Reviews
graham.rickson
Britten and Shostakovich: Violin Concertos James Ehnes (violin), Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Kirill Karabits (Onyx)No apologies for reviewing yet another Britten disc. This one couples the Violin Concerto with Shostakovich’s Concerto no.1; a pairing which makes such emotional and musical sense that you’re surprised it’s not been done more often. Everything hits the mark here. The incisive, virtuosic orchestral backing from Kirill Karabits' Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is a perfect foil for James Ehnes’ jaw-dropping solo playing. The Britten has never opened with such cool poise; a Read more ...
David Nice
Britten’s coronation opera, paying homage less to our own ambiguous queen than to the private-public tapestries of Verdi’s Aida and Don Carlo, is not the rarity publicity would have you believe, at least in its homeland. English National Opera successfully rehabilitated it in the 1980s, with Sarah Walker resplendent as regent. Phyllida Lloyd’s much revived Opera North production gave Josephine Barstow the role of a lifetime, enshrined in an amazing if selective film. The real questions, then, were why choosy visionary Richard Jones agreed to stage Gloriana, and whether he would have fun at Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Having witnessed Neil Young’s shambolic O2 concert on Monday – Young treating the occasional venture into his back catalogue with listless contempt whilst serving up multiple banalities from his recent albums – I considered skipping seeing more veteran American rockers. But one should never pass on a chance to see The Stooges and, as their last London concert was in 2010 (beyond supporting Soundgarden in Hyde Park one sodden Friday last summer – what kind of insult is that where The Stooges open for Soundgarden?), the atmosphere before their Meltdown performance was one of huge expectation. Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Act I of Kentucky Route Zero set out a stall of intriguing characters, noirishly low-res visuals and an atmosphere that slid imperceptibly between "eerie" and "magical". Arranged around the core gameplay of a classic point 'n' click adventure (think Monkey Island or Broken Sword) was something that was barely a game at all but rather a sort of magical realist road movie in gaming drag.There are no objects to collect and combine into tools, no mazes to navigate, and the only real puzzles are those you are left with once the game ends. This may sound like a recipe for rank pretension but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The most interesting thing about this movie is what it says about the changing relationship between film and television. It's becoming commonplace to hear actors, writers and directors claiming that TV is now the place to be for powerful drama with narrative scope and rounded characters. Brad Pitt's zombie flick - directed by Marc Quantum of Solace Forster - falls short all round, and makes the evolving characters and storylines of TV's The Walking Dead look positively Shakespearean by comparison.Spoilers are of course to be deplored, but the story here is so predictable that there's not a Read more ...
fisun.guner
One is increasingly struck by the oddity of an annual portrait prize, or at least I am. Imagine an annual still life award or an open competition for a major prize for abstract art. And imagine how formulaic and stale that would soon become. How many variations of a photorealist table laden with grapes or half drunk glasses of wine could you put up with? Or just think of all those coolly two-tone geometric canvases that’ll come pouring in.So it’s not just that portraiture was for so long an unfashionable genre, or at least not that alone, that’s had the critics all sniffy and dismissive over Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can theatrical lightning strike twice? That certainly looks to be the case at the Donmar, which has followed Josie Rourke's expert revival of Conor McPherson's contemporary classic, The Weir, with the world premiere of McPherson's latest, directed with a deft finger on both the human and numinous pulse by the author himself. A play that extends the terrain of The Weir and can be seen to invert it as well, The Night Alive poses as many questions as it answers, though of the pleasurable kind that comes from the sort of investment in character that sets McPherson so richly and feelingly Read more ...
peter.quinn
While the melodic and rhythmic subtleties of traditional Irish music are best experienced through listening to the solo performer, it's very much through groups that the music has reached a global audience. While some so-called "supergroups" have promised much and delivered very little – being nothing more than a session on stage with no thought for arrangements, pacing or mood – in this much anticipated UK premiere The Gloaming spectacularly fulfilled, and surpassed, all expectations.This surely has something to do with the fact that four-fifths of the group - fiddler Martin Hayes, guitarist Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may have thought BBC sitcoms had sunk to the depths with Ben Elton's The Wright Way, but Quick Cuts is giving it a run for its money. The opening episode of a three-part series started last night and, while I'm not a betting woman, I'll vouchsafe Quick Cuts won't get a full run. Or should it do so, I may have to ask for my licence fee back.Georgia Pritchett's offering, unlike Elton's monumental failure, at least doesn't have the added burden of a laughter track (at least not in the preview version I saw), so I was able to appreciate just how silent I was watching it. To be fair, I did Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Italian documentarist Andrea Sigre’s first feature captures with great tenderness the delicate balance of friendship that grows up between two characters who live as relative outsiders in their community. From its Italian title Io sono Li (I Am Li), we might have expected a subject based on more documentary strands involving the life of the film's eponymous Chinese immigrant heroine, who’s paying off an unquantified debt to those who arranged her journey to Italy by working in any job she's assigned, but Sigre’s film develops far beyond that towards human drama of the subtlest kind.Li mostly Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
In Britten’s centenary the Aldeburgh Festival has come up with two mesmerising opera happenings. The innovation is to stage Peter Grimes on the town’s beach, a few hundred yards from the composer’s beachside Aldeburgh first home, amid a splurge of decaying fishing boats. The daring recreation is to present all three of his orchestrally bewitching 1960s Church Parables in their original setting, Orford Church, where Peter Pears famously created three roles: the distraught Madwoman in Curlew River, haughty Nebuchadnezzar in The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Tempter in The Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Martin McDonagh's play, which premiered in 1997, here receives its first major revival as part of Michael Grandage's star-studded first season at the Noël Coward Theatre. It's a minor modern classic, full of the London Irish writer's trademark dark comedy and scabrous wit and, with its guying of Irish sentimentality and Ireland's obsession with the past, is a bravura postmodern reimagining of J M Synge's Playboy of the Western World, which is also set in the rugged Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland and has a misfit young man at its heart.The play is set in 1934 on Inishmaan. On the Read more ...