Reviews
David Nice
How disorienting it is to find century-old works in the concert repertoire of which you can still say “I’ve never heard anything like it”. That must have been the reaction of most audience members last night to Tuscan-German composer Ferruccio Busoni’s 85-minute symphony-concerto for piano, orchestra and male voice choir, since only a few will have caught what classical anoraks tell me was its only other London performance in recent years, at the 1988 Proms.This misleadingly named Piano Concerto crowned a magnificent triptych of a concert programme centred around the Janus-headed year 1902, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Attracting over one million visitors each year, Canterbury Cathedral is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country. With its picturesque location and very nice, very white staff, the cathedral offers an easy metaphor for the version of England that Ukip supporters apparently hanker after, the narrator Saskia Reeves describing it as “England in stone”. With traditions and routines that haven’t changed much in 1000 years – although one imagines the Reformation shook things up a little – the very idea of Canterbury must be balm to the soul for anyone given to bouts of flag- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The musical that defined an era is back on the West End, allowing a new generation to see what all the fuss was about 33 years ago when a non-narrative extravaganza as heavy on dance and scenic effects as it was light on plot launched itself in London and, soon after, the world. The terpsichorean ambition of Cats is holding up pretty well now, it must be said, thanks in large part to a new breed of triple-threat performer whose movement skills were harder to come by three decades ago.And if the second half of the TS Eliot-inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber/Trevor Nunn collaboration trails off into Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The magnificent Christ Church Spitalfields is a masterpiece of the British baroque and very much an ideal venue for this Spitalfields Winter Festival visit by French period instrument group Le Concert Spirituel. Travelling as a chamber ten-piece without conductor Hervé Niquet, the group performed a selection of early 18th-century works from across Europe, bringing in Muffat, Purcell, Biber, Zelenka, Charpentier, Corelli and Bach.As cellist Tormod Dalen explained in a short address to the audience, the instruments were faithful to the period, bearing mostly naked gut strings, but with the odd Read more ...
Simon Munk
Simple to play, fiendish to beat and with a huge depth of theme and beauty, The Talos Principle is a massively welcome end of year surprise. Like Portal and the recent The Swapper (whose writer also is involved here) this deftly blends a series of (120+) puzzles of growing complexity and ingenuity, that arise out of a very simple and brief set of mechanics, into a rich and deep philosophical theme.Awakening amidst what appears to be the gathered together ruins of the most beautiful bits of human civilisation and history, you're a robot(?) that is told to solve puzzles by a booming voice in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Remembering the early years of social and sexual liberation in Swiss gay life, Stefan Haupt’s drama-documentary The Circle (Der Kreis) has rich affection for its subject. In particular, that’s the relationship between teacher Ernst Ostertag and drag artist Robi Rapp, who first met in the Fifties and have been partners ever since. Both now in their eighties, their documentary remembrances of the time are intercut with staged dramatic material concerning Haupt’s wider subject, the world that grew up around the magazine, social centre and club of the film’s title.Switzerland was unusually Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A Martian, a Spitfire and a flatulent penguin are the unlikely ingredients for The Way Back Home, English National Opera’s first foray into the colourful world of children’s opera. And if those don’t sound like enticement enough, be reassured, at only 45 minutes long this really is a child-friendly taster of a genre that doesn’t always get the best press when it comes to accessibility.Amahl and the Night Visitors, L'enfant et les sortilèges, Hansel and Gretel, Where the Wild Things Are: opera for children might be a niche-of-a-niche, but over the centuries it has punched above its weight. Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
For those who’ve seen one too many Nutcrackers, nothing says Christmas better than a Matthew Bourne production at Sadler’s Wells. A man whose mantelpiece is overflowing with Tony and Olivier awards is a safe bet for entertainrment – even when the production in question looks at first glance unlikely: Bourne’s 2005 danced version of Edward Scissorhands, the 1990 Tim Burton movie which is part Gothic fairy tale, part moral fable, part 1950s soap opera.From the first moments that the small pit orchestra strikes up, amplified to the max through huge banks of speakers and accompanied by Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Four years ago Christopher Jefferies was the victim of a concerted attack by the British press. His tenant Joanna Yeates had been murdered and, lacking any other leads, police arrested her landlord. While he was still being questioned, the newspapers sniffed around Jefferies’s patch of Bristol and, armed with a juicy quotation or two, chose collectively to forget all about the principle of innocent until proven otherwise. "Weird", "posh", "lewd", "creepy" were among the epithets in The Sun. He was branded a peeping Tom. Even the Guardian, which did not join in the mauling, could not quite Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s only a few years since TV companies wouldn’t let Bear Grylls talk to anything more important than small, edible fauna. So he’s done well to progress so quickly to genuine A-Listers like Ben Stiller and Stephen Fry. By most objective criteria, talking isn’t something Grylls does terribly well, relying on a mashup of puns, clichés and semi-scripted pep talks, like a PE teacher at parents’ evening. But by the time Ben Stiller climbed aboard the seaplane that “extracted” him, in Grylls’ awful military jargon, from his Isle of Skye ordeal, I felt I’d got to know him rather well, in a way I Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“At the end of all things,” to quote Frodo Baggins in the dim and distant future, there is purgative fire and resounding clangour in the final instalment of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit triptych. Thirteen years after the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Jackson has concluded his JRR Tolkien opus with an epic more thunderous than its two predecessors. The Battle of the Five Armies is also a little closer in tone to the LOTR films than An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Desolation of Smaug (2013) – not that Bilbo Baggins’ prolonged burglary career can match the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Goldilocks would not have been a good conductor. There’s a reason why there isn’t a dynamic marking between mezzo forte and mezzo piano. Mezzo on its own would be a pretty bland state of affairs, sat solidly in an inoffensive state of not-too-loud-and-not-too-soft, not swelling to a crescendo or pining away to a decrescendo, but content with a steady sonic compromise. Last night the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment gave us a decidedly mezzo Messiah, a performance that couldn’t seem to galvanise itself into any decisive emotion.Perhaps audiences are to blame. Or maybe concert halls. If Read more ...