Reviews
geoff brown
Rich, racy, randy and irreverent: such were the R words gathered up by a Canadian critic to capture the essence of Christopher Alden’s production of Johann Strauss’s cork-popping operetta when it premiered in Toronto last year. Other R words, alas, came to my mind, like rubbish, reprehensible, risible, even rigor mortis.Had this co-production between the Canadian Opera Company and English National Opera changed so much on its journey across the Atlantic? It seems unlikely, beyond the difference in language. Canada experienced the show in the libretto’s original German; ENO, sticking to their Read more ...
judith.flanders
The opening night of the autumn season brings a gala first night, Carlos Acosta’s staging of Petipa’s Hispano-Russo-Austro-Hungarische castanet-fest, Don Quixote, with starry leads (Marianela Nuñez and Acosta himself), a very obviously expensive new production courtesy of West End musical designer Tim Hatley (Shrek and Spamalot), and an amped-up re-orchestrated score from conductor Martin Yates.Acosta (pictured below by Johan Persson) has previously mounted shows of his own – Tocororo, A Cuban Tale was the most prominent – but Don Q is his first outing in the classical repertoire, and for the Read more ...
graham.rickson
It’s the Royal Northern Sinfonia now, the Queen having bestowed the prefix earlier this year. Programming two Requiem settings in the opening concert of their 2013-14 season seemed on paper a little strange, but the main work was Brahms’s A German Requiem, one of the more upbeat, if unconventional works to bear the title. Odd that some of the most heartfelt sacred music has been written by composers whose religious faith has never seemed their strong point; you think of choral music by Vaughan Williams and Britten. Brahms was an agnostic, and his Requiem is music of warmth and consolation. At Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In this refreshingly rowdy, distinctly feminist film from debut writer-director Maggie Carey an inexperienced, tirelessly sensible teenage girl prepares herself for college life by taking charge of her own sexual awakening. She does so in a way that's hilariously overly administrative, with her plans taking the form of the title's tawdry, quite literal "to do list".Parks and Recreation's Aubrey Plaza is gifted the role of Brandy Klark, school valedictorian and virgin. As the film opens, the year is 1993 and Brandy's sights are set on college and little else. That changes when she's conned Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
They called Rita Moreno the triple threat – she could dance, act and sing. But even her spirited performance as Anita in West Side Story could not satisfy United Artists: the doomy low notes of "A Boy Like That" were considered out of her range, and the number was ghosted by Betty Wand, one of the scores of unknown singers who rescued on-stage stars from ignominy.Fifty years on, Moreno, interviewed in Secret Voices of Hollywood, is still unhappy about this. She thinks Wand’s rounder notes lack the passion that Moreno had invested in furious Anita. But at least Moreno did not turn up at the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
At the end of his hour and 20 minute long performance Shlomo gives us an encore, a percussive tune wherein his amazing noise-making abilities are piled on top of each other with a piece of sampling kit called a Loop Station. This multi-layered nugget is propulsive but the seated audience is unsure, as it has been throughout, whether the evening's ambience should be rowdily interactive or quietly appreciative, as if watching a play. Except, that is, for two women who stand up and boogie enthusiastically.Alongside Beardyman, Shlomo is at the vanguard of British beatboxing and his art has lately Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Jean-Pierre Jeunet, of Amélie fame, makes so few films that whenever he pulls one out of that magic hat of his it feels like an event. At least it used to. The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, which has just had its world premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, is a lovingly made and sweet film; but the novelty of the director’s style – that minutely observed production design and full-blown whimsy – has now completely worn off, leaving one wishing for a new dimension.The 10-year-old protagonist, who might also be described as gifted, precocious and brimming with initiative, Read more ...
David Nice
For Londoners unable to travel up to Aldeburgh – or, now, to Leeds for the revival of Phyllida Lloyd’s Opera North production – this was the only chance in Britten centenary year to be blitzed by his seminal masterpiece. After the phenomenal success of the Proms’ Wagner semi-stagings, even the craft and sure-footedness of Daniel Slater’s direction here was never going to be a substitute for Grimes in the opera house (or on the beach), serving only to show that this is a supreme music drama least happily separated from the theatre.Yet there were other virtues; given today’s most accomplished Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dino Valente: Dino ValenteDino Valenti’s reaction to his sole solo album being credited to Dino Valente isn’t recorded, but any confusion probably wouldn’t have mattered as he had such high-profile cheerleaders. Before its release in October 1968, Ralph J Gleason, then America’s most important commentator on rock and pop, called Valenti – who died in 1994 – “an underground Bob Dylan”. After its release, Lillian Roxon, New York’s most trenchant observer of musical trends, said he was “a macrobiotics-solar-energy legend”. In Rolling Stone in January 1969, Ben Fong-Torres repeated the " Read more ...
philip radcliffe
They did it, and continue to do it, their way. Under the self-confident title of The Mancunian Way, the BBC Philharmonic’s new season aims to celebrate the story of music-making in the city through works, composers and performers with special links to Manchester. There is much to celebrate, not least nowadays the spirit of collaboration between the musical strongholds in the city, where it is entirely possible to carve out a total career from childhood to professional fulfilment. One such is pianist Stephen Hough, soloist-in-residence for the season, a product of Chetham’s School of Music and Read more ...
graham.rickson
All starts with a barely perceptible bass rumble, before Britten’s lower strings begin their queasy glissandi, shifting key signature every few seconds. It’s a wonderful operatic opening, here teased out with deft mystery by conductor Stuart Stratford.One of many surprises in this polished revival of Martin Duncan’s 2008 production is the look of Johan Engels’s forest. There’s no greenery, but lots of translucent perspex. Giant plastic balloons drift uncertainly. Bruno Poet’s funky lighting shimmers. All that’s missing is a giant lava lamp. Shakespeare’s fairies look here like primary Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ancient Greece has been having a bit of a run lately what with Dr Michael Scott’s recent primers on Greek culture and society and the like. There are, however, certain parts of the television audience a Hellenistic scholar cannot reach, and they are to be found on a sofa looking for something to watch between Strictly and Casualty. In the event that such viewers choose not to gorge on The X Factor, they can now opt to spend time in Atlantis. Or should that be "Atlantis"?Atlantis has come along to occupy the fantasy slot previously occupied by Merlin. It opens in the present day as a buff Read more ...