Reviews
David Nice
The prospect of adventuring from one unpredictable day to the next in the course of Michael Tippett’s Triple Concerto, and from dawn to twilight in just over an hour’s orchestral music from Wagner’s Ring, seemed very much weighted in the English composer’s favour. Frankly, had Mark Wigglesworth only conducted Siegfried’s Funeral March in this concert’s second half, he would have consolidated an already glowing reputation as a top-notch Wagnerian. That he and the BBC Symphony Orchestra burned their symphonic way through Dutch percussionist Henk de Vlieger’s audacious, unbroken “orchestral Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Terence Stamp is rediscovered as a leading man once a decade. There was The Hit (1984), The Limey (1999), and now this. He reappears every time with his famous beauty weathered but more attractive, his masculine mystery deeper, steely dignity unruffled. Song for Marion pairs him with one of his great Sixties peers, Vanessa Redgrave, as long-married Arthur and Marion.Arthur’s hostility to expressing emotion has alienated son James (Christopher Eccleston), and he can’t change even as Marion suffers with cancer while singing in a choir he can’t bring himself to join, despite the entreaties of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The Gaslight Anthem’s star has been in the ascendant for some time now - arguably since the release of their 2008 breakthrough record, The ’59 Sound. But nowhere has that change been more dramatic than in the evolution of their live shows. The Gaslight Anthem that commanded the stage in Glasgow last night was an altogether more confident, self-assured beast than the band that played the same venue in the summer of 2010.There’s a certain weariness that sits on Brian Fallon as a songwriter nowOne thing that hadn’t changed since then, however, was the somewhat eclectic choice of support band. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In the Fog, Russian director Sergei Loznitsa’s second feature, shows the wartime world of partisans and collaborators fraught with moral uncertainties. Set in 1942 in German-occupied Belorussia, it returns to a theme much explored by Soviet directors, most notably Elem Klimov in his visceral Come and See. Loznitsa’s film, with the exception of a wider opening scene, is almost a chamber piece: three characters, slow-moving action, dialogue without a voice raised, no musical score.Loznitsa’s background was in documentary, before he completed the acclaimed My Joy two years ago, a journey through Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Italian cinema’s resurgence can be felt in the ghetto-operatic sweep of Daniele Cipri’s cautionary Sicilian tale. Like Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah follow-up Reality (also at the LFF), it shows an initially likeable working-class family unravelled by passing contact with temptation. For Garrone’s far more sympathetic family, that’s the prospect of fame on Big Brother. Here, a child of Palermo scrap-dealer Nico Ciraulos (Toni Servillo) is killed during a botched Mafia hit.Cipri doesn’t bother trying to make us grieve, which the family don’t either after they realise that as Mafia victims they’re Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It is considerate of Manchester’s two professional symphony orchestras to have organised their opening Wagner celebration salvoes so that they dovetail so neatly. The BBC Philharmonic opened their season three weeks ago with the Wesendonck Lieder, famously inspired by the composer’s infatuation with Mathilde, the wife of his wealthy sponsor Otto Wesendonck, and featuring those two well-known studies for Tristan und Isolde, "Im Treibhaus" (In the Hothouse) and "Traume" (Dreams). Last night came the Hallé with the Prelude and Liebestod of that very opera.With principal guest conductor Markus Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If the first rule of being a novelist is to write about what you know, then the first rule of comedy is to be yourself. And in that respect Shappi Khorsandi starts with an advantage, as being herself means she's warm and likeable and the audience are instantly on her side. And when it comes to her material, she started in stand-up with another advantage, in that her parents had to escape persecution in Iran (her father is a satirist who upset the ayatollahs), and for a while the family were given protection officers when they moved to London.She has always mined her own life for material, Read more ...
Helen K Parker
You're on the roof of an abandoned apartment building, eyeing a couple of thugs that stand between you and a kidnapped shopkeeper. Do you (a) rain merry death down upon them via a stylish blade-pistol combo, (b) snipe from afar with your crossbow and incendiary bolts, or (c) possess a nearby rat and attempt to find a crack in one of the walls? After much experimenting, and much reloading, I finally settled on (d): drop a plague-ridden corpse at the guards' very feet, silently knocking them out with sleep bolts as they separate to discover the body's origin.Dishonored is a game about choice. I Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If all of Loserville were as arresting and witty as its design, the West End would finally have what it hasn't offered playgoers in years: a buoyant British musical not reliant on a celebrated back catalogue or penned by Andrew Lloyd Webber and his various writing partners over time. As it is, the Elliot Davis/James Bourne collaboration, first seen over the summer at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, is cute and bouncy but also slightly dim; a tad of originality wouldn't go amiss in a show so busy referencing multiple sources that it sacrifices its own identity along the way. The Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Has the great ballerina Tamara Rojo ever done a more nerveracking performance than she did last night in Milton Keynes? On her first night as player-manager of English National Ballet, both its new artistic director and its chief ballerina, she had to inhabit the skin of a dewy 16-year-old discovering the world - all the while watching the stage with the steel gaze of a boss to see if her employees were doing their job to standard.This is a model that is essentially unknown to British ballet for more than half a century since Alicia Markova and the Festival Ballet back in the 1950s - Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Don Giovanni – Coming Soon” winked and nudged the publicity posters for English National Opera’s latest production. And just in case the entendre wasn’t clear they added a picture of a condom. Playful, provocative and just a little bit sordid, it captured the spirit of Mozart’s damaged seducer with singular accuracy. Too bad the revival of Rufus Norris’s 2012 production, though much changed since we last saw it, is still about as enticing as a second-hand sex toy.Jeremy Sams has written a brilliant contemporary libretto – less a translation and more a free reworking of Da Ponte’s text. The Read more ...
peter.quinn
Possessing one of the most recognisable sounds in jazz, US trio The Bad Plus don’t so much subvert genre as wrap it up in a little parcel and put an incendiary device under it. Jazz, rock, pop, country and classical all get thrown into their inimitable blender, as typified by album opener “Pound for Pound”, which traces a musical journey from Satie-like simplicity to an all-out rhapsodic assault on the senses.“Seven Minute Mind” mines the trio’s characteristic embracing of minimalism, with piano and bass pounding out an aggressive, slightly crazed, ostinato before pianist Ethan Iverson peels Read more ...