Reviews
howard.male
In this self-sufficient age of laptops and loop pedals you have to admire the Werner Herzog-like vision and ambition of a singer-songwriter who decides his compositions deserve to be fully brought to life by an orchestra. After all, who has their own orchestra these days? Tony Bennett, perhaps, or Barbra Streisand? But certainly not someone who’s most recent video has so far only garnered 400 hits on YouTube. Yet last night in the acoustically idea setting of the Union Chapel, the confident yet surprisingly self-effacing Johnny Parry came across like the million-selling artist he certainly Read more ...
theartsdesk
David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars 40th Anniversary EditionHoward MaleLet’s start with the bombshell. Yes, Ziggy is a landmark Seventies album but it’s not the masterpiece it should or even could have been, and no amount of remastering or repackaging can change that. For one thing, it simply doesn’t hold together as a concept album or rock opera. For another, the apocalyptic theme set up by the opening number “Five Years” is never followed through (and anyway, Bowie covered this whole area so much better on Diamond Dogs). Then there’s the sore thumb of Read more ...
David Benedict
With the obvious exceptions of Verdi’s twin masterpieces Otello and Falstaff, Così fan tutte is the most Shakespearean of operas. Centuries before anyone invented the term, it’s nothing less than opera’s most elegant study in sexual politics. Written with the textural richness and emotional reversals of Much Ado About Nothing, it needs acting/singing performances of true depth in order to succeed. Harry Fehr’s new production adds a framing device of conscious performance, but intriguing though this is, it distracts from true engagement with the heart of the work.Intent upon underlining the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“A dirty fairy tale” was one of the encomiums lobbed at The Apartment in June 1960, nine months before it won Billy Wilder and I A L Diamond the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Wilder the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Although The Saturday Review’s influential Hollis Alpert was critically off the mark when he disparaged Wilder’s serious adult comedy, he was right to describe it as a fairy tale. A prince does rescue a princess after an ogre’s cruel treatment of her has caused her to fall into a fatal sleep.The “dirty” part is more complex. The premise is undeniably Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Brandenburg Concertos, Sinfonias Orchestra of the Antipodes/Antony Walker, Anna MacDonald, Erin Helyard (ABC Classics)Exactly why this set, recorded in Sydney in 2003, has waited so long for a commercial release is a bit of a puzzle. These are fabulous performances in every sense. The playing is so vibrant, so alive that resistance is futile. Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos are as ubiquitous as Baroque music gets, but their familiarity shouldn’t hide their musical qualities. I loved Riccardo Chailly’s historically informed modern instrument versions, but these recordings Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s one thing for UK Border Control to turn Heathrow’s Arrivals into a giant theme-park queue, but it’s quite another when they start messing with our music. Paperwork issues yesterday saw one Japanese and two Korean members of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra denied entry to the UK, leaving Ton Koopman and his band too under-staffed to attempt their planned Brandenburg Concerto. Fortunately, soprano soloist Dorothee Mields stepped up with Bach’s Cantata BWV 199, giving us a rather more vocal, but no less Bach-centric evening of music to open this year’s Spitalfields Festival.One of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Athol Fugard's 80th birthday is being marked by four major productions in New York this year, two of which have come and gone. How has the London stage honoured this 11 June milestone in the life of the South African playwright for whom the personal and the political have become inextricably linked across the years? With nary a word, which is just one reason why Tony Palmer's hefty documentary about this man of letters and more (Fugard has worked as a novelist, poet and actor/director, not just as a dramatist) is especially welcome. And why it also feels frustratingly incomplete. That Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
If you weren’t sick when you arrived at Les Cerisiers, the private psychiatric hospital in this satiric early Sixties drama by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, you probably would be by the time the institution had finished with you. Its all-female staff are either grotesque or pulchritudinous; and the latter category have a worrying tendency to wind up murdered.The former comprise the sanitorium’s head, hunchbacked, hollow-eyed Dr Mathilde von Zahnd (Sophie Thompson), and her butch, helmet-haired right-hand nurse, Marta Boll (Joanna Brookes). Together with their ill-fated subordinates, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
What an era for pianists it was in the four decades from 1800 to 1840, the era covered by Murray Perahia’s recital last night. Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert and Chopin all in full verdant flight, selected for a programme of much fantasy and dancing rhythms, in which the translucent, crystalline playing of the American found and told multiple stories.Perahia’s narrative imagination constantly strikes me - it’s the way that he can play a pair of phrases with utmost simplicity, and yet unearth within them a sense of rich thoughts or feelings following each other, mirroring the imagination itself Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
All good things must come to an end, but at least if it's a fully tooled-up American drama series it comes to an end a lot more slowly. Where the BBC serves up six episodes of Silk or a ridiculous three of Sherlock, the third season of The Good Wife finally drew to a close with its 22nd instalment.It's hard going for writers, actors and crew, but the benefits of such an extended run are plastered all over the screen, week in and week out. In Britain, at least, The Good Wife hasn't earned itself those "greatest TV show ever made!" accolades lobbed at The Sopranos or The Wire by the more Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Out-characterising anything on stage last night, London’s weather certainly did its bit to celebrate the start of the Opera Holland Park summer season. No Scottish heath could have been more blasted, no moorland more battered by the wind than we were in the shadow of “Lammermoor Castle” (aka Holland House) for the company’s Lucia di Lammermoor.The backdrop of Holland House – originally built in 1605, and determinedly crenelated and decorated – gives Opera Holland Park’s auditorium its particular character; it’s an unwise director who chooses to ignore it altogether. Seasons past have Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sing Your Song isn’t a showbiz biopic of the actor and singer, it’s a history lesson that revolves around Harry Belafonte and his tireless, long-term espousal of civil rights and socio-political causes. Belafonte is an incredibly important figure, a man whose place in history is assured. What’s less certain is who he actually is. “He took all our struggles and made them his own,” says Miriam Makeba. Sing Your Song suggests that the price Belafonte paid for making that choice is to be defined by the issues he pursues. There is no man any more, just the causes.With his daughter Gina Belafonte Read more ...