Reviews
geoff brown
Leonard Tanner, my old choirmaster, used to say that Brahms was a composer with his feet in three different camps: the Baroque period, the Classical period, and the Romantic. Possibly he had a fourth leg too, poking into the music of the future. Composers adept at these multiple postures filled Thursday’s sometimes lustrous orchestral Prom given by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and their chief conductor Donald Runnicles. Brahms was represented of course (the Second Symphony); also the great nostalgist Richard Strauss, watering his old age and the wasteland of defeated Germany with his Read more ...
Sarah Kent
For her latest project, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, American photographer Taryn Simon spent four years searching out families the world over whose lives have been defined by circumstances largely beyond their control – not natural calamities like floods, fires or earthquakes, but events orchestrated by other people. The stories are extraordinary.The title refers to the Yadav family from Utah Pradesh, India (pictured below). Four family members were declared dead by relatives intent on appropriating their farm. Land is in such huge demand there that the practice is Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Great Mariinsky ballerinas are a breed apart, even from Bolshoi women. They take the stage with a consciousness of entitlement that’s thrilling to watch, and when this almost sacred sense of mystique and grace instilled in St Petersburg comes with vivid expressive distinction too, then there really is nothing like it. Even if three American 20th-century ballets might not be thought the likeliest territory to make such discoveries, what a night for ballerinas last night was. Viktoria Terëshkina and Alina Somova are on their way to joining the peerless Uliana Lopatkina at the high table.Maybe Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Elbowings, buttings, anklings, maimings, studdings, anarcho-thespian handbaggings – the figure formerly known as the man in black is the thin line between the beautiful game and the collapse of civilised society as we know it. And what is his reward? Players abuse him. Crowds bay for his blood. Presidents call for his execution (Polish ones do anyway). To misquote Liverpool fans quoting Oscar Hammerstein II, he’ll ever walk alone. Who’d be one?Football nowadays brings out the right-winger in one (and I’m not referring to the old-fashioned five-three-two formation). As a lapsed and, of course Read more ...
howard.male
Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. So it’s something to both celebrate and ruminate upon, that on Tuesday night I was reviewing a gig at which the guitar was undisputed king, whereas last night I was standing before an 11-piece band that didn’t include a single guitar. But the Romanian big band Mahala Rai Banda produce such a brassily dense sound that it’s hard to imagine even the most cranked-up Strat being able to get a chord in edgeways.But first up we were treated to homegrown Balkan boogie merchants The Trans-Siberian March Band. You wouldn’t think that a band that raided the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Rebecca Gilman is an American playwright who once made a big splash in London. After having work such as The Glory of Living, Spinning into Butter, Boy Gets Girl and The Sweetest Swing in Baseball staged at the Royal Court Theatre in the first five years of the new millennium, she then disappeared from view. Now she’s back in the capital with a 2001 play, whose UK premiere opened last night and which takes a peek at some close relationships between cops and hookers in a small Midwest town.Somewhere along Route 29 is a little whorehouse called Naughty But Nice. Two of the teens working there, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having masterminded the existential fantasy of Lost, reinvented Star Trek and served up the monster-on-the-loose rampage of Cloverfield, JJ Abrams now comes trampling all over Steven Spielberg's favourite turf of homely, nostalgic American suburbia. He can feel Spielberg's benign hand resting on his shoulder though, since the Big 'berg co-produced and brought aboard several of his favourite sound and visual effects specialists.Plot-wise, it's the summer of 1979 - we know this from an introductory blast of ELO's "Don't Bring me Down" - and we're in the small town of Killian, Ohio, where many Read more ...
Jasper Rees
I Resign. It’s not a phrase you hear that often these days. Unlike, obviously, You’re Fired. There was a time, largely synonymous with the era when Tory toffs and grandees had sufficient private income to walk away from employment, that a chap could afford to resign, as the phrase has it, with honour. And it usually was a chap, usually after he’d been found to be hopping on and off strippers or tarts or his secretary or handing over the Falklands to some jumped-up tinpot little Johnny Foreigner. Nowadays politicians prefer to wriggle on a spit and keep the chauffeur. Honour be damned, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having masterminded the existential fantasy of Lost, reinvented Star Trek and served up the monster-on-the-loose rampage of Cloverfield, JJ Abrams now comes trampling all over Steven Spielberg's favourite turf of a homely, nostalgic America. He can feel Spielberg's benign hand resting on his shoulder though, since the Big 'Berg co-produced and brought aboard several of his favourite sound and visual effects specialists.Plot-wise, it's the summer of 1979 - we know this from an introductory blast of ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down" - and we're in the small town of Killian, Ohio, where many of the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In Düsseldorf in the 1970s there was an astonishing art academy, the Kunstakademie, with amazing teachers – and amazing students. Düsseldorf was a proud art city, and published at the time a book of photographs called Düsseldorf City of Artists. The presence of that great messianic leader Joseph Beuys loomed large. Gerhard Richter (and Gotthard Graubner among others) taught painting, and an outstanding couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher, taught photography and photographed anonymous industrial architecture in black and white. Germany rejoined and even led the avant-garde that it had destroyed in Read more ...
howard.male
The Killer B’s have been heralded as a kind of alternative supergroup (their line-up consisting of ex-members of The Screaming Blue Messiahs, Chicken Legs Weaver and The Men They Couldn’t Hang) so my expectations last night were high. But a poor sound system, in conjunction with the band’s desire to play much too loud for that poor sound system, ended up making it very hard to judge whether I was hearing the future of rock’n’roll or just another pub rock band.The irony with full-on raucous rock‘n’roll is that it’s a fine art. You might think that it’s just about plugging a cheap guitar into a Read more ...
bella.todd
Halfway through Sean Mathias’s gripping new production of The Syndicate, Ian McKellen’s Don Antonio Barracano reaches for his hat, stick and gloves and heads out through the olive groves to "make [a man] an offer". He looks and sounds like a nice old gent setting out for an afternoon stroll. Unless, of course, you’re passingly acquainted with The Godfather.Set in the criminal underworld of Sixties Naples, Eduardo de Filippo’s dark-cornered comedy is a far, far better play than its performance history here in the UK (just one radio production with Paul Scofield) might have you believe. A Read more ...