Reviews
Thomas H. Green
It’s a condition of certain music journalists – myself very much included – that we can be blindsided by originality to the detriment of much else. Thus I might rate a chunk of electronic weirdness that blows my mind on the first couple of listens over a more derivative piece of song-writing. Later on I sometimes find that the sonic weirdness wears thin, sucked dry of its original sparkle, while the more derivative music slowly reveals itself as something rather brilliant.I admit, then, that when I first caught up with Deap Vally, a female L.A. two-piece, one on electric guitar, the other on Read more ...
David Nice
Pure, unorthodox genius: the terms apply both to the three works on the Belcea Quartet’s programme – Haydn at his most compressed, Britten unbuttoned and sunny, Shostakovich hitting the tragic heights – and, if the term “genius” can be applied to re-creative artists, to the players themselves. Corina Belcea could surely have as big a solo career as violinists like Julia Fischer and Lisa Batiashvili, but she chooses to work with equally committed colleagues Axel Schacher, Krzystof Chorzelski and Antoine Lederlin in what is by and large a greater, wider repertoire.Shostakovich once asked the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Suede, lest we forget, exploded into a moribund music scene dominated by the fag-end of grunge in 1992. Initially cast as the John the Baptists of Britpop, they lost Bernard Butler, their wunderkind guitarist, early on, became as known for druggy indulgence as for albums that were incrementally dropping in quality, and spilt up in 2003. Vocalist Brett Anderson claimed he needed “to do whatever it takes to get my demon back”. Solo albums followed; as did The Tears (a collaboration between Anderson and Butler) and now Suede return (still without Butler), touring properly after a few show-cases Read more ...
caroline.boyle
There’s a giant spider in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s new exhibition of Louise Bourgeois. Her trademark spider and the fact that she lived to 98 – working into her final days – are probably two of the best-known things about her. The story spun by the spider and the other exhibits, in an exhibition entitled A Woman Without Secrets, makes a fascinating walk through the final years and lifelong obsessions of the French-born artist who did not come to real prominence until her early 70s in her adopted USA. As the Guerrilla Girls feminist group remarked, with Bourgeois in mind: Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
You could hardly ask for a better cast than the one assembled for this short run of Wozzeck at the Royal Opera House: Simon Keenlyside in the title role, Karita Mattila, John Tomlinson, Mark Elder in the pit. And at a top price of £65, with many tickets going for much less, this is quite the bargain – not least because the marquee names absolutely nail the performance.Keenlyside jitters and stiffens as Wozzeck gets progressively consumed by imagined and real-life torments, while harnessing the strange lyricism of his vocal lines. Mattila, her voice full and perfectly controlled, brings a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
In 1998, Judi Dench slayed audiences on the London stage in Filumena, playing a former prostitute who learns belatedly to cry. The tears come more quickly - both for Britain's best-loved acting Dame and her public - in the comparably titled Philomena, the Stephen Frears film that tells an otherwise entirely dissimilar story about a doughty Irishwoman determined to locate the son wrenched from her a half-century or more before.The working-class widow's accomplice in a quest that turned the real Philomena Lee into a publishing sensation is onetime BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), Read more ...
Simon Munk
It's the disease most feared among all mainstream videogame franchises – featuritis. That is, the endless quest for some new marketing tick box addition dreamed up to ensure the fans keep coming back. That, sadly, appears to be the rapidly looming fate of the Assassin's Creed series.The bonkers premise behind the series – as best as I can understand it – is that rival secret organisations the Assassin's Brotherhood and the Knights Templar have been waging a clandestine war across history, involving the use of ancient, possibly alien technology. The spine of the series is that both sides have Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Compulsives may be wondering whether it was coincidence that Bedlam, Channel 4’s new four-part documentary following the work of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, reached our screens in the same week that the same channel’s Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners returned for a second series. The channel’s own internal debate as to whether it’s out to entertain or enlighten us has clearly not gone away. Then there was ITV’s hour on OCD Ward on Monday as well, dealing with many of the same issues as Bedlam, no less seriously, this time at Springfield University Hospital. Springfield can’t be far away from the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Orgasms aside, it was When Harry Met Sally’s edict that sex always gets in the way of male-female friendships that hit home. Drinking Buddies comes to more nuanced conclusions, as we watch Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson) steadily drink and comfortably banter during and after work at a Chicago micro-brewery, and wonder just when they’re going to leave their straitlaced partners, Chris (Ron Livingston) and Jill (Anna Kendrick), pictured below. When a double-date weekend in the woods sees Kate strip off in front of Luke, and Jill dig into her rucksack’s wilderness gear for a Read more ...
David Nice
Imagine how discombobulated the audience must have felt at the 1962 premiere of Shostakovich’s most outlandish monster symphony, the Fourth, 26 years after its withdrawal at the rehearsal stage. Those of us hearing its natural successor, Schnittke’s First Symphony, for the first time live last night didn’t have to (imagine, that is). There have been by all accounts several hair-raising London performances since the historic first performance in the "closed" Soviet city of Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) in 1974, but surely each time anyone confronts this confounding work – running at around 70 Read more ...
judith.flanders
The first time you see a Shechter piece, you feel it, literally as well as figuratively: percussive is a mild word for his forceful choreography, the stamping, churning, yearning of his sweeping shapes and rhythms. Percussive is the music, too (Shechter played drums in a rock band), which he co-writes, and it is played at volumes that make it vibrate through the theatre.Percussive, too, is his view of the world. Not for Shechter polite abstraction, or even angst-filled explorations of his own psychodramas. His interests turn outwards, to the world around him, and his works are explosive Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
The best moment in this production of Pinter's The Dumb Waiter comes when one of the protagonists snatches up a piece of paper and bellows "Scampi!" at his bewildered partner in crime. The line is delivered with face-reddening passion and absolute seriousness, perfectly encapsulating this play's fascinating absurdity.The note bearing this instruction is the latest in a series that have been delivered to the room where two men are awaiting an order to commit murder. Through their mostly matey chatter, we quickly gather that for Gus (the scampi-bellower, played deftly here by Joe Armstrong Read more ...