Reviews
Thomas H. Green
I do not envy the Portico Quartet’s stage manager. The Komedia stage is not very big and most of it is covered in wire, effects boxes, electronic gizmos and other units. Amidst this carnage of cables, before the band arrives on stage, stands laptop DJ, Flying White Dots (aka Bryan Whellams), DJ Rob Da Bank’s “favourite bootleg mashup artist” (so Whellams' business card later tells me). He entertains the milling studenty crowd with his alternative versions of Elton John, Simon & Garfunkel, America and others, as well as Angelo Badalamenti’s grinding "The Pink Room" from the Twin Peaks film Read more ...
geoff brown
For more than 10 years now I have been waiting in vain for the pianist Evgeny Kissin to shatter the stereotyped image built around him by music critics who haven’t always liked what they’ve heard. You know the kind of thing: Kissin the visitor from outer space, the strange performer who bows to the audience like a priest at a religious rite, displays plenty of peerless technique, but after decades cocooned and fêted on the virtuoso circuit appears too often emotionally remote, as if his feelings had been locked in his dressing-room fridge or maybe a strongbox in Siberia.I recognise much of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The final section of The Joy of Disco illustrated how disco music grew into a vast global phenomenon. It had been brought to the popular mainstream by the success of Saturday Night Fever, was enjoyed by grannies at Pontins, and even prompted 70-something showbiz veteran Ethel Merman to make a disco album.But the central theme of the film was the way that disco represented the triumph of social groups who had been deemed to fall outside the prevailing social norms. Blacks, gays and Hispanics flocked to join the scintillating Church of Disco as it blossomed through the Seventies, and it became Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There must be a protest movement going on in Birmingham’s ballet against London’s - if down south they insist on Kenneth MacMillan’s box-office blasters, so in the Midlands it’s Frederick Ashton’s more fragile work that reigns. BRB director David Bintley’s northern chip on the shoulder has its uses, and especially this spring. After his hugely entertaining Hobson’s Choice last week, here is a double bill of Antiques Roadshow Ashton that it's unlikely today's Royal Ballet (trying so consciously to be hip) would think of rediscovering.Its problem, soberly, is that both pieces are difficult to Read more ...
peter.quinn
Released last month on One Fine Day Records to excellent reviews, last night saw the first of an 11-date UK tour for Gerry Diver's remarkable multimedia work, The Speech Project. Conceived over the past four years by musician, composer and producer Diver, a former member of Irish world music group Sin é and Shane McGowan's The Popes, at its heart The Speech Project features new and archival spoken word recordings of seminal Irish musicians and singers including Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore, Damien Dempsey, Joe Cooley, Danny Meehan, Martin Hayes and Margaret Barry.Specific motifs or phrases Read more ...
joe.muggs
A mea culpa from me: I never gave Sbtrkt's records the attention they deserved. I always thought they were a capitulation, a softening of the radical developments of the post grime and dubstep generation with more traditional musicality and indie affectations to reach out to a more generalist, NME reading audience... and in a way they are – but, I came to realise, that's not a bad thing, and certainly not cynically done.Having listened to last year's self-titled debut album more thoroughly, it became clear that there is a distinct and often deliciously absorbing character to Aaron Jerome's Read more ...
fisun.guner
Michael is a work of fiction, but it is also clearly an amalgam of real-life events. For first-time Austrian director Markus Schleinzer (former casting director for Michael Haneke, whose influence you may detect), the subject must have particular resonance: in this story of a child abduction by a lone paedophile, it’s unavoidable that we think of Josef Fritzl and Wolfgang Priklopil, as well as Belgian child-killer Marc Dutroux. Schleinzer has created a script that bears comparison to all three cases in ways that are incidental but also striking.Schleinzer also appears to rely on some of the Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
There’s always a bit of a buzz around a premiere, even one which may seem slightly off-the-wall. Jan Sandström’s Echoes of Eternity is a concerto for two solo trombones – unusual in itself, given that there are precious few concerti for just one solo trombone – and symphony orchestra. Add to that the fact that one of the soloists is also the conductor and it’s easy to see that this piece is beginning to get complicated.Even more odd was the fact that it started last night with neither conductor not the other soloist on the platform. One moment, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra was Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Two superb exhibitions at Tate Modern bring into public view the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and Italian conceptualist Alighiero Boetti; their work is not in any way connected except that, with their singular voices, each deserves much broader recognition.Conceptualism often gets a bad press because people associate it with those artists who, more interested in ideas than products, rely on others to translate their concepts into objects. The approach is seen by many as a dereliction of the relationship between an artist and their materials, which some consider crucial if an object is Read more ...
Ismene Brown
“The lady from the sea” is what a remote Norwegian fjord town calls the young second wife of its good doctor, an elusive woman who seems to walk in the footsteps of the ghost of her well-loved predecessor. Joely Richardson is doing much the same by taking on an Ibsen role previously frequented by her mother and sister, Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson, and directed by her dad, Tony Richardson - and it’s hard to say whether it’s her comparative slightness of gifts or Stephen Unwin’s domesticated direction that make so little of an enticingly strange play.There are pre-echoes of Maurice Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's a quintessential Channel 4 idea. Take one hot-button issue (racial integration, or lack of it), go to Bradford ("one of Britain's most segregated cities," according to the voiceover), and shove a racially mixed bunch of locals into a thinly-disguised Big Brother house to see how they'll get along. To stir the pot a bit more, the eight chosen "contestants" all failed the government's UK Citizenship test.Not that that singles them out, particularly. The programme-makers staged test-sittings all around Bradford, from the Asian-dominated city centre or Manningham to predominantly white areas Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What’s it like to be young, British and Muslim in the age of austerity? In an era of global financial crisis, high unemployment and shrinking pay packets, what can this country offer British Asian youth? New talent Ishy Din poses these questions in his storming debut play which takes a trip to the local snooker hall in the company of four blokes, plays a few rounds of pool, downs a few pints and then chats its way up and down the walls and across the ceiling of the place, before quietly staggering home.The play’s title refers both to players who can’t make a direct shot in a game of pool and Read more ...