Reviews
aleks.sierz
This year the Royal Court is 70 years old. Yes, it’s that long since this premiere new writing venue staged its opening season, whose third play was John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, a drama which redefined British theatre. The current celebratory year kicks off with Guess How Much I Love You?, by Luke Norris, whose debut Goodbye to All That was successfully staged here in 2012. Since then, the playwright has provoked interest with several theatre and television pieces, including the BBC’s Poldark and So Here We Are at the Manchester Royal Exchange. But because he’s hardly produced more than Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If modern and post-modern dance has a reputation for being earnest, then this latest curation of British and American pieces shows another face. For while there is rigour in Yolande Yorke-Edgell’s selection for her fine small company, there is also fun, colour and even louche behaviour. And for all the variety of moods and dynamics of these creations spanning 90 years, a silver thread connects them all. The late Robert Cohan, granddaddy of British contemporary dance, was once a dancer for American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, and every one of the choreographers presented here has felt Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Lionel (Paul Mescal; played as a child by Leo Cocovinis) has perfect pitch and is able to name the note his mother coughs each morning. He can harmonise with the barking of the dog across the field. “Early on I thought everyone could see sound.” Sounds bring shapes, colours, tastes too: “B minor and my mouth turned bitter.”Directed by Oliver Hermanus (Moffie; Living), The History of Sound, adapted by Ben Shattuck from his own short story about a gay couple in the 1920s, starts promisingly but its tone is too tasteful and restrained and its faded painterly palette of brown and white, though Read more ...
Robert Beale
It was a pleasure to see conductor Duncan Ward back in Manchester. His Hallé debut was by no means his first time in the city – he trained at the University of Manchester and the Royal Northern College of Music and has conducted the BBC Philharmonic and Manchester Camerata in the past, and some may even remember him as a student with an orchestra he took to the Arndale shopping centre, making music in the malls, back in 2011.He was something of a Wunderkind then – pianist, organist and composer as well as budding conductor, a product of Mark Heron’s joint course at the two Manchester Read more ...
Gary Naylor
On a motorcycle, you have to slow down once you get that sinking feeling that there’s an accident on the road up ahead. Even if you’re not rubbernecking yourself, you don’t want to be going at full tilt in close proximity to those who are. I made an effort not to look past the sirens and flashing lights towards the wreckage, but sometimes it was unavoidable.I recalled such incidents in the unlikely environment of the Hotel Malmaison’s first floor corridor and again inside six of its bedrooms, the venues for Dante or Die’s revival of their immersive production I Do. It’s not like Tunde (Dauda Read more ...
David Nice
Every visit by Vladimir Jurowski, the London Philharmonic Orchestra's former Principal Conductor and now Conductor Emeritus, is unmissable, and this fascinating programme outdid expectations. If there was any link with the LPO's "Harmony with Nature" season theme, it was ironic – discord being the keynote – but the concert was perfectly wrought.Jurowski balanced Mosolov's 1920s mini-thrash depicting an iron foundry with contemporary Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun's soundcape initially tied to an image of mining waste mountains in the Donbass (the composer pictured below by Konrad Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
To the rich but faintly melancholy strains of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no 23, the latest release from Korean director Park Chan-wook sets up its protagonists for us, a carefree family enjoying a barbecue in their garden, with a mischievous ironic tone from the outset.The music suggests refined, portentous emotions, far from the mundane domesticity of the scene before us. The father, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun, pictured below right), is almost blissed out with happiness at his good fortune: he has a sexy wife, two photogenic children, a house that once belonged to his farmer grandparents, a long Read more ...
theartsdesk
We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.Our fundraiser is rolling towards hitting the halfway mark, and it’s already raised enough to repair our ageing site and ensure its survival. But just as important to all of us have been the messages of love and support from our readership. It’s not just the morale boost of being praised either – though let’s be honest, the warm glow is pretty Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The cellist and the pianist famously have a more competitive relationship in Brahms’ Cello Sonata in E minor than in many compositions for solo instrument and piano. Brahms composed it for the Viennese singing teacher and cellist Dr Joseph Gänsbacher – when, on first playthrough, Gänsbacher complained he couldn’t hear himself because of the piano part, Brahms bellowed back, “You’re lucky.”Yet in the packed lunchtime concert performed by American cellist Alisa Weilerstein and Siberian-born pianist Pavel Kolesnikov, there was no sense that either musician was bludgeoning their way into the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Evil capitalists are in the cross-hairs of this six-part thriller, conceived and mostly written by Sotiris Nikias. Possibly not the most original of villains, but they serve well enough as the basis for a story which takes a dive into the unscrupulous underbelly of London’s Square Mile and then spreads its tentacles around a cluster of assorted reprobates and untrustworthy characters.Our heroine is Zara Dunne (Sophie Turner), who works at pension fund managers Lochmill Capital, based in a swanky new skyscraper somewhere near the Lloyd’s building and the Gherkin. But while the company’s high- Read more ...
David Nice
Any conductor undertaking a journey through Mahler's symphonies - and Vladimir Jurowski's with the London Philharmonic Orchestra has been among the deepest - needs to give us the composer's last thoughts, not just the first movement (which, along with the short "Purgatorio" at the centre of the symphony, was all that Mahler fully scored). Or so I thought every time I heard Deryck Cooke's restrained but not anaemic performing version. Last night I wished Jurowski had left it at the opening odyssey, as perfect as I've ever heard it, and not espoused fellow Russian Rudolf Barshai's "completion". Read more ...
Robert Beale
Perhaps it was the thought of “Blue Monday”, which fell a week ago, that stimulated the choice of Lili Boulanger’s D’un soir triste as the opening piece of this concert. Certainly there can be few short pieces of music filled with such unremitting misery from start to finish.Anja Bihlmaier, the BBC Philharmonic’s principal guest conductor, is normally not one to wallow in lugubrious gloom – far from it. But she entered the spirit of music written by the tragic composer who died very young in 1918 and whose last work this was, completed not long before her demise in piano trio form. It was Read more ...