Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
While we are far from lacking in top early music ensembles in the UK, there’s no denying that the French have a special affinity for this repertoire. While The Academy of Ancient Music and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment are virtuosic champions of the genre, if we were all stuck in a sinking hot air balloon I’d lose both before sacrificing Les Musiciens du Louvre, Les Talens Lyriques, Le Concert d'Astrée or Les Arts Florissants. So it was with anticipation that I made my way to the Barbican last night to hear the UK debut of Le Cercle de l’Harmonie, the newest French orchestra on Read more ...
josh.spero
Fake or Fortune? on BBC One, with Fiona Bruce and art dealer and sleuth Philip Mould, ought to have been called CSI: Cork Street for its blend of fine art and forensic science. They were trying to resolve whether a Monet was in fact a Monet, using a 240 million-pixel camera, Monet's own accountbook (which Fiona Bruce ran her ungloved fingers across) and plenty of ominous music. Next up: who killed Marat in David's picture?The mystery of fakes, forgeries and misattributions becomes ever more fascinating as pictures fetch greater prices at auction; Monet's record stands at £41 million. The Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When the infantilisation of Hollywood started in 1977 with Star Wars, as a 10-year-old I was all in favour. The hugely successful Transformers franchise based on a series of clever 1980s toys - they’re a car; some Origami-style fiddling later, they’re a robot! - probably isn’t where that trend bottoms out. Michael Bay, the most bombastic, critically derided and commercially unsinkable director around, has as the title suggests gone prog rock for this third film, pumping up the Transformers “mythos”, and dragging it out to triple-album, 154-minute length.The pre-credits sequence chucks in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There are few absolutes left in contemporary theatre. Fourth walls have long since crumbled underfoot; site-specific and immersive theatre experiences have further done away with divides between theatre and world, performer and audience. The one principle you can rely on is that consciousness is generally a good thing – that a play capable of putting you to sleep is bad. Oh, and that turning up to an opening night in your pyjamas is guaranteed to get you sent straight home again. Step forward maverick theatre company Duckie and their new show Lullaby, hoping to change all that.In a reversal Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the many strengths of new writing for the stage is that it’s not afraid to go into the darkest and most upsetting places of the human psyche. Whether at the Royal Court or at the Bush or Soho theatres, young playwrights have dived in to explore the grimmest reaches of our imaginations. Hundreds and Thousands, which opened last night, is Lou Ramsden’s powerful and compelling account of one family’s descent into a nightmare.Lorna is not unusual. She’s a frumpy thirtysomething who wants a baby. Unable to meet a suitable man, she tries speed dating. After thus hooking up with Allan, an ice Read more ...
josh.spero
An article in this week's New Yorker bemoans the death of drawing in art. Why has the emphasis on craft, Adam Gopnik writes, been replaced by concept? He has evidently not seen the fantastic noirish drawings of Marcel van Eeden at Sprueth Magers in Mayfair.Van Eeden has created a mysterious story based around three characters - an athlete, an assassin and an artist - who meet on 22 November, 1948, the title of the show. There is murder in the Seychelles, a tram accident in Zurich, maps and guns and explosions, a complex plot which we can only ever see fragments of in his drawings. The Third Read more ...
David Nice
Profound experience of 2010? For me, unquestionably, portions of the great Russian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja's first-time journey through all the Schubert sonatas at the Verbier Festival. I was lucky to catch three out of nine recitals, and to talk to her about Schubert. I'd have been happy to listen again to any of those extraordinary works - all 19 are loveably idiosyncratic - in London. But this was a strand of unusual radiance I hadn't caught at Verbier embracing, as ever, Schubert's deepest sorrow in a late piece served up as prelude, the meltingly beautiful A-major Sonata D664 and Read more ...
james.woodall
Asghar Farhadi’s new film unostentatiously suggests that Iran has many of the same things we have: cars, cash machines, schools, sex, divorce, Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t, we gather, have modern law. Before howls of protest erupt over so banal and Western-slanted a generalisation, I stress that this is the film’s contention: the madness of law the film proposes is not necessarily fact.Yet A Separation does seem to be realistic. The society depicted, allowing one man’s accusation of another of murder to be mediated by a harassed pen-pusher in a building resembling a job centre on a hopelessly Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Yesterday afternoon's final concert at the Aldeburgh Festival saw an astonishing world premiere. A major new double concerto from a 102-year-old Elliott Carter. Imagine Schubert premiering a song cycle in 1900, or Van Gogh unveiling a self-portrait in 1956. Gob-smacking stuff. So what sort of music does a man born before Benjamin Britten have to offer 2011? Music of an amazingly energetic bent, it transpires. Conversations for piano and percussion reveals a composer who, at least in musical thought, hasn't slowed down one bit. From the off, fantastically industrious ideas are Read more ...
mark.kidel
While Michael Eavis’s fields were colonised by the solstice hordes, transforming a tranquil farmstead into a vibrant (and muddy) drop city, a very different and much smaller crowd assembled in the enchanting grounds of Dartington Hall in south Devon, for the second edition of Home, "a Festival with Acoustic Music at its Heart".Now spread over Friday and Saturday, Home offers a family-friendly, laid-back and warmly intimate alternative to the star-heavy events of the summer season. Small, in this case, is definitely the measure of beauty: the largest stages have an audience of 400 each and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Spitalfields Summer Music Festival is now finished for another year, but bid farewell to its audiences in fitting style with We Are Shadows – a new community opera devised by composer John Barber and librettist Hazel Gould. Bringing together over 200 local participants, whether as singers and performers or working behind the scenes to usher this two-year project to fruition, it’s a show that celebrates not only the talents of the Spitalfields community, but also that most universal of London icons: the rat.Inspired in part by Hans Christian Andersen’s nightmarish fable The Shadow, Gould and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The two-course evening out is made possible by the Wigmore Hall’s late Friday-night concerts, so if you get out of a central-London show - or dinner - by, say, 9.30, you can add a second layer of entertainment at 10. In my case, a ferociously poor hour spent at contemporary dance in Sadler’s Wells was offset by an hour with Joanna MacGregor in a stimulating splicing of Bach and Shostakovich piano music that at least offered something to think about, if not ultimate satisfaction. Evening not entirely wasted, then.MacGregor is worth following for her communication skills, more than Read more ...