Reviews
graham.rickson
Elgar. Hmm. Music for the home counties. Party conferences. Golf clubs, and chaps wearing tweed jackets. All wrong, of course; it’s easy to forget that this most misunderstood of composers was actually a bit of an outsider. A self-taught, working-class Catholic, he definitely wasn’t a member of the establishment.Elgar’s First Symphony isn’t music for crusty old buffers, and John Wilson’s coruscating performance with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain served to highlight its many wonders. Despite the vast forces assembled, has Elgar’s scoring ever sounded so transparent? Or, dare I Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Powder: Ka-Pow! An Explosive Collection 1967–68It’s an instantly familiar sound. Crescendo follows crescendo, and power chord follows power chord. For The Who, “I Can see for Miles” was the apex of this style. But this is not The Who. Instead, it is a band from California called Powder whose shelved album from 1968 was crammed with thrilling, British-influenced gems. Like Todd Rundgren's contemporaneous band The Nazz, Powder filtered a British sensibility through an American outlook.Ka-Pow! collects the surviving recordings by Powder and the band they seamlessly evolved from, The Art Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The ebullient presenter, writer and director Waldemar Januszczak opens his enthusiastic and proselytising hour-long film on Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) by reading out a series of disparaging quotes from other artists. William Blake thought Rubens’s shadows looked like excrement, that Rubens was a fool and his paintings were slobberings. Picasso thought Rubens was gifted but unusually nasty, whilst Thomas Eakins also thought him the nastiest painter, and Byron referred to his infernal glare of colours. Januszczak can even be pretty disparaging himself, discussing Read more ...
graham.rickson
Konstantia Gourzi: Music for piano and string quartet (ECM)You rather hope you'll bump into and make the acquaintance of the Greek composer Konstantia Gourzi. And that she'll be sufficiently impressed by the force of your personality that she'll capture it in music. The most immediately engaging work on this disc is Aiolos Wind, a sequence of six tiny piano pieces from 1993, each one recalling an encounter with a different musician. They're like tiny pencil sketches, each one sharply drawn and economic. Helmut Lachenmann's folky rumination is enchanting, and there's a transcendent, pure Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
French actress Marie Rivière had a specially close relationship with director Eric Rohmer. After seeing his work for the first time in the early 1970s, Rivière expressed her admiration in a letter, which led to a succession of parts and culminated with her appearing as heroine Delphine in Rohmer’s 1986 The Green Ray (Le rayon vert): the part was in some way centred on the experiences of the actress, who was allowed to develop the story through almost total improvisation. Rivière herself went on to make a documentary about the director which was finished shortly before Rohmer's death in 2010. Read more ...
David Nice
All happy families are alike, Tolstoy declares at the start of Anna Karenina, but this adaptation of War and Peace stresses how the surviving Rostovs and Bolkonskys went through various hells to get to that enviable state. In this one respect consummate mover and shaper Timberlake Wertenbaker steals a march on her author. Isn’t there a feeling of flatness when we find Natasha and Pierre sunk in seemingly trivial domestic bliss towards the end of the novel? By having them, and the equally contented married couple of Princess Marya and Natasha’s brother Nikolay, recollect with anything but Read more ...
Simon Munk
The videogames industry is rapidly changing. Many of the best and biggest games of the last few years have come from tiny, independent studios – we're back to the days of bedroom coders and quirky ideas. But that doesn't mean there haven't been worthy big budget "AAA" traditional titles.Alien IsolationProbably the most interesting of the big budget titles, this first-person stealth game saw an unscripted, intelligent alien stalking you while you crawled through darkened ducts and hid under tables. Frustratingly difficult and ludicrously uneven – but genuinely terrifying. The most interesting Read more ...
Veronica Lee
And so, after starting life as Miranda Hart's Joke Shop on Radio 4 in 2008, then continuing for three series on the BBC from 2009, Miranda is no more. Its co-creator, co-writer and star, Miranda Hart, has decided to pull the plug on her eponymously named sitcom.Hart follows in good company of writers who realise they have mined all the com they can from the sit and, in the best showbiz tradition, have stopped while leaving their audience wanting more – as did Connie Booth and John Cleese with Fawlty Towers, and Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant with The Office. And, it should be said, while Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
You usually know a good piece or performance when you see one, but sometimes you only identify a great one as such significantly after the fact. What better way to test a work's durability, then, than by seeing what remains of it in the memory after six or 12 months? I admit this "best of" exercise is pretty subjective, but 2014 was such a rich year for dance that I've had to be ruthless: an item only makes my list if I still feel excited when I recall it.This list doesn't sum up the whole year by any means. Some of the biggest events don't get a look in – the Royal Ballet's new Winter's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Filmgoers will either find Denis Villeneuve's latest art-house thriller to be a tantalising head trip or so much celluloid posturing, but there's no denying its contribution to the rise and rise of leading man, Jake Gyllenhaal. Racing up the outside track as a potential Oscar nominee for Nightcrawler even as he is making a (splendid) Broadway debut in the Nick Payne play Constellations, Gyllenhaal here gets to impress twice over and for a simple reason: Javier Gullon's script casts the hirsute star in two different, teasingly complementary parts. Thoughts of Jeremy Irons's career-best Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Birmingham Hippodrome claims to stage the UK's biggest pantomime – a proud boast that highlights its productions' West End-level of investment. And this year's venture, Jack and the Beanstalk, is certainly glitzy and star-laden, while the sets and costumes are fabulous, and there's a 3D sequence as well as a live band, so the claim seems a fair one.Gary Wilmot is Dame Trot, whose three sons Jack, Simple Simon and Silly Billy endlessly get into scrapes. Silly Billy (the excellent Matt Slack, who really connects with the youngsters in the audience) is secretly in love with Princess Apricot Read more ...