Reviews
Roderic Dunnett
Valery Gergiev’s exploration of the music of Karol Szymanowski is one of the most vitalising series mounted at the Barbican in recent years - to compare, say, with Sir Colin Davis’s Sibelius and Berlioz, Michael Tilson Thomas’s tributes to Leonard Bernstein, or Gergiev’s own Shostakovich and (increasingly) Prokofiev.The first point, and Gergiev himself is in no doubt about this, is that Szymanowski belongs right up there with the best of them. An uncredited introductory note (the others, pithy and perceptive, are by Polish-Russian specialist Adrian Thomas) rightly points out that Szymanowski Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Plaudits to ITV for their recent campaign of new drama, even if the results have been patchy. The best ones have been well worth persevering with, and The Bletchley Circle and Tony Marchant's Leaving have wedged themselves most firmly in the mind.So where does The Town fit in? Well, it would have had a better chance of evolving into something truly memorable if it had been given more than three episodes, and the curse of the short series has become the scourge of British TV drama on whatever channel. Interestingly, the makers of The Killing argue that it's actually cheaper to make longer Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“How I do love a steely sting in my fairytale ending,” croons Meow Meow, eyes glinting even more brilliantly than her eyeshadow. When she says “sting” a whole army of scorpions couldn’t equal her venom. As the title of this veteran “kamikaze cabaret” artist’s show makes clear, Meow Meow’s The Little Match Girl is an entirely idiosyncratic take on Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story, a piece of iconoclastic, bra-baring (if not actually burning) revisionist theatre – a “73-minute showbiz extravaganza on child poverty and social disenfranchisement.” Phew.It sounds like a lot to pack into Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A film for those who see the festive period as a never-ending trudge from bar to bed via a shedload of booze, Terry Zwigoff’s delightfully deviant offering from 2003 gives us a trash-talking, beer-slugging Father Christmas, unimprovably played by Billy Bob Thornton. This chaotic Santa becomes the unlikely guardian of a troubled child. Wildly funny and oddly cheering, Bad Santa puts the crass in Christmas.Bad Santa is brazenly drunken from start to finish, it even begins in a bar. Willie (Thornton) is a misanthropic, alcohol-dependent, suicidal safe-cracker. For the past seven Christmases he’s Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Of all the festive institutions, the Christmas No 1 holds a special place in my heart. I was one of those kids who, over the month of December, would carefully plot which CD single I’d be pledging my allegiance to (usually not the ultimate winner, apart from that one year Gary Jules’s cover of “Mad World”, from the Donnie Darko soundtrack, fluked it). I’d then make sure I was in front of the television in time for Top of the Pops, while my Grandad would complain that these new songs were all just noise and at least the Beatles had tunes.He might have had a point: as The Christmas No. 1 Story Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s not a real tiger, is it? Well, sometimes, actually, it is. In director Ang Lee’s long-awaited adaptation of Yan Martel’s feel-good parable of 2001, The Life of Pi, we learn that real tigers are good swimmers and even the best CG programme in the world would find it hard, now anyway, to digitally reproduce a big, wet, muscular cat that wants to eat the hero.Beginning with the elder Pi Patel – played by Irrfan Khan, a man blessed with a face that seems to know more than your face – an amazing story of magic and hope is told to bedazzled Canadian pre-novelist (Rafe Spall). As a youth, Pi Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
Valery Gergiev is a human dynamo. Even before embarking on the latest tranche of his (slightly curious) pairing of Szymanowski and Brahms with the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he has been principal conductor since 2007, at the Barbican, the man who is arguably not just a musical but a socio-political force in his native country and music director of the most famous opera and ballet company in the world was down that morning at the Russian Embassy in London, promoting his plans for a whole new complex (Mariinsky 2), which from May next year will dramatically enhance the prospects of an Read more ...
Ismene Brown
They should use the whole Yeats line: "A terrible beauty is born". The programme, A Beauty is Born, being terrible, I mean, rather than the Beauty, which is Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty, his latest dance work, which isn't terrible at all, just a mite disappointing. And it strives a great deal higher and with more aim to stimulate than Alan Yentob did in this stock documentary from the BBC's flagship arts strand. Is Yentob the most uninterested specialist presenter on TV?With that morose stare, he's a terrible advert for arts-loving for a start, leaving a chill as he wanders among the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Thanks to its unalloyed Dickensianism and Alastair Sim’s wondrous Ebenezer, 1951’s Scrooge is the definitive adaptation of A Christmas Carol – so richly atmospheric it has rendered all other versions irrelevant. Forcefully presenting Boz’s themes – the spirit of Christian charity should be universally embraced at Christmas and it’s never too late for a humbugging old misanthrope to change his attitudes – Brian Desmond Hurst’s movie may seem unsophisticated alongside The Magnificent Ambersons and It’s a Wonderful Life, but it is, undoubtedly, the best British Yuletide movie.Noel Langley (who Read more ...
howard.male
Reading How Music Works feels a bit like breaking into David Byrne’s house and randomly nosing around the Word files on his computer. First there’s some stuff about whether specific types of music were subconsciously written with certain acoustic spaces in mind, then there’s a biographical bit about Byrne’s experiences as a performer. But just as you’re enjoying becoming immersed in vivid descriptions of what a dump CBGBs was, or the inspiration behind that white suit, the book suddenly makes a sharp, left turn into a potted history of music technology and its influence on what records sound Read more ...
David Nice
Rolando Villazón at 40 is back on reasonably stylish form, as far as the voice will allow him to go – which is not always up and volume-wise only just as far as the Covent Garden Balcony. John Copley’s Royal Opera Bohème is two years younger than the Mexican tenor. It burns less warmly than the faltering stove in the first act, casts a pall over collective attempts to reanimate the naturalism which is all there in Puccini’s perfect score, and needs a second interval to drag its weary bones back up the stairs to the students’ attic in Act Four.The late Julia Trevelyan Oman’s sets still have Read more ...
Laura Silverman
It sounds unlikely but The Dance of Death makes the perfect Christmas play. Half a minute with Strindberg's squabbling couple makes the ordinary family row over underdone/overdone turkey seem like a parlour game. Need a reminder that your relatives are rather charming? This is the play for you.In Strindberg's unsentimental work, Edgar and Alice are approaching 25 years of marriage. Boredom with each other and their lives has intensified into bitterness: every observation has become an accusation, every remark a provocation. They are united only in their hatred towards everyone else. They are Read more ...