Reviews
peter.quinn
Gloriously feel-good, unashamedly retro, uniformly urbane, the Nicola Conte Combo presented a set that was bursting with fantastic melodies last night at Ronnie Scott's. Performing music from last year's Free Souls and his 2011 album Love & Revolution, listening to the Italian DJ, producer and guitarist's music is rather like falling into a jazz wormhole, a wondrous peregrination through the past, from the finger-snapping soul-jazz of Horace Silver (the great "Shades of Joy" surely nods to Silver's classic "Song For My Father") and the all-embracing polystylism of Archie Shepp, to the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Some documentaries can feel like trying to view a desert landscape through a telescope. The need for tight focus on too large a subject can leave you constantly aware that there’s important stuff going on out of eyeshot. The stuff you can’t see becomes a constant irritant, like a pending tax return, or David Starkey. Kraftwerk: Pop Art, in significantly narrowing its focus, was more like studying a Petri dish under a microscope – and just as fascinating.The particular prism chosen for this band biography was the connection between Kraftwerk and the art world. This was centred around 2013 Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Did you know that Jack White’s Lazaretto album sold nearly 87,000 copies on vinyl last year? Sales continue to rise all over with European manufacturing facilities running at full tilt. Given the demand for vinyl has risen 800% in the last decade, that’s not so surprising. Dance music, as ever, lauds the format, with the massive Tomorrowland rave/festival in Belgium this July announcing a vinyl-only stage to be headed up by long time aficionado, Sven Väth. theartsdesk on Vinyl also continues to celebrate this resurgence with our wide-ranging monthly round-up.Jóhann Jóhannsson The Theory of Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The echoes of last summer’s number one hit “Bang Bang” had hardly faded when Jessie J’s third album Sweet Talker was released to a largely positive reception last October. She’s been on the road on and off ever since, and though her act never seems short of either energy or self-belief, you might expect to see some signs of flagging after such a relentless display of girl power. Not a bit of it: her all-action show hit Hammersmith last night. Hammersmith is probably still feeling the aftershocks.Her act teeters constantly on the edge of sensory overload. She began with a string of romantic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you can't beat 'em, steal brazenly from 'em. Instead of importing another Scandinavian drama series and slapping on some subtitles, or recycling Fargo or Breaking Bad (or for that matter Deadwood or Twin Peaks), Sky Atlantic has pushed the boat out and created its own slab of sub-zero Nordic mystery, packed with bankable international names. If this extended pilot episode was a reliable guide, it's going to be a tortuous ride on black ice.Fortitude is a remote town in the Arctic Circle, perched on the edge of a majestic and somewhat scary glacier. Up to now it's been renowned among the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When people talk about the Heroic Age of exploration, the heroes are generally agreed to be the explorers. But we’d know a great deal less about Edwardian chaps pluckily struggling through far-flung snowscapes if there weren’t images of them in situ. And the men who caught those images can be counted heroes too. Herbert Ponting pioneered cold-weather photographic techniques in Antarctica with Scott. Frank Hurley hurled himself into a freezing flooded cabin to retrieve now iconic photographic plates from Shackleton’s sinking ship Endurance. And then there is Captain John Noel.It is no Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The director Stephen Daldry has always worked beautifully with young actors, whether on film or stage, so it's not difficult to see what might have drawn him to Trash, the Richard Curtis-scribed adaptation of the Andy Mulligan novel about life on the Rio de Janeiro scrapheaps. An opportunity for three Brazilian unknowns to take centre-screen in a film spoken almost entirely in Portuguese, the movie gives an instant career to its three male newcomers while otherwise remaining mired in the feel-good Hollywood muck that even the most elaborate change in locale can't shift.Equal parts adventure Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Is there any bond more powerful than shared history? If life is the sum total of our experiences, then those who experienced it with us will always hold a piece of us – and none more intimate than those formative years when we are figuring out who we want to become. Friendships forged on the cusp of adulthood rival great affairs in their intensity, but can be just as difficult to maintain.Amelia Bullmore’s Hampstead hit, earning a well-deserved West End transfer, is both loving and uncompromising in its incisive study of long-term friendships. Her schematically disparate trio meet at Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Ernst Krenek is probably best remembered nowadays as the composer of Jonny Spielt Auf – the quintessential Zeitoper of Weimar Germany and later the archetype of all that was designated “degenerate” in art by the Nazi regime. And perhaps also as – briefly – the husband of Anna Mahler, daughter of Gustav. But Krenek was far more than that. He was a magpie collector of styles and influences whose large corpus of work reflects almost every major 20th-century trend. From Romanticism to jazz, serialism, neo-Renaissance modality and even electronic works, Krenek’s history is the history of music Read more ...
Simon Munk
The recent glut of reboots, remasters and HD updates for classic videogames is not a sign of a fatigued industry, out of imagination. One of the biggest issues with videogames and the rapid evolution of the the gadgets and consoles they play on, is that all too often gamers are left unable to play a game five years old, let alone over fifteen years old.That's so ancient in games terms, you might as well try plugging cave paintings into a flatscreen TV. The return of warmly-remembered titles, brought back for those who miss them, and those that missed them first time round, is not then a worry Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Here's the genuine hard problem facing commentators confronted with Tom Stoppard's new play of the same name: how do you honour the legacy of this extraordinary writer's first play in nine years that also marks its director Nicholas Hytner's National Theatre swansong and is – truth be told – a disappointment on multiple fronts? Speaking as one who can recall as if it were yesterday the revitalising jolt to both head and heart that one felt leaving the opening night of Arcadia nearly 22 years ago, The Hard Problem doesn't sufficiently engage either, notwithstanding occasional Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The habit among ballet critics of being simultaneously down on John Cranko's 1965 Onegin and up on Kenneth MacMillan's 1974 Manon is a curious one. The two have many similarities, from their basis in novels that became operas (though Prévost's Manon Lescaut antedates Pushkin's verse Eugene Onegin by a century), through their patched-together scores that don't actually use the Massenet/Tchaikovsky operas, to the knotty questions of morality and culpability that attend their titular characters. Perhaps it's because the London public eventually got used enough to MacMillan to decide he was a Read more ...