Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Madness: One Step Beyond - 35th Anniversary EditionLast time One Step Beyond was reissued on CD, for its 30th Anniversary, the album was expanded to cover two discs with added B-sides, tracks from EPs and a flexi-disc, a John Peel session as well some live cuts. The package was rounded out with five promo videos and liner notes by author Irvine Welsh.Now, five years on and 35 from its original October 1979 release, Madness’s debut long player resurfaces again in a multi-foldout digi-pack as a double-disc set. Disc Two is a DVD with four of the videos from last time (“The Prince” is Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
In the vein of My Left Foot, Inside I’m Dancing and Gaby: A True Story, Margarita, With A Straw focuses on living a full life with cerebral palsy. Laila (Kalki Koechlin) is a young woman who lives in Delhi with her supportive and loving family. Despite ructions between mother (Revanthi) and daughter, Laila’s life is pretty good. Growing up is another matter and after one particular embarrassment, she takes on an opportunity to study in New York City. There, she discovers physical love with blind activist and girl power proponent Khanum (Sayani Gupta).Well structured and intentioned, writer Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The septuagenarian American sculptor Richard Serra can treat the most massive sheets of steel as though they are handy pieces of paper for his version of origami; or he can decide to stack huge dense metal blocks as though they were children’s play bricks. He can playfully balance huge slabs of steel held just so by a perfectly judged tension, and he almost persuades us that one huffing breath might bring the whole thing down, particularly so in London Cross, which is just what it says it is: two huge elevated steel planks crossing each other at an oblique angle in a specially constructed Read more ...
David Nice
You may be more familiar with the Italian title, Il mondo della luna, but chances are you won’t have seen this or any of Haydn’s other 16 operas. You haven’t missed much, at least until the last of his works as court composer to the Esterházy family, Armida, an "heroic drama" rather than the slim comedies which don’t seem to have inspired the composer to the heights of his symphonies and string quartets. Glyndebourne failed to trigger a revival with La fedeltà premiata in 1979 – my first acquaintance with the house as a teenager; young Simon Rattle was conducting – and more recently the Royal Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Another week, another war commemorative; it’s the story of all the arts in 2014. But – because you can always rely on David Bintley and Birmingham Royal Ballet to be different – last night’s programme at Sadler’s was overshadowed by the Second World War, not the First. Nor were there any soldiers or war widows to be seen: instead this remarkable mixed programme danced from the doomed brightness of the inter-war generation, to religious experience in war-torn Clydeside, to a kilt-girt, abstract, bittersweet lament.Kenneth MacMillan’s 1979 La Fin du Jour is an odd bird. Deliberately evoking the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony no 9 Danish National Symphony Orchestra/Michael Schønwandt (Challenge Classics)The halting, juddering opening of Mahler 9 is nicely characterised in this live reading. Low harp notes ring out like bells, the stuttering rhythm on cellos and horn sharply pointed. Michael Schønwandt conducted this performance at short notice owing to a colleague's illness, and there's an unusual flexibility and spontaneity on display. The build up to the first climax, three minutes in, is well handled. Schønwandt lets us hear all – the orchestral playing fiery and radiant, the tempi Read more ...
Matthew Wright
A first live experience of the French-Cameroonian singer Sandra Nkaké leaves many questions unanswered. Once the immediate bewilderment has passed, the most pressing question for a British audience should be: why is this extraordinary performer not block-booking the festival circuit? In a single set, accompanied by flautist and controller of the electronics, Jî Drû, Nkaké gave a stunningly complete display, as voice, accompaniment, movement and stage presence combined to project her mesmerising, leonine charisma. For Georgia Mancio’s ReVoice Festival, it was an inspired booking.There’s a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Alan Rickman returns to film directing 17 years after he first stepped behind the camera with a film as pulpy and bodice-ripping as his debut feature, The Winter Guest, was chilly and austere. Visually enticing and packed with a blue-chip international array of actors, several of whom have precious little to do, A Little Chaos addresses a preferred English topic (gardens and gardening) displaced to some mighty elegant French environs. The result is pictorially ravishing if often pretty silly, though filmgoers of a certain disposition may be too dazzled by the scenery and frocks to care. Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
There is loud Oscar talk surrounding the stellar performance by Steve Carell in director Bennett Miller’s genuinely unsettling Foxcatcher. Miller (Capote) tackles yet another true crime drama, this time following the steps leading to the murder of David Schultz, an Olympic wrestling champion. Top athletes need patrons and Schultz’s brother Mark (a truly exquisite performance by Channing Tatum) thought he’d found his in John E. du Pont (Carell), the scion of the du Pont chemical fortune. This is the story of how two champion wrestlers and one very wealthy man end up on the road to tragedy. Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Thirty-year-old Rocío Molina has been rattling cages in the hide-bound world of flamenco. Back home in Spain, gloom-mongers are predicting she’ll bring down the art form with her brazen, off-the-leash excursions from its honoured tropes. Her shows are popular. And the fluorescent four-inch heels and electric bass guitar that feature in her latest – brought to London for three nights by Dance Umbrella, following a storming reception in Seville – will have done nothing to reassure traditionalists.Not one of the scenic or sartorial elements we’ve learnt to expect in theatre-mounted Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Apologies, I missed nearly half the concert. I turned up at 9.00 when I’d been told the gig began but they started half an hour early. Apparently it was a last minute decision. There we go. When I crushed into the back of the Concorde 2, a space jammed mostly with men between 35 and 55, Buzzcocks guitarist Steve Diggle, clad in a polka dot shirt, was singing “Sick City Sometimes” from their eponymous 2003 album. It’s no classic but Diggle was throwing his every ounce of zest at it.The band has always been based around the dynamic of Diggle and the other Buzzcocks lifer, Pete Shelley. The Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
To take Figaro – the ultimate operatic assault on class distinctions and social hierarchies – and set it on a giant revolve is a gesture as wilful as it is elegant. Not only are divisions of above and below-stairs dissolved in this steadily circling world, but also those of background and foreground, onstage and offstage. By the time the set’s rotations revealed two young valets with their trousers down, relieving themselves up against a palace wall, some few minutes into the Overture, Fiona Shaw had already won her audience and her case.When we first encountered Shaw’s production in 2011 – Read more ...