Reviews
geoff brown
If you’re going to bash a tam-tam for six, the Albert Hall is the perfect place to do it. The reverberation lasts for ages; and everyone in the audience can see you bashing. That must explain in part why Messiaen’s hieratic, gong-crazy Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum has notched up 10 Prom performances in 45 years. Sunday’s was the first, though, to be performed by the historic and wonderful Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, an outfit previously associated more with Bach and Mendelssohn than Messiaen’s idiosyncratic altar cloths in sound.But times have changed since Riccardo Chailly arrived Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Australian director John Hillcoat certainly knows what he likes, and what he likes is lawlessness. It’s the central focus of his brilliantly uncompromising film Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, which saw a high-security prison driven to bloody ruin, and of his scorching western The Proposition. And there it is again in the anarchic dystopia of The Road (less impressive because, despite Hillcoat’s flair for brutality, it perversely shied away from some of the key violence of the source novel). It therefore comes as no great surprise that Hillcoat’s Prohibition-era latest should be lawless not just Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The verdict may still be out on the BBC’s lavish unfolding drama, Parade’s End, but it’s already done one thing: to bring the name of its writer, Ford Madox Ford, back from the (relative) oblivion where it has been since his death in 1939 (not least thanks to a script from Tom Stoppard). The novel for which he is best known, The Good Soldier (with its immortal opening line, “this is the saddest story I have ever heard”), has always hovered on various lists of best-ever books, but often rather in the lower ranks. With Who On Earth Was Ford Madox Ford?, a Culture Show Special fronted by Alan Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I'd love to see the stats on the last time a Prom was this packed for an afternoon organ recital. Were it not for the fact that organist Cameron Carpenter was sporting spandex trousers encrusted in silver glitter, a wife beater and Mohawk, you could have been mistaken for thinking we were back in the organ glory days of the early 19th century. Even the programme harked backward, offering as it did big, bloated Romantic transcriptions, arrangements and improvisations (pretty much everything in fact except the urtext).Scratch that. We did get two pieces of unadulterated Bach, the Toccata Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
As everybody but the most casual of viewers knows, the titular character in a certain long-running BBC sci-fi series is not “Doctor Who” but merely “The Doctor”. Yet Steven Moffat - showrunner and second most talented writer to come out of Paisley - seems to be having a bit of a love affair with those two words. As the credits roll on Asylum of the Daleks it’s those two words that echo from, well, whatever every Dalek uses to speak; their kind having forgotten the man they called their Predator thanks to a well-timed piece of computer hackery the likes of Julian Assange would kill for.As an Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Well that was bloody fantastic,” a broad Aussie accent declared from somewhere behind me at the end of Ravel’s String Quartet in F major. And that’s the thing with the Australian Chamber Orchestra – it’s just that simple. Their concert programmes reliably include all manner of arrangements (the quartet, for example, was a classic Tognetti reworking for string orchestra) and unexpected collisions of repertoire, but strip all the tricks away and get them stuck into a serious bit of music-making and the result is thrilling and entirely unaffected.A carefully curated programme took us from Read more ...
theartsdesk
Lee Hazlewood: A House Safe for TigersGraham RicksonLee Hazlewood’s voice can still invoke awe. It's gravelly, sonorous, rasping, but incredibly affecting – even when he’s scraping around in the depths it always sounds musical. A reissue of a hard-to-find 1975 LP, A House Safe for Tigers was originally the soundtrack to a Swedish TV movie directed by Hazlewood’s friend Torbjörn Axelman. Hazlewood had moved to Sweden in 1970, partly to ensure that his son wouldn’t be drafted to Vietnam. He continued to record and release new material, most of which slipped under the radar.A House Safe Read more ...
geoff brown
Champagne on ice in the private boxes; scarcely any spare seats. This isn’t the normal situation for a concert climaxing in Witold Lutosławski’s Third Symphony, a modernist work whose usual audience is more than two men and a dog but still doesn’t pull in the crowds. What pulled in last night’s Proms crowd, of course, was Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, an orchestra so lustrous that people would pay decent money just to hear them tune up.Indeed, they tuned up beautifully, though still lovelier sounds emerged shortly after as they sank themselves into the work that probably Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's not completely unheard of what Sir Simon Rattle did at the start of last night's Prom, where he elided two familiar works - Ligeti's colouristic classic Atmosphères and the Prelude to Act One of Wagner's Lohengrin - into a seamless whole, beating without stopping from one into the other. But it was still pretty breathtaking. With the Wagner becoming an integral part of, and dreamy payoff to, Ligeti's wheezy Modernist nightmare, the works were transformed. In their place stood one single work: a strange new musical wonder by Ligetiwagner. It was the most magical opening to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Jason Lytle has a “fervent appreciation”, he says, “for bands that don’t exist anymore”. It’s why he’s playing the cover of “Here”, by Pavement, that has become a staple of his band Grandaddy’s live sets on this open-ended reunion tour, although it doesn’t explain why the time is right for a Grandaddy reunion in the first place.Not that any of the caps or plaid shirts under the ABC’s giant disco ball were complaining, of course. While it seems that these days Nineties alternative bands will reunite at the drop of a hat - or a royalty cheque - you would have been hard-pressed to find any Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
A sense of déjà vu strikes from the very first shot. It is a dark and stormy night. A lone man staggers down an empty street through the lashing rain. Once indoors we see he has blood on his hands. A minute has not yet passed but Warren Brown – for it is he – tears his shirt off. Before we can admire the size of the former cage fighter’s guns he produces a real one. Roll titles.They identify the man as a Good Cop. John Paul – never just John – Rocksavage is a clumsy name for a leading character. His creator, Stephen Butchard, wants us to know that the politically correct PC is Catholic, Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Welcome to Lafcadio Academy for Troubled Young Ladies. In this environment of blood-soaked walls, spinning blades, spikes, ghouls and HP Lovecraft references, the curriculum is simple: play if you dare, and survive if you can. They Bleed Pixels, the new game from indie developers Spooky Squid, is a traditional platformer that serves up more splat than a hamster in a microwave. Upon arriving at the school, your character is mysteriously cursed by an evil book, and finds herself transforming into something distinctly crustacean. As you frenetically traverse the 11 platform levels of your Read more ...