1950s
Gary Naylor
Barry Gibb was at the considerable peak of his era-defining songwriting powers when he provided the song that played over the opening titles of the iconic 1978 film, so it's a wise decision by director, Nikolai Foster, to go straight into "Grease is the Word" after a brief prologue.The energetic dancing by the boys and girls of Rydell High, the strength of the harmonies and the warm familiarity of the tune builds two bridges – one back to the movie, the other across the fourth wall. For all its flaws, this new production recognises that, perhaps in big musicals more than any other genre Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Mancunian tribute to Ralph Vaughan Williams – a symphonic cycle shared by the BBC Philharmonic and Hallé – reached its conclusion with the Eighth Symphony last night. But, unlike most concerts in the RVW150 sequence, in this one (the final performance in the Hallé Thursday concerts series of 2021-22), Sir Mark Elder added an eclectic mix of other composers’ work to the evening. Value for money, without a doubt (main picture: Sir Mark Elder with the Hallé).First up was Stravinsky. The Concerto for piano and wind instruments is a challenge to the ensemble as much as its soloist, and there Read more ...
Robert Beale
The baton passed, metaphorically, to the Hallé last night in the Vaughan Williams symphony cycle shared between them and the BBC Philharmonic to mark the composer’s 150th anniversary. Literally, that baton was in the same hand as on the last date, for it was John Wilson who conducted the Ninth Symphony, as he had the second and seventh 12 days ago. This time VW was paired with Holst, as the second part of the concert consisted of The Planets.It made an interesting comparison, as the two composers were friends as young men, and though Holst died 24 years before Vaughan Williams and The Planets Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A story of forbidden love, Great Freedom takes place almost entirely in a prison. The film's background is encapsulated in the word “175er/ hundertfünfundsiebziger”, still to be found in German dictionaries and collective memories as a pejorative word for a gay man.It's a reference to Clause 175 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalised homosexuality. The law was originally introduced in 1871, broadened by the Nazis in 1935, substantially re-drawn in 1969, but only finally and fully repealed in 1994. There is also topicality here: claims for reparations – which are generally Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” the John Ford scholar Tag Gallagher quietly observes in the penetrating – and deeply moving – video essay he contributes to Masters of Cinema’s Blu-ray disc of Ford’s 1953 masterpiece The Sun Shines Bright. It’s good advice. There’s plenty in the movie for cancel culture advocates to sink their teeth into – should they be so blinkered. Gallagher asserts here, as he did in his book on Ford, that the film might well have been titled Intolerance, such is its condemnation of bigotry.The Sun Shines Bright, which Ford claimed in 1968 was his favourite of his films Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Barbican’s Postwar Modern covers the period after World War Two when artists were struggling to respond to the horrors that had engulfed Europe and find ways of recovering from the collective trauma.Perhaps inevitably, a considerable amount of sturm und drang was produced by artists such as Alan Davie, Eduardo Paolozzi and Francis de Souza. Melodrama may have seemed appropriate as an expression of the despair and fatigue they experienced, but the work has weathered badly and now feels decidedly overblown.You could say that, as people emerging from a global pandemic, the last thing we need Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1957, popular music was given a jolt when the first electronic pop record was recorded. “Song of the Second Moon” was created and composed by the Dutch musician Dick Raaijmakers who was working at NatLab, the research laboratory of the electronics company Philips.“Song of the Second Moon” was based around a rhythmic pulse, and incorporated tape manipulation and multiple Ondes Martenots. It predicted the bubbling sound which became associated with Jean-Jacques Perry and presaged the machine beat Giorgio Moroder incorporated into his Donna Summer productions. It is also echoed by the 1962 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What’s now been titled The 1959 Sessions represents an unreleased studio album completed by the Stan Tracey Trio on 5 and 8 June 1959 at Decca’s London studio at Broadhurst Gardens. If issued then, it would have been the swift follow-up to the trio’s debut album Little Klunk, recorded at the same studio on 22 and 26 May 1959.Little Klunk was made by Tracey (piano, vibes), Kenny Napper (bass) and Phil Seaman (drums). This release features those three on four tracks – Tracey originals – and Tracey and Napper plus Tony Crombie rather than Seaman on drums for the remaining four tracks: which are Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Three films, each restored to glorious 4K, make up Second Run’s Hungarian Masters set. Billed as “essential works by three of Hungarian cinema’s most renowned filmmakers”, each film earns that praise in its own way.Zoltán Fábri’s Merry-Go-Round is the first, released amid the final months of Mátyás Rákosi’s de-facto leadership, a period defined by intense industrialisation, militarisation and collectivization. Fábri and his contemporaries witnessed a severe decline in living standards, purges, and the deportation of more than half a million Hungarians to the Soviet Union, where Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Watching this restored print of Nicholas Ray’s delirious Western reminded me of the discovery that those pristine white statues of the Ancient World had once been painted in gaudy colours. When I first saw Johnny Guitar, it was one of those movies that played the repertory and art house cinemas in a battered, faded 16mm print. Seeing it on a modern TV screen in all its original lurid glory, the film is so shockingly garish it’s as if it had been reconfigured in 3-D. Although it did well enough at the box office in 1954, American critics hated it and its producer-director Nicholas Ray, rated Read more ...
David Nice
British opera’s attempted answer to The Magic Flute, and its presentation as the opening gambit of Edward Gardner’s eminent position as principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, leave me queasily ambivalent.After all the smoke and lighting of the LPO’s online series, there’s barely a hint of theatricality in this plain concert performance, with the only concession to lighting the constant red on the Royal Festival Hall organ: is it not an opera but a choral symphony with eight soloists? Then you remember what wonders good directors and designers have achieved with The Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The cinema fan in your life is going to thank you for this one. The BFI’s new two-disc Blu-ray version of Jean Renoir’s 1951 The River, filmed in India, is absolutely packed with extras: no fewer than six other offerings, including a 90-minute "documentary film-fiction hybrid" by Roberto Rossellini, an hour-long documentary, and even some early 20th century footage from India.There are interviews and essays, including an important and beautifully written one by Satyajit Ray, whose own film-making career was kickstarted by his involvement in the filming of The River. All this fascinating Read more ...