Reviews
mark.kidel
The voice is the pinnacle of instruments, the surefire road to the heart. But the core humanity which distinguishes it can work both ways: the vulnerability displayed so powerfully in human song makes possible the expression of powerful emotions but it can also pitilessly expose the flaws in an artist’s work.Chaka Khan is without question one of the great voices of R&B and disco: a belter who could also be soft and tender, a party animal who drove people onto the dance floor for several glorious decades. The audience at Ronnie Scott’s for the last in a series of sold-out performances were Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a clear territorial divide in the small space of the Jermyn Street Theatre at the opening of Ashley G Holloway’s new drama Lesere. At the centre of Ellan Parry’s persuasive design there’s a bright decked area in which the seemingly sunny lives of its characters play out – the setting is the peaceful French countryside, 1921. Around the stage edges, however, is a very different environment, a dark space of silent, agonising memories.Lesere moves between such light and dark, the latter coming to dominate the action. An English couple, Jane and John, have settled in rural France to put Read more ...
graham.rickson
Medtner: Piano Sonatas Alessandro Taverna (Somm)It's tempting to dismiss Nikolai Medtner without having heard a note of his music. Those who dismiss him as a less flamboyant Rachmaninov contemporary are making a huge mistake. Prokofiev enjoyed playing Medtner's piano sonatas, and Rachmaninov once described his friend as the greatest of living composers. Post-Revolution, Rachmaninov eventually settled in the US and spent his final days in glamorous Beverly Hills. Poor Medtner ended up in a semi-detached house in suburban Golders Green, dying there in 1951. Become a Medtner fan and you'll veer Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
What do we do when our heroes become incapable of doing what made them our heroes in the first place? Who are we to say when an artist is too old and broken to be on stage, if that’s where they want to be? Where is the line between thrilling avant-punk chaos and an unrehearsed shambles? When does an enthused audience willing a band to succeed, whatever the evidence to the contrary, slip into the realms of self-delusion? These were a few of the questions that ran through my mind as I watched the disheartening mess that was Suicide: A Punk Mass, part of Californian multi-disciplinary Read more ...
Barney Harsent
I’m in a car and I’m uncomfortably hot. The reason I’m in a car is I’m on my way to a gig on the first day in 14 years that industrial action has brought London Underground to a standstill. No skeleton service, no contingency, just closed doors and solidarity. This means it’s bumper-to-bumper and I’m running late. Very late. I’m on my way to Abbey Road Studios where Studio Two has been opened up for a special performance by pianist and composer Tom Hodge and electronic producer Max Cooper. A team-up with the soon-to-be launched Sonos Studio in Shoreditch, it’s an evening with the focus Read more ...
David Nice
Operatic hit parades have always been subject to fashion. For people of my parents’ generation, the famous number from Delibes’s Lakmé was the heroine’s coloratura Bell Song, immortalised at the movies by Lily Pons and Kathryn Grayson. Now it’s the Flower Duet, courtesy of British Airways. But there are other numbers equally worthy of attention in a glorious score stockpiled with the kind of thing the French call la mélodie eternelle. This is an opera that outside France has been in need of singers and a not too violent concept to do it justice.At Holland Park second time around – the company Read more ...
ellin.stein
The pop-genius-as-self-destructive-lost-soul biopic is this year’s genre du jour. We’ve already had documentaries on Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, while coming down the pike are dramatised bios of NWA, Hank Williams, Elton John, and, again, Cobain. Now Love & Mercy, a fictionalised life of Brian (Wilson), presents the Beach Boys’ resident composer of gorgeous pop classics like "God Only Knows" as a sort of Californian Amadeus, an otherworldly savant through whom sublime music pours while he tries to escape from the domination of a stern father. As with all such biopics of artists, it Read more ...
simon.broughton
2015 is the "Year of Mexico in the United Kingdom" which is why we’ ve got an exhibition on the Mayas in Liverpool, masked wrestlers Luche Libre at the Albert Hall and the country’ s leading symphony orchestra on a debut UK tour. The Mexico Philharmonic was founded at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in 1936 and is the oldest symphony orchestra in the country. It made waves with the excellent Mexican conductor Eduardo Mata in the Sixties and Seventies and the British-born Jan Latham-Koenig has been Music Director since 2011.The concert opened with a Buxtehude organ Chaconne Read more ...
Simon Munk
A throat-slitting, daredevil samurai in a motorbike helmet out for bloody vengeance against their enemies, flying through the air. Sounds like an action game, looks like an action game, plays like a puzzler.Ronin steals liberally from the side-scrolling brilliance of Gunpoint. Similarly to that game, the ninja/samurai/motorbiker hero here must break into semi-lit buildings – jumping through windows, stealing keys to get in through locked doors and always slashing through groups of enemy guards to get to the bosses the samurai is out to bring down.Like Gunpoint, the hero here can jump in Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Musicals are cheesy by nature, aren’t they? If not cheesy, then picturesque. The cast of Les Mis may be grimy and poor, but they’re picture-postcard poor. Even modern musicals play by the rules.But Aemonn O’Dwyer and Rob Gilbert break most of them in their new musical, The House of Mirrors & Hearts. Forget exotic settings: this type of family terrace house can be found by the thousand off the Kingsland Road. And forget happy families: this one’s falling apart. What’s more, the climax of the first act is a grisly accident involving a character we haven’t even met. And two of the key Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
When least expected, comedy has come stumbling into the work of French auteur Bruno Dumont. In his seven films to date, from the Cannes-winning Humanité of 1999 through to the stark Camille Claudel 1915 from two years ago, the director, frequently working with non-professional actors, has marked out a distinctive territory defined by its bleakness and emotional intensity.Which makes his latest, P’tit Quinquin, a departure indeed, both in mood and format. Though thematically the comedy is distinctly dark, its sense of the absurd is often laugh-out-loud funny, resulting in an ambiguous feeling Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Christopher Wheeldon is the purveyor of pretty. You can perfectly well see why San Francisco Ballet, who commissioned a new full-length work from Wheeldon in 2012, got cold feet at the prospect of tackling the difficult, Britten-scored Prince of the Pagodas, and steered Wheeldon instead towards Cinderella, with its ready-made audience of little girls in blue sparkly dresses and splendid Prokofiev score. I'm sure it has been a useful addition to SFB's repertory, and to that of Dutch National Ballet - the co-commissioning company who gave the piece its UK première last night - but I wonder Read more ...