Reviews
Kimon Daltas
The billing for this all-Schubert concert, "Spira Mirabilis and Kate Royal", was a little misleading, since they did not actually share the stage at any point, the two halves being clearly separate events. First came the hour-long Octet, played by members of Spira Mirabilis, followed by half an hour of songs with Kate Royal accompanied by Malcolm Martineau.Now, there are no laws against presenting a salon evening of music by Schubert. In fact, it’s been going on for nearly 200 years, and it’s called a Schubertiade. It might even have been a selling point. But then, shouldn’t the Octet, with Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s no ignoring gender in Julius Caesar. Whether it’s Portia’s “I grant I am a woman” speech, an enfeebled Caesar likened to a “sick girl”, or Cassius raging against oppression – “our yoke and sufferance make us womanish” – the issue is written into the language and ideological fabric of the play. So all those who might be tempted to rage against the travesty of Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production for the Donmar should take their complaints directly to Shakespeare’s door.Wherever there is political tyranny there are inevitably the silenced, the disenfranchised, so it seems only natural Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Neapolitan Francesco Clemente was born in 1952 into a patrician Italian family, the son of a judge. He studied classics in school and architecture in Rome, became a photographer, and then turned, as a fine art autodidact, to painting and drawing. He has spent substantial time over several decades in Madras, where he had a studio, and in Varanasi, with its continual burning pyres for the dead before they are floated off into the Ganges.Now Clemente lives in Santa Fe and New York, where he moved in the 1980s, working at first with the beat poets, and collaborating with Basquiat and Warhol: Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's routine to refer to violent thugs and vicious gangsters as "psychos", but the protagonist of Richard Cottan's four-part thriller faces genuine mental disintegration. Richie Beckett (Peter Mullan) is an abrasive Scottish crime boss who has built his own boardwalk family empire in Brighton, but now it's under threat from a merciless bunch of Albanian mobsters. Meanwhile, Richie's grip on his kingdom is being undermined by the onset of dementia.Cottan has set up a cunning opposition of sympathies. Richie and his family, notably his pallid and somewhat impotent sons Matty and Cal, inspire Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You could hardly wish for a better subject for Imagine than Jeanette Winterson. When we see her at the Edinburgh book festival, promoting her recent autobiography Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, she’s got the audience eating out of her hand: they get the full "experience". Elsewhere, though, she’s quieter, reflecting on a short enough life - born in 1959, she’s only just over the half-century mark – that has been so full that Roger Parsons’ immaculate 80-minute programme took a 25-year intermission in the middle.We jumped from the end of her Oxford years, culmination of that strangest Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Having 30 “rats” running around hardly seems the stuff of festive fare, but since the begetter of the show is Carol Ann Duffy, known in her children’s writing for dark fairy tales, we might expect something different. And, after all, these rodents are actually local children dressed as ragamuffins. Rats, it seems, can be cute and not necessarily baddies – and, in any case, the Pied Piper is at hand.This is the world premiere of an imaginative entertainment concocted by director Melly Still and our Poet Laureate, inspired by the latter’s three stories in The Stolen Childhood, but taking in Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
There are very few examples in film history of a son directing his mother, and there’s a distractingly Oedipal vibe at the core of Barnarby Southcombe’s I, Anna that might offer some clue as to why. Charlotte Rampling turns in a brittle, enigmatic performance in her son’s big-screen debut, playing the eponymous divorcee whose attempt to become sexually bold goes violently awry.Anna attends a singles evening initially with trepidation, but gains momentary courage from a straight-talking fellow single (Honor Blackman), who encourages her to loosen up. She goes home with a man. Cut to Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Lehár’s Merry Widow has been been spreading enchantment across the globe for well over a century. She’s the vintage champagne of operettas, and the prospect of John Wilson popping her cork was more than a little enticing. Wilson, one feels, instinctively knows how this music goes and indeed did so before even the composer put the notes on the page. He was surely born into the wrong century. So why do I feel a "but" coming on? Why did this particular magnum of bubbly not go to my head?First the positives. Presenting the Widow in concert has to be about the numbers; the dialogue - a problem at Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Elbow are responsible for a remarkable conjuring trick. Earlier this year their song “First Steps” stirringly soundtracked the BBC’s Olympic credit sequence, and then at the Closing Ceremony they serenaded the athletes into the London 2012 stadium with “Open Arms” and “One Day Like This”. Their musical message of harmony and celebration - of higher, faster, stronger, cheerier - ought by rights to sound like the most grating of bromides. But no, Elbow have found the secret recipe for banishing cynicism, boosting endorphins, spreading the love. It’s no coincidence that their star has risen Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Guitar virtuoso RM Hubbert is something of an unlikely champion of quiet music. In fact, if you haven’t yet heard the gorgeous Thirteen Lost and Found, the Chemikal Underground debut on which the guitarist invited friends including Aidan Moffat, Alex Kapranos and Alasdair Roberts to supplement the instrumentals with which he made his name, you might wonder what Hubbert - a heavily-tattooed onetime member of various Glasgow hardcore bands - is doing co-curating a festival with the unlikely label of Shhh!Shhh! was created by London-based promoters The Local who - together with Hubbert and Alun Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The idea of making the princely hero of Cinderella a preening, vacuous lead character from some BBC Three-style reality show is a good one. These days the notion of a smart, self-respecting young woman limiting her horizons by playing accessory to a standard-issue posh bloke is ripe for subversion. Best to turn the entire concept on its head and have a little fun with it.Which is precisely what Johnny McKnight’s retelling of the classic Cinderella story attempts, to sadly limited effect. It begins with a young Cinders scattering her Mum’s ashes around a blossom tree, and throughout is weighed Read more ...
David Nice
Now the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s second Conductor Laureate, Jiří Bělohlávek was always going to deserve a hero’s welcome for taking his players to the finishing line of their six-year cycle through Mahler’s symphonies. As more superficially brilliant Mahler series like Gergiev’s, squeezed into a single anniversary season, seem a distant memory, many of Bělohlávek’s slow burn, deep vein interpretations live on in the mind and soul. Last night’s Second Symphony, following an equally well prepared Schumann Piano Concerto with the scrupulous Francesco Piemontesi, shared many of those qualities. Read more ...