Reviews
graham.rickson
Grainger: Works for Large Chorus and Orchestra Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Sir Andrew Davis (Chandos)Here's a welcome postscript to Chandos’s mammoth Grainger Edition – one of the best, wackiest box sets out there. This new anthology of rarities for chorus and orchestra has the added advantage of having been recorded in Melbourne, and the performances are consistently successful. The works themselves are of variable quality though; Grainger’s output could be maddeningly inconsistent. Here, the high spots are magnificent. Few composers were such brilliant arrangers, and Grainger can Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Throughout Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse, the characters of an ill-defined institution split hairs over the service it provides. Is it a rest home, a nursing home, a sanatorium? They may be kidding themselves, but not us; not when their chief asserts that “the key word is order”, or when these patients “recommended by the ministry” are known not by their names, but numbers, and not when we glimpse the diabolical misdeeds behind the door of Room 1A.Pinter wrote the play in 1958, immediately shelved it, only dusting it off for use in 1980; the intervening years turned prescience into stone-cold Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Sixty years of hard work, encapsulated in 90 drawings and a handful of thickly encrusted paintings, by the distinguished, obsessive, single-minded octagenerian artist Leon Kossoff (b 1926) vividly set out a passionate attachment to a simultaneously immutable and ever changing London. An East Ender, Kossoff has had several subjects: he has painted people, and has continually drawn after the Old Masters, first visiting the National Gallery as a schoolchild. His drawings after Poussin were exhibited at the National Gallery. But here for the first time, is an exhibition concentrating on Kossoff’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just like Vietnam in 1970s, the so-called War on Terror has been a boon to filmmakers. It has allowed Hollywood to send another generation of buff leading males off to the front and, as the ordnance explodes, bravely question why it is that they are there. However, there’s not been a lot of mainstream filmmaking which puts the Muslim point of view. The Reluctant Fundamentalist – in which a Wall Street highflyer from Pakistan heads home after 9/11 to be among his own troubled people - redresses an imbalance.Indian director Mira Nair caught sight of the slender novel by Mohsin Hamid before it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Are you thirsty? I’ve got water and beer.” The car’s trunk is opened to reveal a picnic-style plastic cooler. But this is a taxi, so in goes the case. “If you’re hungry, I’ve got liquorice.” It’s unusual hospitality, not what’s expected from a taxi driver. Even one this young, hip and, well, blonde and classically Nordic looking. It was a fine, if surprising, welcome to Denmark and smoothed the departure from Billund airport, a functional facility adjacent to the original Legoland, one of Scandinavia’s top tourist draws.Miniature towns made of plastic bricks, rides and a small-scale Read more ...
Simon Munk
"Avoid missing ball for high score" ‑ possibly some of the most famous and minimal videogame instructions ever, for one of the earliest arcade games, Pong. The instructions for Impossible Road could probably be similarly distilled to such haiku levels of minimalism: "don't let the ball stray too far from the track," perhaps.Impossible Road initially appears to be one of the popular "endless running" handheld games typified by titles including Canabalt, Temple Run and Tiny Wings. Games of this genre see you tapping screens in various ways to dodge, overcome or move round obstacles as your Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Uncensored” is the word that best describes Sinéad O’Connor onstage. Even when she’s singing a less-than-great number she remains fascinating. Where most perform, she just is, in the most naked and mesmeric fashion. There’s stage-craft involved, of course, but she really does seem to be in the moment, prancing and pixie-ing barefoot on a carpet that she always has for shows.I’ve seen a couple of different Sinéads since I first became a convert a couple of years back. One was a damaged-looking biker chick, on the release of her latest album How About I Be Me (And You Be You) early in 2012, Read more ...
fisun.guner
After the marvellous Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words, the BBC has once again rummaged through its documentary archives, this time to see what artists have to say for themselves. Artists are often not the most loquacious breed, which is why they communicate best in the language of images and objects. But it can certainly be instructive to get the lowdown straight from the horse’s mouth, even if it ends up being all performance and no insight.Picasso’s art is turned into performance, though one that speaks more eloquently than any spoken statement canIn this first episode of three, subtitled Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If JJ Abrams's first shot at reinventing the Star Trek franchise in 2009 was a memorable coup de cinéma, blending a plausible back story with a fresh cast imbued with the spirit of the TV originals, this follow-up is more about consolidation. There's bags of vertiginous interstellar action, retina-scorching 3D effects and earth-in-peril terror, though by the time you totter from the multiplex 130 minutes older, you may be asking yourself where the big payoff went.Still, to Abrams's credit, his cast is terrific and he wrings more genuine actorly mileage out of them than you might reasonably Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
US drama is a funny thing. Given the obsession certain parts of the press have with the stuff, there are some shows whose names you will be familiar with regardless of whether you’ve ever seen an episode. But while your social media feed has been working itself up into a frenzy over Game of Thrones, and counting down the days until Breaking Bad is back on, there is one show that has been quietly brilliant throughout that you probably haven’t heard of.As its fourth season gets underway on this side of the Atlantic, Justified has only gotten better since the last time theartsdesk checked Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nine people are on stage. Male and female. None is singing. All are dancing. No instruments are being played. For a 20-minute, three-song segment of Swedish art-dance electro-tricksters The Knife’s London show the sound was of a live concert, but nothing else was. Then, for “Networking”, the stage emptied and the music continued. All that was left were lights beaming into the audience.Expectations were always going to be confounded by this ever-challenging sibling duo, but in presenting the show following the release of Shaking the Habitual as an experience rather than a gig, The Knife took Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
What’s the price of betrayal? In Peter Nichols’s 1981 play it’s a painful splintering of the psyche. The betrayer mentally compartmentalises in order to be both affectionate husband and ardent lover; the betrayed loses her confidence, her purpose, even her identity until she is – in ways that Nichols makes theatrically explicit – beside herself.There are moments when this ghastly anti-romantic gavotte creaks faintly, carrying with it the sour whiff of the hangover from the sexual-liberation party games of the Sixties. But the drama, often compared to Stoppard's The Real Thing and Pinter's Read more ...