Canada
david.cheal
One of the great pleasures of watching live music lies in witnessing the joy that people get from making it; to experience a great live band in their prime, to see them interacting with each other, feeding off each other, pushing each other on, is a marvellous thing. Arcade Fire are like that: this show, the second of two nights in London from the Montreal band, was an infectious outpouring of feverish emotion and raw energy. I really don’t think any of them are virtuoso musicians, but there was a cohesiveness, a sense of collective endeavour from the eight-strong ensemble, that made them Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The renaissance enjoyed by Leonard Cohen over the past few years is not only thoroughly welcome and entirely justified, but also partly a testament to the strange and powerful alchemy that sometimes occurs when the defiantly high-brow is swallowed whole by popular culture. The adoption of Cohen’s 1984 song “Hallelujah” by everyone from Jeff Buckley and Shrek to a parade of desperate X Factorettes made it an “Angels” for the noughties; the only point, I'd be willing to wager, where Cohen and Robbie Williams will ever find communion.More prosaically, the decision – forced upon him by the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Far be it from me to complain when the eternal geek is reborn as a man of action. But perhaps I'm not sufficiently a video game kinda guy - Okay, let's come clean, I've never played one - to get into Scott Pilgrim vs The World, the inoffensively if incessantly violent romcom in which an eerily youthful Michael Cera gets to go "Ka-pow!" an awful lot before he finally gets a girl that doesn't in any actual way seem a sensible match. There are chortles to be had, and Lord knows the (English) director Edgar Wright keeps enough visual balls going simultaneously to ensnare even the most ADD- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although The Arcade Fire are currently occupying column inches on the back of their new album The Suburbs, it’s fellow Montréal band The Besnard Lakes that are over here, playing dates on the back of their recent third album The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night. Both bands share a fondness for a full-on live assault that leaves audiences reeling. But beyond that and the geography, The Besnard Lakes are a different proposition, taking their cue from the fuzz and distortion of shoegazing, mixing it with a muscular rock that’s as much Led Zeppelin blast as Neil Young guitar flash.The Besnard Read more ...
rebecca.ritzel
To get a feel for whether an arts festival has truly penetrated a city’s psyche, it helps to strike up a conversation with local Starbucks baristas. That’s why I was grateful to be asked one recent evening in Toronto, “So what exactly is Luminato?”As the green-aproned server handed me a post-show cup of tea, I thought, good question: what is Luminato? Four years after the festival’s founding, it seems many Toronto residents remain unsure. I explained that it’s an arts festival with many different events, including performances at nearby theatres. As it happens, I had just come from a Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Canadian-born pianist Janina Fialkowska has an extraordinary story to tell: she's battled cancer in the muscle of her left shoulder, endured ground-breaking muscle-replacement surgery, and even, in another bizarre twist of fate, had her work "stolen" in the notorious Joyce Hatto recording scandal. But she's still here, her resolve and musical sensibility intensified by her experiences. In this exclusive audio podcast she talks to me about her beloved Chopin - a kinship which began when she first heard Arthur Rubinstein play and which extends to the very size and shape of her hands (she has Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Listening to Woodpigeon’s nuanced indie-folk, I looked around at the 300 or so strong crowd who had also chosen to spend the evening away from Peter Snow and his Swingometer. Some had their eyes closed, others were gently nodding, but mainly they were just smiling. And right then I’m sure they were thinking, as was I, that listening to these luxuriant Canadian harmonies was possibly the best way you could spend election night.Woodpigeon has become known for a sort of lush pastoral sound that sits somewhere between Belle and Sebastian and Sufjan Stevens. And if the latter were the main parties Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As we look on the strictly dieting future that undoubtedly waits for the more esoteric arts after Thursday’s election, it’s evident that the dance landscape has already been blighted - and self-blighted, at that. Somewhere in the past few years a loss of confidence in dancing itself has allowed expressive and aesthetic exploration to become increasingly replaced by undemanding scenic gimmicks and numb circus derivations, subtle matters by dim clichés. My depressed thoughts after watching two of the middle scale shows that used to be common all over Britain and now are scarce as hens’ teeth. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This isn’t Atom Egoyan’s first road accident. In The Sweet Hereafter he portrayed the agony of a small rural community after a school bus crash deprives almost every household of its young, like some disembodied edict from King Herod. This time it’s the other way round: in Adoration a child has lost his parents to a mysterious car crash, leaving him and the uncle who brings him up to live in its long dark shadow. But that’s not the main difference between the two films. The Sweet Hereafter was based on a novel. Adoration is almost entirely a product of Egoyan’s imagination.It was suggested by Read more ...
sue.steward
I’m no folky but I fell for the songs of Kate and Anna McGarrigle the moment I first heard their album Dancer with Bruised Knees, and it’s remained a companion ever since. It never struck me that their songs and the eclectic backing music was "folk", as it was often categorised; the tag presumably arose from Kate’s accordion and banjo playing, their acoustic guitars and, of course, the French-Canadian chansons they sang at home as children - and thankfully introduced to the rest of us.But regardless of definitions, when Kate sat at the piano and Anna played guitar, or they swapped places and Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The singer Lhasa de Sela passed away from breast cancer in her Montreal home on 1 January just before midnight, at the age of 37. Since this news emerged my email box has had numerous messages about this tragic loss, including from theartsdesk critic Robert Sandall who wrote about her “extraordinary talent, amazing life… a total original, a real artist”, and adds a note below this article. Howard Male said, “The Living Road is one of the truly great albums in any genre, in my opinion.” While never forming a conventional career, her three albums La Llorona, The Living Road and the self- Read more ...
howard.male
The first thing to say about Drawing Attention is that its title decidedly undersells the scope of this compelling and unpredictable exhibition, which spans five centuries and includes 100 works from the Art Gallery of Ontario’s collection. Most of us might define a drawing as some kind of monochromatic sketch, either produced by the artist as preparatory work for a finished painting, or to capture some ephemeral moment. The drawing represents artists, paradoxically, at their most casual and yet most focused, transcribing what is seen with intense concentration, yet often rendering it with Read more ...