Reviews
Kieron Tyler
A lot has blown in since the last Scandinavian round-up. The most recent releases sifted here include singer-songwriter intimacy, various forms of electropop, several shades of jazz experimenta, joyous dance-pop and some distinctly non-Scandinavian flavours. High points are many. Satisfaction is a certainty.On their last album, 2010’s Magic Chairs, Danish moodists Efterklang gently embraced a more direct way of presenting their songwriting. Up to that point, their sepulchral melodies had intertwined with instrumentation that merged glitchiness with the organic. Magic Chairs smoothed the edges Read more ...
Ismene Brown
For Darcey Bussell it’s Baryshnikov in The Turning Point; for Carlos Acosta it’s The Red Shoes. No one at last week's starry premiere of Love Tomorrow at the Raindance Film Festival, when I asked them for their favourite dance film, mentioned Black Swan. Films about the ballet life are rareties - are the memorable ones those that are realistic about their strenuous world or are they the expressionistic shockers that let rip with the curtains and OTT fantasies?Indeed, it’s unusual to see a dance film being made at all, let alone picked for a celebrated indie film festival like Raindance this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Being told that Magical Mystery Tour was a home movie is bit tiring. Self-evidently, The Beatles’ filmic response to the psychedelic experience was not that. They tried, and failed, to hire Shepperton Studios. Known artists like Ivor Cutler and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were brought on board. Gavrik Losey, then hot from being an assistant director on Modesty Blaise, worked on it. Masses of extras were employed. Although a self-originated vanity project, none of this points to it being a home movie. The negative reception received at the time seems to have skewed the collective consensus. Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Like several of Bill Naughton’s plays, Lighthearted Intercourse started life as a BBC Third Programme drama. When it was broadcast, in 1963, its title was, less provocatively, November Day. Subsequently, it was rejected for the stage by producer Binkie Beaumont, who apparently tried to get Michael Caine or Albert Finney for the lead role of Joe, considered an “Alfie-size” part by the author. “The setting might be poor, but the characters are rich, at least, so I think,” he wrote to Binkie. “A sort of high comedy in low places, yes, genuine kitchen mink.” Even Sir Bernard Miles, who was Read more ...
theartsdesk
B B King: Ladies & Gentlemen…Mr B.B. KingKieron TylerOne of the stranger manifestations of U2’s Eighties fascination with the iconography of American music was “When Love Comes to Town", their collaboration with B B King. As a single, it was a hit, something King has never chased. This smart, career-spanning box set is probably not going to have the same effect as U2’s patronage, but the still-constantly touring 87-year-old blues legend is unlikely to be fussed about that.Ladies & Gentlemen…, confusingly, comes in two configurations: a 4-CD, 77-track set and a 10-CD, 194-track Read more ...
David Nice
Can two half-orchestras playing together ever be better than one well-established organism? The second and third concerts in yet another special project masterminded by Vladimir Jurowski, drawing together British and Russian perspectives on war and peace, proved that they could. It may have been disappointing to find the Russian National Orchestra on Thursday evening launching so cold-bloodedly into the feral start of Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony. But when many of their key players upped their game by joining colleagues from the London Philharmonic Orchestra the following evening in Read more ...
judith.flanders
Site-specific theatre is hard – where to put the audience, can they stand for nearly two hours, how do we enable them to see/hear, most importantly, what is the purpose of the site and how is it to be used? Verbatim theatre, too, is hard – how to shape a narrative, how to develop characters. Put the two genres together, and what have you got? A well-intentioned, rather unfocused mess, to be honest.On paper, the idea is great: three journalists interviewed 43 of their colleagues about their own experiences, their views on the industry and the state of journalism. Then the company (the National Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Victor Ullmann’s 1943 opera The Emperor of Atlantis never made it beyond a dress rehearsal during the composer’s tragically curtailed lifetime. Composed in the Terezín concentration camp, this operatic satire is a work of exquisite bravery – a musical credo and shout of defiance that backs humanity in the face of overwhelming odds. It’s also an exuberant magpie score, where the composer’s ear for jazz, cabaret, neo-classical pastiche and dance tunes shows its inventive skill.After disappearing until the 1970s, the work is enjoying something of a revival in London at the moment. A fringe Read more ...
graham.rickson
James MacMillan: Veni, Veni Emmanuel, A Deep but Dazzling Darkness, Ì (A meditation on Iona) Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic/James MacMillan (Challenge Classics)James MacMillan’s Veni, Veni Emmanuel, premiered by Evelyn Glennie in 1992, is a rare beast, a percussion concerto which always sounds like music, not a cabaret act. The theological baggage underlying MacMillan’s work may unsettle some listeners but never gets in the way; this piece is tautly constructed and highly entertaining. What you miss is the visual element – being able to see the remarkable Colin Currie rapidly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I daresay some of you, like theartsdesk, have been pining for the sadly departed Spooks. Its production company, Kudos, knows how you feel, and has rustled up this pacey, knotty and deliberately complicated thriller in its place.The decision had clearly been made to seize the viewer's windpipe in a throttling grip even before the credits had stopped rolling, and the opening 15 minutes of this debut episode charged along like a herd of furious buffalo overdosing on amphetamines. We were in Tangier, armed with high-octane cinematography and a panicky sense of encroaching danger. Sam Hunter ( Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio should see an uptick in admissions on the back of Liberal Arts. The wan cross-generational love story was shot on the invitingly leafy grounds of a campus whose alumni over time have included E L Doctorow, Paul Newman and this very film's own co-star, Alison Janney. But if the place looks lovely, the people decidedly don't. One's best advice for Elizabeth Olsen, who walks off with the film playing a lovestruck undergrad, is to get out - and fast. Instead, this vibrant actress spends most of the film mooning over Jesse (Josh Radnor, who also functioned as Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Albert Herring probably doesn’t make the top five most performed of Britten’s operas, yet is easily the best known work in English Touring Opera’s brave Autumn season – the other two are Viktor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis and Peter Maxwell Davies’ The Lighthouse.Britten’s "country comedy" is light-hearted but it displays similar preoccupations to Peter Grimes and Billy Budd – insularity, groupthink, innocence and a hero who doesn’t fit in. Overall, ETO gave a compelling production with very effective direction from Christopher Rolls. The characterisation in the piece is fairly two- Read more ...