The Kurdish singer Aynur opened her current European tour in Bristol, presenting music that's rooted in ancient tradition but explores contempoary sonorities and styles while keeping the music of her people vibrant and alive.On arriving at the venue, it felt as if the place had been magically transplanted to the Middle East. The audience was predominantly Kurdish, and many of the excited crowd, posing for selfies and photographs in the entrance area, were wearing festive traditional gear – brightly coloured and sequined dresses, extravagant headscarves and some turbans for the women, the men Read more ...

The vertigo of lawlessness in Stalin’s Russia carries contemporary resonance in Sergei Loznitsa’s latest Soviet parable. As a Russian dictator invades a neighbour and erases his enemies and the US Supreme Court presides over an authoritarian rampage, paranoid purges and show trials no longer seem distant.Two Prosecutors is based on gulag prisoner Georgy Demidov’s novel, and set in 1937 during the Great Purge. We are in a provincial jail where starving old men burn letters petitioning Stalin for mercy. Fresh-faced local prosecutor Kornyev (Alexandr Kuznetsov) has somehow received a message Read more ...

“Fear death by water,” says the fortune-teller in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. There were a few moments in Natalie Abrahami’s new production of The Turn of the Screw when I worried that the fine musicianship and otherwise smart direction in evidence all around might founder irrevocably beneath the sodden weight of its core conceit. For long sections, especially in the second act, the singers stand or splash around a waterlogged stage. Yes, the fatal lake of Bly that so attracts little Flora in Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera (as in Henry James’s incomparably unsettling novella of 1898) Read more ...

Was it a risk to attend a third Irish Baroque Orchestra Matthew Passion in as many years, given that previous indelible interpretations had come from Helen Charlston, Hugh Cutting and Nick Pritchard? Not really, because the shaping hand of Peter Whelan, musicianship incarnate, was bound to give us the connected dramatic arc in Bach's greatest of masterpieces as usual. And as ever he had several equals among the instrumental and vocal soloists.The revelation this year was the Christus of Frederick Long (pictured above on the right), supported by hyper-expressive work from the strings of Read more ...

If it were true, as Timothée Chalamet has said, that ballet as an art form has become a museum, the job of running a national ballet company would be easy. Ballet never ceases to evolve, and to prove the point I’d be happy to offer the actor my plus-one on any night of his choosing, if only he’d return my calls.English National Ballet has been as front-footed as any in the business of supporting new work, new talents, new directions. This takes an appetite for risk and above all money. After seeing the company’s latest double bill, which included a world premiere by an untried choreographer, Read more ...

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 ...

The baldness of the titles the writer-director Stefan Golaszewski gives his TV series — Him & Her, Mum, Marriage and now Babies — is a misleading guide to the subtlety of their contents. These are, admittedly, Marmite dramas; but for those who love them, they are also finely crafted forays into the everyday existence of most humans today.Marmite actually features in Babies, in a scene midway through its six hour-long episodes in which Stephen (Paapa Essiedu) is munching one of the many slices of toast he gets through, this one smeared with Marmite. Which his wife Lisa (Siobhàn Cullen) Read more ...

The title doesn’t refer to a void into which detectives disappear, but to Harry Hole, the fictional Norwegian sleuth created by novelist Jo Nesbø. Netflix’s nine-part series is derived from his book The Devil’s Star, adapted by the author himself. Getting the casting of the tormented but insightful Hole right is crucial, and they’ve done themselves some favours here by picking Tobias Santelmann for the job.Grizzled but capable of empathy, and ruggedly single-minded enough to ignore the threats and scepticism of senior officers, Hole is a classic bloody-minded loner, and Santelmann Read more ...

VINYL OF THE MONTHBorokov Borokov World War Too (Rotkat) Image Belgian duo Borokov Borokov are described by one source as “weirdcore”. Their gumbo of lo-fi funk, indie-electronica, and games soundtrack synth burbling does, indeed, frolic into purposeful silliness, as on the entertaining “Slippery”, a dry disco-flavoured ode to improper lust (including repeated outraged shrieks of “It was an accident!”). There are moments when they remind of a much more cantankerous and crudely formed Chromeo but their latest, limited to 300 on vinyl, also Read more ...

I’ve always liked to think that, when it comes to artistic performance, comparisons are odious (or oderous, as Dogberry had it). There is one glory of the sun and another of the moon, etc. A performer should be judged on what they do on one occasion, how it speaks to their audience, and not by saying that they’re better or worse than someone else.And yet we do it all the time. We compare X’s performance with Y’s – reviewers do it constantly – and we may have one in mind from the past, or a recording, that’s our benchmark for everything else. And today’s world of classical music, including Read more ...

It’s hard to describe this hot mess of a film without divulging the entire plot. And even if you did, you’d struggle to convey the scabrous, psycho-sexual atmosphere, or summarise the thematic currents that swirl beneath the surface. As director Peter Medak says in one of the interviews on this typically well-stocked BFI disc, “it’s too complicated to explain”.The basic setup is simple, though: Theo (Peter McEnery, pictured below right) and Vivien (Glenda Jackson) live above Theo’s father’s antiques shop, on a down-at-heel corner of West London. They pass the time by indulging in what today Read more ...

Immaturity is a virtue in Kirill Sokolov’s action-horror-comedy, a slapstick class satire set in an exclusive New York apartment block where being on the list gains a hellish new meaning. Derivative, fright-free and frenetically stylised, it still partially confirms the promise of the director’s 2018 debut Why Don’t You Just Die!Sokolov introduced Tarantino’s school of blackly comic ultra-violence to Putin’s Russia and this is his first feature in exile since criticising the Ukraine war, filmed in Latvia as part of producer Artem Vasilyev’s push to bring East European talent to the West. Its Read more ...