Reviews
graham.rickson
Nielsen: Symphonies 1 and 4 New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert (Dacapo)Alan Gilbert tears into the opening of Nielsen 4 with some ferocity, sustaining the forward motion very nicely indeed. Until, well, we'll get to that later. This symphony needs to feel slightly unhinged, a boiling cauldron of sound. You suspect that this performance works so well because Gilbert hasn't micromanaged things, letting an on-form New York Philharmonic let rip. The brass scythe through the first movement with precision and abandon, and Gilbert's especially good at managing the tempo and metre changes. Read more ...
Simon Munk
The iconic monster is back in a far more successful way than Prometheus. The first-person, stealth game Alien: Isolation largely successfully returns us to the creeping horror and claustrophobic environments of the original film.Set after the events of Alien, Isolation sees Ripley's daughter chasing the black box recorder of the original spaceship, the Nostromo. On reaching the space station it's on, of course she finds the iconic "xenomorph", the "perfect organism, its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility", let loose among a terrified and splintered population.The Read more ...
Marianka Swain
To do Mamet’s work justice, you must be able to deliver dialogue with the speed, skill and breathtaking bravura confidence of Usain Bolt. In Lindsay Posner’s much-hyped but frustratingly sluggish revival at the Playhouse Theatre, only one of three cast members rises to that challenge – and it’s the one who’s generated by far the fewest column inches. British actor Nigel Lindsay is the breakout star of a strange experiment in meta-satire, in which Mamet’s denunciation of a movie-going public allowing crass commercialism to override creative integrity gains surreal significance. Doubtless this Read more ...
David Nice
So now it’s Minnie Get Your Gun from the director who brought us the gobsmackingly inventive Young Vic Annie (as in sharpshooter Oakley, not Little Orphan). Richard Jones’s subversive but still very human take on Irving Berlin discombobulated its American support and never made Broadway; but there’s little here that would rock the steadily progressive Met (home of La fanciulla del West’s 1910 premiere, with Enrico Caruso as “Dick Johnson” aka quickly repentant bandit Ramerrez). Girl should certainly go well in Santa Fe, sharing this production with ENO.Jones knows better in his maturity than Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
At the risk of endorsing national stereotypes, I’ll still describe Yann Gonzalez’ feature debut You and the Night as a very French film. Its appearance in Critics’ Week at Cannes last year brought comparisons with Francois Ozon and Pedro Almodovar for a combination of style and sex, arguably at the expense of substance. And you can’t help feeling that the ghosts – it’s a work very much concerned with ghosts and fantasies – of Cocteau and Genet are lurking somewhere too.Gonzalez’ opening scene, as a woman is driven by a mysterious motorcyclist (pictured, below right) away from a figure she's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So we're off for another blast of between-the-wars ultraviolence with the Shelby gang from Birmingham, once again soundtracked by incongruous electric blues music. Time has moved on from the immediate aftermath of Great War hostilities and now we're into the Twenties, which are roaring as if they're in agony. The baleful Tommy Shelby (a curiously shaved and bleached-looking Cillian Murphy) is aiming to undertake "business expansion" by extending the Peaky Blinders' racketeering tentacles down to London.However, not everyone thinks this is a great idea. Younger brother John points out that the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Julian Fellowes, now the Conservative peer Lord Fellowes, left behind the fictional world of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey to give us this sumptuous tour of Blenheim Palace. Nor were its surroundings neglected as vista after vista showed us Blenheim’s lavishly landscaped gardens, fountains and columned monument to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, victorious over Louis XIV. It was his military prowess that led to wealth and Blenheim itself, gifted by the grateful nation and thus an early example of government subsidy.But this was more than a gushing visit to yet another stately home. Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
As a political act, the first performance of Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel in 1916 is exceptionally important. It was staged in Washington DC by the drama committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and was the first play by an African-American woman ever to be professionally produced (as well as one of the first to feature an all-black cast).As drama, though, it does not quite measure up. The themes it features - segregation, racism, insidious intolerance - are undoubtedly powerful and too-little discussed on the stage. Yet the play’s dialogue Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Grupo Corpo means Body Group, and if that sounds like the name of a global exercise consortium, it’s because it should be. If I were an entrepreneur media mogul type, I would have shot out of my seat at Sadler’s Wells last night and straight round to the stage door to persuade the Pederneiras siblings who run the company - it's emphatically a family business - that they need to do a fitness video or five, and syndicate an accompanying wordwide branded exercise class guaranteed to have the likes of Zumba and Les Mills, the BodyPump people, quaking in their last year’s Nike Airs.Grupo Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
As revered as the Greek tragedies may be, I have to admit to feeling a little weary of all that conspicuous, over-ripe angst, and the expectation of our sympathy, even empathy for matricides, patricides, filicides and all such. Rather than resonate through time, they’ve brought me to the point where I’m feeling “enough already”.I’m overstating. Yet a version of the above is one reason why I find Ian Rickson’s production of Sophocles’s Electra, from Frank McGuinness’s 1997 adaptation, so appealing. Rather than pummel the audience with emotion, this leans back a little, lets air into the play, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“The minute I touched New York,” wrote Berenice Abbott, “I had a burning desire to photograph the city of incredible contrasts, the city of stone needles and skyscrapers, the city that is never the same but always changing.” Backed by funding from the Federal Art Project, the elegiac photographs she took of New York in the 1930s record cluttered corner shops and brownstones standing cheek by jowl with new high rise developments. “The past jostling the present” was how she described the juxtapositions of old and new that she found so inspiring (pictured below left: Rockefeller Centre, New Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
2014 is the 250th anniversary of the death of Jean-Philippe Rameau, France’s baroque giant and maverick. To say that the UK celebrations have been muted is to put in generously, reconfirming a national trend that has long sidelined this repertoire in favour of more familiar Italian and German contemporaries. So it was especially good to see the Wigmore Hall full for an anniversary concert from instrumental ensemble Les Paladins and soprano Sandrine Piau.But, emerging back out onto Wigmore Street after barely more than an hour of performance, I found myself baffled. Was this brief evening of Read more ...