Reviews
graham.rickson
Messiaen: Des canyons aux étoiles London Philharmonic Orchestra/Christoph Eschenbach (LPO)Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie is almost a repertoire work, but performances of Des canyons aux étoiles are rarer. Any new recording is a cause for celebration, and this live one is a wowzer. Messiaen had been asked to write a large-scale work for the United States bicentenary, a commission which gave him the chance to visit the spectacular Bryce Canyon in Utah. Its geology and birdsong fill the piece, a vast 12-movement work which sounds like a summation of Messiaen's career. Newcomers should Read more ...
Simon Munk
Shiny cars, going fast. In real life, obsessing over gravel-crunching oversteer or the downforce your rear spoiler exerts is one for Jeremy Clarkson fans or pimply youths in suburban retail car parks, late at night. But there's something about the mix of sheer muscularity and precision strategy that appeals when racing is on TV or in videogame form. It's a spectacle, meant partly in the situationist sense.Project CARS doesn't start out spectacularly, though. Perhaps because it's come not funded by a big publisher, but as a crowd-funded developer project, Project CARS comes in with a menu and Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Kate Tempest's long blonde-brown hair flailed as she prowled the stage, red-faced from exertion, adhering not a jot to the media’s tick-boxes for femininity. She is smaller, by far, than her backing band, dressed down in baggy sweatshirt and jeans. Unlikely star material yet she exuded such energized passion and righteous charisma that, by the end, as she encored with a poem that, like so many tonight, seemed to allude to the troubling political developments of last week, she had the audience rapt, completely engaged. “We never saw it coming,” she announced towards the close, “like all the Read more ...
David Nice
Fusion between Christian Venice and the Ottoman east started up at least as early as the 15th century, accompanied by a superb portrait of Sultan Mehmet II attributed to Gentile Bellini (pictured below). So what Egyptian-born oud (read oriental lute) player Joseph Tawadros and that febrile Australian Richard Tognetti with members of the Academy of Ancient Music in cheerful tow were trying to do last night had honourable precedents. Their vibrant mix turned out to be exactly the sort of high level east-west happening not on the programme of this year’s Proms.Tognetti’s Vivaldi sometimes bent Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It took approximately 30 years for High Society to first make its laborious transition from screen to stage and there are good reasons for that. The indelible impression left by the movie and its star, Grace Kelly, was undoubtedly the biggest, and before that, of course, was the source play (The Philadelphia Story) and the equally indelible movie made of that. Along the way, the stage version, with a new book by Arthur Kopit, added a host of unrelated Cole Porter songs to the half-dozen or so in the movie, drawing from other Porter musicals (Can-Can, Jubilee), which is a bit like Rodgers and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There is still much to be said for George Miller's original 1979 Mad Max, a cheap but ferocious tale of rape, murder and vengeance in a gang-infested dystopia. However, only two sequels later, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) found the franchise blimping out into a steroidal freak-show. After a 30-year intermission, Fury Road is much more of the latter, now saturated with digital enhancements while almost dispensing with plot entirely.The potential audience for Fury Road wasn't born when its predecessors came out, so it was a brazen move indeed by Miller (still aboard as writer/director) to Read more ...
Heather Neill
The premise might seem familiar: a famous photograph, taken by a Western journalist in fraught military and political circumstances, has repercussions many years later. The subject of the picture, a representative of an entirely different culture from that of the photographer, is anonymous, but the image is familiar all over the world. Attempting to bridge the gulf between subject and journalist leads only to further bitter misunderstanding.Two years ago Lucy Kirkwood's award-winning Chimerica took the photograph of the "tank man" of Tiananmen Square, the brave, lone protester of the 1989 Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s not often in classical music that you find yourself queuing under a railway bridge in Shoreditch at 9pm (and still less often that the artistic experience inside merits the endeavour). But get past the door staff and the effortful East London cool of it all, and I Fagiolini’s Betrayal (subtitled “A Polyphonic Crime Drama”) offers some pretty persuasive reasons to slough off the comforts of the concert hall and get gritty.The show is the follow-up to I Fagiolini and director John La Bouchardière’s previous collaboration The Full Monteverdi, and follows a similar pattern – threading a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When Hollywood characters revisit their youth it tends to be through the school reunion, with generally trite results; how typical of a French filmmaker, and of the cerebral, cinephile Olivier Assayas in particular, that his character should be an actress, who is pushed towards midlife crisis by a role.Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is an international film star, 40 years old, who is simultaneously dealing with a difficult divorce and the sudden death of the reclusive playwright, Wilhem Melchior, who discovered her as a 20-year-old, when he cast her in his play and subsequent film, Maloja Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The big vinyl storm in the US media over the last month has been a kerfuffle about VNYL, the service that hoped to do for vinyl what Lovefilm used to do for DVDs. The idea, backed by a hefty and successful Kickstarter campaign, was VNYL would send members three records, based on their stated tastes and chosen by connoisseurs. These could be listened to and returned, to be replaced with others. Sounds like a dreadful idea. Vinyl is delicate and surely one of its pleasures is ownership? If there are scratches, they've been earned at your own parties and late nights. Unlike MP3s and CDs, vinyl Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Lucky old us. We are now living “in a techno-sexual era”. So claimed this documentary about dating apps which radar-guide you to the nearest available groin. If groins are your thing, that is, and they are by no means everyone’s. We heard about a man who wanted to paint a woman green and “spank you like a big fat avocado”. Another woman was considerably aroused by the sight of a man putting his motor into reverse. We met a puppy fetishist who trusses himself up in leather straps and yaps a lot. This is not to be confused with dogging.The Secret World of Tinder wasn’t really about secrecy at Read more ...
fisun.guner
We’ve not been short of memorable London productions of Arthur Miller’s best known works. Ivo van Hove’s triple Olivier award-winning A View from the Bridge, which transferred to the Wyndham’s Theatre from the Young Vic earlier this year, and the Old Vic’s The Crucible, directed last year by Yaël Farber, were two exceptional productions. And now we have the seminal play of the 20th century. The RSC’s Death of a Salesman arrives from its short run at Stratford garlanded with plaudits, but it’s even better in this West End transfer.The smaller stage and more intimate auditorium of the Noël Read more ...