Reviews
Sebastian Scotney
A rare thing indeed. A British singer/pianist duo has had the patience, and also been given the opportunities over a number of years, to own and to inhabit a thoroughly individual and intelligent interpretation of Schubert's Winterreise.Tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook were in recital at Temple Church last night as part of the Temple Winter Festival, their performance also broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. They were at their best when giving a reminder of quite how much beauty, balance, subtlety and variety there is in the songs of Schubert's winter journey. Comparing last night's Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The first Royal Opera House production to transfer to the West End stage, and Tony Robinson’s first theatre role in 16 years, is a dance-drama version of a children’s book about animals and features a man in a car costume being chased by comedy coppers during the interval. Dumbing down, do I hear you cry? Not a bit of it.Personally, I think one of the best things about the Christmas season is the effort made by purveyors of “high” culture to be more accessible to children: see The Nutcracker, Britten’s St Nicolas, Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. Like these august efforts, Will Tuckett’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We've already been casting a revisionary eye over Lord Lucan, the Cold War, the Kennedy assassination and the Profumo affair. Last year Sheridan Smith portrayed Mrs Ronnie Biggs for ITV, but what took them so long to get around to the Great Train Robbery itself? Just hours too long for the real Ronnie Biggs, as it happened.Scripted by Chris Chibnall, a man basking in bankability following his bustin' hit series Broadchurch for ITV, this two-part voyage round the GTR is stylish, well cast and easy to watch, but adds nothing much to the existing information-mountain about the crime. You'd get Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The exquisitely eclectic David O. Russell is fast becoming the go-to director for Oscar hungry actors. His last two films, 2010's The Fighter and 2012's Silver Linings Playbook, garnered their respective casts an astonishing seven Academy Awards nominations between them, including three wins. His latest, American Hustle, combines key cast members from those two films, creating an awards monolith (the New York Film Critics Circle would agree - they named it Best Picture earlier this month). But if the cast might make it seem impossibly worthy, the best thing about American Hustle is that it's Read more ...
judith.flanders
It has been said that Mozart, so prodigiously talented so young, seemed to be merely a vessel through which God, or the music of the spheres, or whichever higher being one chooses, channelled the sounds of heaven. So, too, sometimes, does Balanchine appear to be a vessel through which music is channelled, to take solid form in front of our eyes. And never more so when the music in question is Tchaikovsky.Jewels can be a tricky piece to get right. In less than 90 minutes, it covers 150 years of dance in three plotless acts: mid-19th century French Romanticism, via Fauré, for Emeralds; American Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Exactly what constitutes “the End of Time” in Olivier Messiaen’s extraordinary Quartet for piano, violin, cello and clarinet? Not surely “the end of days” but rather the end of measured time; music unfettered, music of the spheres, music without frontiers. Famously written when Messiaen was “doing time” in a prisoner of war camp, this unique expression of faith, of eternal life unbounded, was his “escape” in every sense of the word - and to hear it played with such astonishing abandon and consummate musicianship by Mitsuko Uchida and three Musicians from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s panto time in the UK and what better way to get into the spirit than the Goth Christmas Roadshow that is The Mission and Fields of the Nephilim? Here are two bands who were part of the goth scene that sprang forth in the second half of the Eighties in black cowboy hats and blacker shades, with a mission to move things away from post-punk austerity and back towards Seventies excess.In the Eighties, Fields of the Nephilim (pictured below in their heyday) adopted a stage show that included industrial volumes of dry ice and the fierce strobe lights. The music was a loud dirge and Carl McCoy’ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was released in 2004 it became a sleeper hit and has since appeared on several “Funniest Movies of All Time” lists. Fans have had to wait nearly a decade for a sequel to see how the eponymous news anchor’s life has panned out, and what has happened to his KVWN colleagues – co-anchor Veronica Corningstone, weatherman Brick Tamland, sportscaster Champ Kind and field reporter Brian Fantana – since they worked together on San Diego's local television station in the 1970s.Finally Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is upon us, after a huge Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s cruel comedy and human drama aplenty in Fortune’s Fool, so much so that it’s hard sometimes to know whether we’re watching farce or tragedy. But it’s a mixture that works well in Lucy Bailey’s production of Ivan Turgenev’s early play in this version by Mike Poulton, making its London debut at the Old Vic.Fortune’s Fool has a rather special history behind it. Poulton’s adaptation of Turgenev’s 1848 work was first seen in Chichester in 1996, to mixed critical reception. Thanks to Alan Bates, who had played the central role of the tragic Russian country estate hanger-on, Vasily Kuzovkin Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though greeted ambivalently when it made its debut at the end of 2012, Ripper Street has looked increasingly like TV's undervalued secret weapon as it has surged purposefully through this second series. Maybe the title was misjudged, suggesting it was just another gruesome and mist-shrouded Victorian murder mystery. Turns out it was much more than that.Indeed, echoes of Jack the Ripper have been almost entirely absent as the series has taken the plunge into such factually-based issues as rent-boy networks and the Barings Bank crisis of 1890 (different only in scale from recent financial Read more ...
geoff brown
Readers who recall the 1872 Paris premiere of Offenbach’s Fantasio have had 141 years to wonder when its British debut would arrive. The long wait ended yesterday when Opera Rara, that valiant and necessary company dedicated to dusting off neglected beauties in concert versions and recordings, joined forces with its Artistic Director Sir Mark Elder and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. One flick of the baton and the overture began, with two limpid flutes gracefully dangling arm in arm over the unison cellos’ bass line.But the overture to what? Based on a play by Alfred de Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
She has been called “Africa’s greatest diva” but as DJ Nihal giving the award of Artist of the Year at this year’s Songlines Awards to Angélique Kidjo pointed out the word “diva” is a loaded one, and makes you think of Mariah Carey’s backstage tantrums. Not that there’s aren’t African divas – the imperious Oumou Sangare, for one, but Kidjo is more known her down-to-earth pragmatism and idealism.With the death of Miriam Makeba, Kidjo with age (she’s now 53) has become an even more important symbol of big ideals, helping numerous education projects for African girls, campaigning Read more ...