Reviews
Kieron Tyler
“It’s very deep, very private and full of love,” said Art Garfunkel of his relationship with Paul Simon. So private that for this examination of their swansong 1970 album Bridge Over Troubled Water the pair were interviewed apart, despite both being credited as executive producers. Whatever the nature of the love, 40-plus years on, bridges weren’t being built.Paul Simon didn’t seem too enthusiastic about revisiting his past. One of the few times a smile flashed across his face was when he recalled the journey he used to make to buy records by The Everly Brothers. Discussing the Read more ...
howard.male
It’s commonly accepted that a song’s true worth can be tested by stripping it down to its bare bones: if it still has wings when played on just an acoustic guitar, then you’re in business. So I couldn’t help but smile at hearing tracks from Mara Carlyle’s lushly orchestrated (courtesy of the Royal Philharmonic, no less) album Floreat delicately strummed on the humble ukulele, backed by that other wallflower of an instrument, the concertina (played by contemporary classical composer Emily Hall).The other two musicians crammed onto the almost comically tiny stage were a double bassist (Tom Read more ...
judith.flanders
Manon is the planet around which a series of moons orbit, locked in place by her gravitational pull. There is Des Grieux, who gives up his seminary studies for nights of pleasure; there is her brother Lescaut, who translates her into cash; and there is Monsieur GM, the aristocrat who wants her body, both to possess it and to display it. They all see her as an object of desire, and their desires set the plot in motion, spinning ultimately to destruction.Sergei Polunin as Des Grieux and Gary Avis as Monsieur GM circle each other warily, and they have good cause. Polunin was making his debut in Read more ...
David Nice
Is this the year that G&S became definitively chic again? The slow-burn effect of ENO's "Miller Mikado" and Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy now results in numerous fringe benefits. Sasha Regan's all-male Union Theatre regime has delivered its best yet - Iolanthe at Wilton's Music Hall, the most touching and funny show I've seen over the last 11 months - and now Charles Court Opera gives us more witty operetta-in-close-up with a cast of nine backed up by two pianos. It's not quite on the level of Regan's imaginative refit, but it does place the singing and playing at the forefront, while the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s easy to get lost in the music of Danish singer-songwriter Agnes Obel. As she ended with "On Powdered Ground" singing “don’t break your back on the track”, her piano meshed with a cello and a Scottish harp, making what was already an affecting album track into a requiem. Obel’s Philharmonics album collects a series of similarly autumnal reflections. A rain-spattered evening was just right.North London’s Union Chapel – a functioning church – was ideal for Obel. Although she veers towards folk and classical music, her songs are dark and hymnal. Last night’s darkest moment came with a new Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Apart from voting, there is only one duty the United Kingdom asks of its residents: if, or less likely when, it comes, to answer the summons to sit and listen to evidence in a criminal court and, with 11 other randomly selected individuals, reach a collective decision about the guilt or innocence of the accused. Trial by jury is rightly held to be one of the more unimpeachable achievements of civilised society.The jurors being emblematically the nice guys in this national success story, they are also the colourless guys. Which is why legal dramas – and there have been perhaps a dozen of them Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A glittering egg cracks open and, waving a magic wand, Andrew Logan emerges riding his sculpture of Pegasus, the winged horse. He flies across London to waiting friends and relatives and, with one touch of his miraculous wand, transforms them into sparkling glamour queens.The opening credits of The British Guide to Showing Off are a witty, Pythonesque riff on Logan’s extraordinary ability to inspire people. “He appeals to the child in everybody,” says fashion designer Zandra Rhodes. "He’s like your naughty aunty, putting a bit of gin in your tea,” observes artist Grayson Perry, best known for Read more ...
fisun.guner
Leonardo da Vinci was not a prolific artist. In a career that lasted nearly half a century, he probably painted no more than 20 pictures, and only 15 surviving paintings are currently agreed to be entirely his. Of these, four are incomplete. Indeed one painting, abandoned by the artist but currently hanging in the National Gallery, is so far from being finished that the two figures in it, that of Saint Jerome and the lion in the wilderness (c 1488-90, Pinacoteca Vaticana, pictured below), have been barely touched by paint.Yet the aged saint’s musculature, the way the taut sinews of his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And so the eventful second series surged to a close with a bumper 90-minute edition - or at least it was in a 90-minute slot, generously padded with the commercials battling to scramble aboard the great ship Downton - and we were still left dangling in Mary and Matthew's will-they-won't-they neverland. The show's resemblance to a gargantuan soap which has been telescoped into a handful of Greatest Hits episodes was never greater.Mary is supposed to be marrying the hard and cynical newspaper tycoon Sir Richard Carlisle (a dish served cold by Iain Glen, [pictured below]), who has charmingly Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You can forget “I am Heathcliff”. And abandon hope of “I cannot live without my soul” and “I love my murderer” while you’re at it. Andrea Arnold’s newest addition to the canon of Wuthering Heights adaptations is the story flayed so raw you can see bone. Jettisoning such fripperies as dialogue, fixed cameras and even for the most part avoiding professional actors, she takes period drama by the wing-collared throat and throttles it with gonzo relish. Brooding and brutality is in generous supply, but when we get down to the sharp end of this blighted romance Brontë’s passion seems oddly dulled, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Where’s the African car? Seun Kuti wanted to know. There are German cars, Chinese cars (he grimaced) even Brazilian cars. At least, anyway, there is “original African music”, not traditional but something new. Actually, not entirely new, as some of the music and some of his band, Egypt 80, were that of his father, that visionary genius, subversive and sex maniac Fela. (Not just 28 wives “on a rota system” as Fela explained to me in an interview I wrote up for theartsdesk, but plenty of groupies, too.) One of the things I found impressive about Seun and his band last night was how he Read more ...
graham.rickson
Fauré: Requiem Chœur de l’Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre de Paris, Paavo Järvi, with Philippe Jaroussky (counter tenor), Matthias Goerne (baritone) (Virgin Classics)Fauré’s understated Requiem is another iconic work which has suffered by dint of its popularity; too many dodgy amateur performances convinced me that I never wanted to hear it again. And then a fresh-sounding recording turns up, and makes you realise that there is something special going on here. It’s Fauré’s restraint which surprises: there’s little shock and bombast in this Requiem but a great deal of warm, fuzzy consolation. Read more ...