Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Patagonia’s Welshness was a nagging issue for Gruff Rhys, mainman of Welsh psych-nauts Super Furry Animals. His distant cousin, the folk singer René Griffiths, was born in the desert-filled southern reaches of Argentina, but visited Wales and appeared there on TV in the mid-Seventies. Remembering those appearances, Rhys decided to visit Patagonia to search for Griffiths amongst the region’s Welsh-speaking community. Given a Rhys-hosted outing at the BFI, the resulting film Separado! was billed as being followed by a live set with Brazilian Furry Freak Brother-lookalike Tony da Gatorra.Da Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Great stars get lost sometimes. Up there in outer space, ringed with adulation, when they get a mid-life crisis sometimes they get sucked into a vanity black hole. No light emits, just the tatters of an angel who lost his way in his own legend.Carlos Acosta is one miracle dancer whose unique gift for the past 15 years has been to free us from our sense of cloddishness. He was sent from heaven like Mercury, with winged feet, to elevate us all by his divinely sprung dancing. He is sweet and funny as Colas, easily led by the nose by a sly girl. He’s the greatest Spartacus I’ve ever seen, a Read more ...
David Nice
Everybody in the business says don’t think Sondheim is easy. I’ve seen galas where big names stumbled in under-rehearsed numbers, and last night Bryn Terfel and Maria Friedman slipped and almost fell on the same banana skins that had done for them in a hastily semi-staged Sweeney Todd. Not enough to matter, though, and they rightly brought the house down. And the show as a whole? Not quite a so-great-you-want-to-get-up-and-join-in event like last year’s MGM Prom, but still a stylish and slick homage to the great man in his 80th birthday year.The rhythms, the patter, the pathos, the pace Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The stage of the Royal Albert Hall has a rather unfortunate habit of making orchestras seem incidental. Stretching endlessly across, one of the world’s largest organs by way of backdrop, even the most generous conventional ensembles take on Lilliputian proportions. Youth orchestras, with their Romantic scale and do-or-die attack, often emerge best from this encounter, as the Simón Bolívar and Gustav Mahler ensembles have recently proved. Framed by eight double basses and five horns, the Royal Albert Hall finally starts to make sense as a performance space. In the hands (and lips) of the Read more ...
David Nice
They're having a laugh at Holland Park, surely: offering 700 pay-what-you-like tickets to hook newcomers on the wonderful world of opera, and then serving up a Pythonesque staging of an immoveable Italian dinosaur. Three fine singers wasted, a fourth prematurely past his prime: with these and less, director Martin Lloyd-Evans, the man who among many other things brought you Wallace and Gromit: Alive on Stage, apologetically presents Francesca da Rimini: Dead on Arrival.They're having a laugh at Holland Park, surely: offering 700 pay-what-you-like tickets to hook newcomers on the wonderful Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“You see! This is America! All races, genders and everything else blending together to make something beautiful!” This a quote from an American fan living in the Middle East currently on Pink Martini’s website. Thomas Lauderdale, the musical director of the band was involved in politics, about to run for Mayor in Portland, Oregon when he put Pink Martini together. When their first international hit came along in 2004, at the height of "the anti-American craze", as the singer Caetano Veloso put it, the band were an export from America that liberals could love.Pink Martini were multi-cultural Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's very hard to ever know what to expect from Alan Moore, the Mage of Northampton. The author of era-defining comics like Watchmen, V For Vendetta and From Hell has long maintained that art and magic are one and the same, and since the mid-1990s his works have often tended to be long and complex explications of various occult principles, which while eye-opening can often lose readers in all their baroque unfoldings. However, his 1996 novel Voices of the Fire, showed his writing could work powerfully untethered from the panels of comics, so I was cautiously optimistic for his new prose-art- Read more ...
David Nice
The banquet's laid, the host is absent but the guests can still relish the first-class fare in his memory. Sir Charles Mackerras was perhaps looking down happily in the company of Mozart and Dvořák as another oboist-turned-conductor like himself, Douglas Boyd, put his beloved Scottish Chamber Orchestra players buoyantly through their paces. The special late-night Prom, the second we wish he'd lived long enough to conduct, was one Mackerras had planned so carefully as a serenading double bill especially close to his heart. Our late maestro couldn't have wished for anything more blithe as a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Finding a cheerful Australian film these days is quite a challenge. Having discovered the particular affinity between Australia’s parched and expansive landscape and the genres of horror and misery memoir, the nation’s filmmakers have set about exploiting it with an enthusiasm that reliably finds a pile of corpses – physical or emotional – bloodily heaped by the time the closing credits roll. Beautiful Kate is no exception, but if you can brave its confronting gaze you’ll find one of this year’s most delicate and accomplished films staring back at you.The film opens with lingering shots of a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
With summer now fully upon us, and tourists flocking to the West End, it seems a good time to lift the bonnet on the tireless engine of London’s long-running hit shows. Over the next six weeks theartsdesk will be giving six of London’s hardest-working and longest-running classics – Les Miserables, The Lion King, Chicago, Billy Elliot, The Woman in Black, and of course The Phantom of the Opera – the once-over, checking to see whether all really is still running as smoothly and efficiently as it once was.There’s a country and western song (whether spoof or real it’s hard to tell) that goes by Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
"Stockhausen's festive overture from 1977 opens the programme," declared the Proms website cheerily. Come again? Festive? Stockhausen? From my limited but largely enthusiastic knowledge of the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen - much of which is about as festive as Auschwitz - I assumed that this must either be a big misunderstanding or a lively, perhaps German, joke. It was both. There can have been few composers more ballistically, brilliantly obnoxious than loopy old Karlheinz Stockhausen. Most famously, he declared the attack on the Twin Towers "the greatest work of art Read more ...