Reviews
Thomas H. Green
Things do not start well. Ian McCulloch, in trademark shades, apparently not aged a jot since Echo & the Bunnymen’s 1980s glory days, hits the stage in an offensive strop. He is performing a solo acoustic set from a chair. Beside him on a table sit a glass of water, a glass of milk and another glass with – at a guess – vodka and cranberry juice. He has the demeanour of a diva who’s been having a “party” in their changing room. Milk is good for settling an acid stomach.During his opening numbers, “Rescue” and “Villiers Terrace” from the Bunnymen’s debut album Crocodiles, he repeatedly Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
One masterpiece and two superb portraits both dominate and sum up in vivid fashion the complex personality, long life and astonishing trajectory of the first Duke of WellingtonThere were something like 200 portraits done in his lifetime. The haunting Goya portrait of 1812-1814 (main picture), altered several times to allow for more decorations on his uniform, was painted in Madrid when the British occupied the Spanish capital at the end of the horrible five-year slog of the Peninsula War. As the general once said, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won” – and Read more ...
David Nice
Over the past two Saturdays, Vladimir Jurowski and a London Philharmonic on top form have given us a mini-festival of great scores for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The hallucinogenic vision of ancient Greece in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé last week was succeeded yesterday evening by the fresh-as-poster-paint colours of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and excerpts from Prokofiev’s Chout (The Buffoon), a longer score in the Petrushka mould which has suffered disproportionate neglect (though not from the LPO – both Alexander Lazarev and Jurowski have conducted the complete ballet). Both works, especially in Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Hey, it’s the 1990s – yet again. After high-profile revivals of contemporary classics, such as Patrick Marber’s Closer and Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg, here comes, from that edgy decade, a fringe version of the iconic story of Leith heroin addicts, based on the cult book by Irvine Welsh which spawned a classic 1996 film by Danny Boyle, as well as this play, adapted by Harry Gibson in 1994. This version of the in-yer-face drama by the aptly named In Your Face Theatre Company was first seen at the Edinburgh Festival last year. How well has it traveled south?When you enter the venue, it’s Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Pierre Boulez sits in the back of a car as it drives across Westminster Bridge. He is talking about the audience appeal of his music, and he is characteristically direct. If the performance is good, and the situation is right, he insists, then audiences will come. That was back in 1968. The interview was featured in one of the documentaries that began today’s event, and it proved prescient. Boulez at 90, the day-long festival of music by the BBC Symphony Orchestra's former chief conductor, was well planned (by the BBCSO) and well performed. And the audiences came: every event was well Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: The Odyssey - A Northern Soul Time CapsuleIt begins with “Open the Door to Your Heart” by Darrell Banks. Over a mid-tempo rhythm, Banks sings in an affecting voice obviously schooled in gospel. Choppy Motown-style guitar is punctuated by brass, lifting both singer and the song through the choruses. A US hit for the independent Revilot Records label in 1966, it reached number two on Billboard’s R&B charts. The UK issue on London Records barely sold. A copy went for £14,500 last year. The song was early floor-filler on the Britain’s then emergent Northern Soul scene, Read more ...
David Nice
When is a famous aria more than just a showpiece? When it’s a narrative of a future event conjured by a hope beyond reason, which is what Madama Butterfly’s “Un bel dì” (“One fine day”) ought to be but so rarely is: too often prima donna overkill and stereotyped mannerisms get in the way. Not with Latvian soprano Kristine Opolais. Her Butterfly’s gestures can be stylised but always unusual, setting her apart, an ex-dancing geisha driven almost mad in a three-year wait for a “husband” who won’t come back. The effort of will sees her crumple in the aftermath of her vision.Opolais (pictured Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The grand but domestic setting of Hertford House, home of the Wallace Collection, makes a fitting backdrop to an exhibition of paintings by Joshua Reynolds. The Marquesses of Hertford acquired some 25 paintings by Reynolds in the artist's lifetime, and after it, and the 12 that remain in the collection form the focus of this exhibition. Not only does the Wallace Collection give an impression of the way that paintings were collected and viewed in the 18th century and beyond, but in its wealth of Old Master and 18th-century French paintings, for example, it shares characteristics with Reynolds' Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Sam Lee launched his second album this week, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to his Mercury-nominated debut, A Ground of it Own. The Fade In Time has been garnering five-star reviews like poesies in May, and for good reason – Lee is a distinctly 21st-century artist, collecting new versions of old songs on his iPhone and laptop, while his repertoire is steeped in the reek and smoke of folk history and lore, its tales of love, parting, exile and murder bound by a sympathetic magic still resonant today, parting the veil on vivid scenes from our islands’ deep history.There had been concerts Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Australian musician and musicologist Martin Jarvis, connected with Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory, has been obsessed for the past 25 years with proving that Anna Magdalena Wilcke, Johann Sebastian Bach’s second wife, was not only muse, inspiration, and copyist but a composer of pieces that now bear her husband’s name. He claimed that she created the cello suites which are among the masterpieces of 18th-century music, among other contributions, including, perhaps, the tune that is the basis for Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Jarvis enlisted the professional help Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Ruperto Chapí: String Quartets 1 and 2 Cuarteto Latinoamericano (Sono Luminus)Think string quartet and you tend to think Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart. Maybe Bartók and Shostakovich. But generally something respectable, well-behaved and Northern European. Not Spanish, unless it's the one by Ravel. So you need to make the acquaintance of Ruperto Chapí. He came to prominence in the late 19th century as a zarzuela composer. Born near Alicante in 1851, he trained in Rome and Paris, returning to Spain in 1880. In the years immediately before his death in 1909 he composed four string quartets, a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This 1887 domestic drama by August Strindberg is rarely seen in London, and Abbey Wright’s new production of Laurie Slade’s new version might have seized the opportunity to give this gristly chunk of pre-Freudian sexual polemic a thorough 21st-century shake-up. That chance is missed.Instead of bracing modernity (the play would have startled its first audiences with its naturalism), we’re presented with a historical hybrid of a world in which the characters wear approximations of fin-de-siècle dress, and the arrival of visitors is heralded by sleighbells, yet a husband may speak of his wife as Read more ...