Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
It’s not quite 76 trombones, but back in 1570 24 violins were the height of sophistication and innovation at the French court. While in England we still persisted with our viols and gambas, in France the new vogue for the violin had travelled from Italy and the King ordered a full string orchestra’s-worth for his entertainment. The result has since been restored by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, and on Saturday afternoon the full forces (played jointly by the musicians of the CMBV and Royal College of Music) showcased their unique historical sound.Fascinatingly these are not Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Formed especially for the London 2012 Festival, the Aldeburgh World Orchestra does what it says on the tin: bringing together talented young musicians from across the world in a single youth orchestra. Under the direction of Mark Elder, musicians from 35 countries, including Jordan, Ukraine, Malaysia and Uzbekistan amongst others, joined together to perform a mixed programme of music from Mahler, Britten and Stravinsky, as well as the world premiere of Charlotte Bray’s At The Speed of Stillness.Owing to circumstances beyond my control I was unable to stay for the second half of the concert. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Unadulterated happiness: swinging on the wheel, high above the ground, at the fair on Hampstead Heath in 1949, in Wolf Suschitzky’s photograph that effortlessly conveys that sense of moving at ease through the sky. Fourteen years earlier the same photographer, just arrived from Vienna, immortalised a gravely courting couple smoking their cigarettes over a tea in Lyons Corner House, the behatted lady apparently entertaining a genteel proposition; and inbetween Suschitzky shows us the view of total devastation in 1942, flattened streets strangely punctuated by arbitrary heaps of rubble, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having begun as a piece of fan fiction derived from the Twilight movie series, EL James's Fifty Shades of Grey has blown up into the publishing phenomenon du jour. It's supposedly the UK's fastest-selling book of all time, and has sold nearly 50 million copies worldwide. In the process, with its copious descriptions of BDSM (or bondage, discipline and sado-masochism), it has gathered a vast mostly-female fanbase and fostered the creation of the term "mummy porn".It has also become a giant canvas for pundits, fans, critics and "experts" of every hue to spray graffiti on, a fact which this Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Not all geese are swans, and not all Handel oratorios are like Messiah – storyless, spiritual, monumental sequences of reflective arias and choruses. By definition, though, they aren’t operas either, and it’s always a calculated risk to put them on the stage, as Iford Arts are doing with Susanna, a quasi-oratorio that Christopher Hogwood has described as “a pastoral opera verging on the comic”.The production’s director, Pia Furtado, would probably question that description. Iford Manor, near Bath, does, it’s true, have a pastoral touch. One looks out from Harold Peto’s wonderful semi-formal Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Iceland’s kings of heavy metal Momentum are launching into an assault called “The Creator of Malignign Metaphors”. It’s broad daylight and they’re playing about 10 meters from the kitchen window of a suburban-looking house. The stage is sited on an AstroTurf football pitch, with one of the goals pushed to the side of it. On the opposite side, kids are shimmying down a blow-up slide. Very little about G! conforms with the standard festival experience.G! is the Faroe Islands’ – The Føroyar - annual celebration of its own music. The chocolate-box coastal village of Syðrugøta is the host ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If he isn't careful, Daniel Barenboim is going to find himself on a plinth in Trafalgar Square. He was feted at the Olympic opening ceremony as a great humanitarian, and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is being held up as a model for how music can bridge political and ethnic divides, with particular reference to the Middle East. The orchestra's performances of the nine Beethoven symphonies at the Proms have been an event, even if Barenboim's conducting priorities have provoked some critical pursed lips and the hiss of vitriol hitting keyboard.In this hefty documentary, Michael Waldman Read more ...
theartsdesk
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Nocturama, Abattoir Blues, The Lyre of Orpheus, DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!!Howard MaleThere’s something just not right about having to reassess a bunch of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds albums in August, just as the sun is finally making a concerted effort to do its job. Cave is generally either icily cold or autumnally melancholic with the only heat being issued from the fiery hell awaiting some of his vividly conjured protagonists.The first three of these rather swiftly re-released albums - Nocturama, Abattoir Blues, and The Lyre of Orpheus (2003, 2004, 2004 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Oh to have been a fly on the wall at the Palace. “Your Majesty, we’ve had a request from a Mr Boyle. It concerns the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games.” “I’m already opening the blessed thing, aren’t I? What else do they want?” “Ma’am, they just want you to be yourself.”Enter Daniel Craig, greeted by corgis and flunkies, ushered along lushly carpeted corridors into an inner sanctum. The entire planet will have had the same thought at the same moment. They haven’t gone and got the Queen to play ball? “Good evening, Mr Bond,” suggested Her Majesty, before apparently following 007 into a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
And so we came to the Ninth. But wasn't it meant to be the only work on the programme? Why then was I hearing Boulez? A mishap: the final movement saw the quartet of soloists fall apart so comprehensively that, momentarily, it began to sound like they'd slipped into some unscheduled Modernism. We should be so lucky. No, we were still with this strangely anti-Olympian climax to the Beethoven cycle, where faster, higher, stronger had become slower, messier, more slug-like in Barenboim's hands.Did he know he was conducting Beethoven Nine, not Bruckner Nine or Mahler Nine? Twice, I did Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
So, how are we all feeling about David Starkey? The historian’s reputation has taken a battering lately, since he was seen last year taunting overweight schoolchildren on Jamie’s Dream School and more recently causing Twitter to combust after criticising black culture on Newsnight. But if Channel 4 is to be believed, such displays of bullying and bigotry haven’t dented his authority as a historian.While the viewing figures will likely be the judge of that, what is immediately clear in his first proper outing since the Newsnight furore is that, to Starkey, such controversies are but minor Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The British new wave came ashore with its angry young men – foremost among them those played by Laurence Harvey in Room at the Top (1959), Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962), and Richard Harris in This Sporting Life (1963), all but Courtenay’s rebellious Nottingham borstal boy bloody-minded Northerners.With the exception of Rita Tushingham’s character, pregnant and single in A Taste of Honey (1961), and Leslie Caron, pregnant, single, and French, in The L-Shaped Room (1962), the movement’s Read more ...