Reviews
Tom Birchenough
You can only marvel at the family intrigues that virtually closed down the legacy of photographer Erwin Blumenfeld in the years following his death in 1969. "Destroy, destruct, separate, divide,” was the emphatic double-phrased imperative with which one of his granddaughters described the “family legacy” in The Man Who Shot Beautiful Women, the BBC Four documentary that’s itself the work of another descendant, grandson Remy Blumenfeld, who wrote and produced this film by Nick Watson.It’s astonishing that it’s the first such screen tribute to a figure of Blumenfeld’s stature: the efforts of Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The Major-Domo promises fireworks during the Prologue of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Katharina Thoma, the director of Glyndebourne’s new staging, drops a bombshell - actually several bombshells. Glyndebourne’s wartime history (as a refuge for evacuees) would seem to have chimed with the darker implications of the opera within - namely, the Composer’s opera seria of the title. So here we are, in these darkest of days, occupying the house of a wealthy nobleman for sure but not in Vienna or even Germany but in deepest Sussex. So why, one wonders, is everyone speaking German Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Scott Walker: The Collection 1967-1970Few pop records possess a beauty taking them into the otherworldly, inexplicable realm where it’s impossible to understand the magic which coalesced in their creation. The Four Tops’ “Seven Rooms of Gloom”, Joy Division’s “Atmosphere”, Billy Fury’s “Halfway to Paradise”, ABBA’s “Dancing Queen”, Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream”, Sigur Rós’ "Hoppípolla”: all channel something other, rapturously embracing the listener.Another such is Scott Walker’s “Boy Child”, the string-bedded contemplation he wrote which closed side one of his fifth solo album, 1969’s Read more ...
Gary Raymond
There is a glaring irony in that a play about an all-consuming obsession with one thing (fame) has no real idea of what it itself is supposed to be. Say It With Flowers, a purported biography of iconic lounge singer Dorothy Squires, teases at the sequins of the musical, the psychological drama, the tragi-comedy, the biopic, gritty realism, expressionism, and soap opera, but eventually falls between the cracks of all these. It makes for a frustrating two hours.The life of Squires was full of incident, scandal and fractured relationships. She was a star, the spotlight kid, who set off from her Read more ...
fisun.guner
Mariele Neudecker is the lead artist of this year’s HOUSE, a festival for the visual arts which is now in its sixth year and which runs parallel with the Brighton Festival. She's a fitting choice: an immersive exhibition in a beautiful wreck of a Regency house by the sea complements her long-held fascination with the watery sublime.The Düsseldorf-born artist, who now lives in Bristol, became known over a decade ago for her miniature three-dimensional representations of rugged and magnificent land and seascapes. These perfectly realised models suggested paintings by Friedrich, with echoes of Read more ...
peter.quinn
Jamie Cullum's sixth studio album is about as good a pop record as you'll hear all year. Newly signed to Island Records, the singer-songwriter has seemingly raided ideas from the entire history of pop music, such that low-fi vintage synth lines and jazzy piano breaks rub shoulders with heart-on-sleeve soul belters and subtle electronica. The kind of stylistic pluralism that directly reflects Cullum's own musical loves, in other words.The mash-up of opening salvo “The Same Things” is typical of the album as a whole, combining a deep, New Orleans-type rolling percussion groove with stacked up Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title says it all. Whatever John Wrathall’s script for The Liability might have promised is resoundingly undelivered in Craig Viveiros’s direction, and that’s despite the presence of Tim Roth in a lead role, and Peter Mullan giving a supporting turn that proves at least that he can parody himself. Possibly its comedy may work slightly better in front of a full cinema audience, but frankly I doubt it, and DVD is where this one is heading with a speed faster than the crime caper-cum-road movie itself ever manages.The eponymous role here goes to Jack O’Connell (a bright face best known to Read more ...
David Benedict
I mean, really, what is the point of Rossini? That’s actually not as stupid as it sounds. No-one has ever mistaken any of his operas for taut music-drama, and even the best of them are peculiarly difficult to pull off because without first-rate singers, everything collapses. That is, without doubt, not a problem facing the Royal Opera’s new La donna del lago. Trust me: London hasn’t heard such spectacular Rossini singing in decades.Nor, indeed, has London seen a production of this opera since Covent Garden’s 1985 outing which, I’m reliably informed, boasted (good news) the great Marilyn Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
From being “a strange facsimile of the original” to generating the “first British record made by people who are 100 per cent convinced that they are doing the right thing”, Rock ‘n’ Roll Britannia breezily mapped the protracted birth of a British rock scene which could take America on at its own game. As Cliff Richard put it, what was created was “different enough to become European. Or other-worldly.” It took The Beatles to crack America, but they would not have done so without being rookies in Britain’s Fifties’ musical boot camp.That the programme tackled this familiar story with a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Magicians’ online forums are seething at Bullet Catch’s host and writer-director, the Scottish actor and magician Rob Drummond. This is because at one point in the show he levitates a small table then takes an audience poll as to who would like to know how the trick is done. When a majority vote they’d like to know, he shows us, simple as that. The irritation of his peers is understandable but Bullet Catch, a hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, isn’t really a magic show – although it contains magic; it’s a chattily paced, oblique meditation on nothing less than the purpose of life.Taking Read more ...
fisun.guner
Every time you turn a corner, he’s there, on yet another monitor. Either the exhibition curators have a sense of humour, or Alastair Campbell really is the last word on propaganda, a subject about which the British Library has mounted an excellent and occasionally provocative exhibition.On one screen Blair’s former spin doctor can be seen talking with some regret. The P-word, he is saying, is so sullied that it’s now no more than a byword for lying. Personally, I feel more comfortable with the Jeremy Paxman line: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” Perhaps Campbell could mount a campaign Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
The past: it’s etched into the fabric not just of our lives, but of the architecture that surrounds us – the streets we tread, the buildings where we work or make our homes. In this whimsical, winning 90-minute piece by Will Adamsdale, the past has a niggling habit of leaping out from the places where it should lie buried, rubbing up cheekily against the present, and sticking its nose into the future.Sweet and slyly clever, the show blends the literary, the historic and the anecdotal to tell two London love stories, separated by over 100 years. Its ambitions are not, perhaps, vast. But with Read more ...