found many patrons fleeing the Festival Hall at the interval. The culprit lay in sound issues that took the aural equivalent of a pneumatic drill to a featherweight piece that needs tender treatment if it is to flourish as the original did against the odds. Rarely performed today (New York did a concert version of its own in 2006), this was in fact the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize.Last night's concert staging improved marginally Read more ...
Simon Munk
It begins so gently. Initially, Prune is a slow-paced and simple puzzle game – you stroke the screen to start growing a tree, then encourage it to bloom by pruning away errant branches with finger-swipes. It's simple, but beautiful and calming. That doesn't last, though.Wordlessly, the game gradually ups the tension. The trees you're growing are so delicate, so beautiful. And the world you're growing them in is so inhospitable. The only puzzle is how to encourage your tree upwards towards the light, where it can flower sufficiently to pass the level.As the levels pass by, however, soon you're Read more ...
Matthew Wright
After years of pussyfooting around pop, hoping the Pet Shop Boys will write something in a passable classical idiom, the Proms has embraced the most euphoric popular genre of all - dance - to its bosom. Pete Tong, long-standing Radio 1 presenter and DJ, is probably the high priest of this music, and under his guidance last night, Radio 1 and the Heritage Orchestra, conducted by Jules Buckley, brought a near-capacity Proms crowd to a booming climax in way that's quite possibly never happened before.It never seemed likely the sedately seated rows would stay put once the dance beats were Read more ...
Florence Hallett
When a photographer is as little known as Shirley Baker, it is probably only natural that we scour her work for clues to the personality behind the camera. Certainly, Baker’s photographs of inner city Salford and Manchester, taken over a period of 20 years, seem to offer as full and intriguing a picture of Baker herself as of the disappearing communities she was committed to recording. Her knack of making eye contact with the people she photographs makes her an active, if invisible participant in the narrative; an ice cream man catches her eye at precisely the moment he hands a woman her ice Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Gergiev’s programme for this concert raised eyebrows when the Proms were announced: all five Prokofiev piano concertos, presented in chronological order, over the course of a long evening. As it turned out, he had some good reasons for his plan. The three Russian pianists he lined up – Daniil Trifonov (Concertos 1 and 3), Sergei Babayan (2 and 5), and Alexei Volodin (4) – had between them the talent to carry any programme. And the composer benefited too, with his Fourth and Fifth Concertos, both difficult works to programme, finding a natural home, and both appearing for the first time at the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Now was the summer of our disco tent. The disco tent in question backstage was not jumping as much as in previous years – somehow strutting your Travolta moves in wellies doesn’t quite cut it. A glam tribute band at Molly’s Bar on Thursday night, knocking out Bolan and Bowie numbers dressed in cheap sci-fi tat were hugely entertaining though.Friday was a washout, with nonstop rain, but there were gems – like Tinariwen (pictured, below) whose music is more roll than rock, something to do with how the camels move in the Sahara. Though their main man Ibrahim seems to have been replaced by Read more ...