Reviews
igor.toronyilalic
Had a dastardly dirty bomb gone off in the Wigmore Hall last night and turned us all to dust, the contemporary British classical music scene would, in one fell swoop, have been wiped off the map. No more Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, George Benjamin, Julian Anderson, Simon Bainbridge or Oliver Knussen, all of whom were gathered for the inaugural concert of the year-long residency at the hall of rising compositional star Luke Bedford (above) . This was a fascinating programme, delivered without fault by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Knussen. Most fascinating Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Another day, another plot to destabilise the planet. Early scenes in the eighth series of 24 show us a mellow, semi-retired agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) playing grandad to his daughter Kim's child, and planning to return with them from New York to LA to re-establish his family ties. With his career in the Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) behind him, Jack is thinking of taking up an offer of some private security work.Then, as he's about to leave, a wounded informant hammers desperately on his door. He blurts out a tale of foreign assassins planning to shoot President Hassan of Kamistan ( Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The prefix “Christian” can invite mockery. The suffix “rock” usually makes it worse. And a Christian Rock band celebrating 25 years in yellow and black Spandex? Surely that has to be a spoof. But I have news for you: Eighties Californian glam metal band Stryper are real, back, and tonight they rocked.Stryper were formed in a world where the more macho a band the more they wore make-up, and where the intricacy of the guitar work was in direct proportion to the volume of hairspray. Stryper made no concessions to such conventions. Nor would they make any concessions to their religious beliefs. Read more ...
bruce.dessau
"So, we made it eventually." Having postponed this show two weeks ago due to the M1 doubling as a skating rink, Richard Hawley opened not with a song but an apology. It was hardly necessary. The sold-out Royal Festival Hall last night was prepared to forgive Sheffield's second-finest songsmith - after his chum Jarvis Cocker - almost anything.Making it eventually could also apply to Hawley's career. After two decades and little headway he finally hit paydirt with Coles Corner in 2005, bagging a Mercury Award nomination. If he trod a little water with 2007's self-conscious sequel Lady's Bridge Read more ...
joe.muggs
The dominant look among all ages of the sell-out audience at the Barbican Hall last night was distinctly “smart-Bohemian”, with plenty of thick-rimmed specs, duffle coats and subtly outré hairdos visible as they took their seats and gave one another knowing nods on spotting the “Fruit Tree” motif in the stage décor. For Nick Drake, the fragile Cambridge-born singer-songwriter who died of an overdose of antidepressants in 1974 aged 26, is perhaps the perfect cult artist: utterly singular, too intense and serious to be appreciated in his short lifetime, but increasingly influential on the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“New programme, new set, new city,” said Kirsty Wark by way of introduction to the BBC’s new flagship culture programme, The Review Show. It replaces Newsnight Review and goes out after the current affairs programme that spawned it, but now in its own discrete slot. The offspring has left London and moved to the BBC’s fabulous waterfront studios in Glasgow, has brightly coloured seats for its guests and even gets to stay up late: The Review Show lasts 45 minutes, as opposed to half an hour when it was part of Newsnight.It may seem perverse, then, that the opening hour-long special was about Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I’ve never been quite sure whether Brian Eno is a musician, or somebody for whom music happens to be the end product of a chain of cognitive processes. Certainly it was music that powered him to prominence, either as the inventor of ambient music, a performer with Roxy Music, or as a collaborator with artists ranging from rock gods U2 and David Bowie to composers Harold Budd and Philip Glass.But as this Arena film illustrated, these days Eno is as likely to be involved in art installations, software development, the study of mathematical systems or debates on the value of global governance as Read more ...
David Nice
Two hundred costumes, over 60 solo roles and the world premiere of a great operatic composer's first thoughts: it's a task which would daunt the best-resourced opera company in the world. The fact that Prokofiev's initial, 11-scene meditation on Tolstoy's War and Peace was launched last night by students with slow-burn but ultimately total confidence, an orchestral collaboration with established professionals and a fusion of production with design at the very highest level could only send us out in to the streets of Glasgow echoing the Russian soldiers' final cries of "Ura!"The most Read more ...
james.woodall
It's a short run, in London, but a sweet one. At the Coliseum, English National Ballet's revival of a 1971 Giselle is a showcase for a company on exceptionally calibrated form, offering audiences a taste of its myriad talent over six more shows after Wednesday's opening [the cast changes each time - Ismene Brown reviews a second cast below]. On the evidence of the latter, I'd gladly go to all of them: soloists can either shine or die on their feet in this most intricate of Romantic ballets, and if time were not the defeating beast it usually is, it'd be hugely instructive to see over five Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Not everyone was playing for the same team in last night's revival production of The Rake's Progress. On the one side were the conductor, choir and soloists, all focused in their service and submission to unravelling this quietly brilliant piece of neoclassicism by Stravinsky - mostly pretty effectively. On the other side were the sets and direction of Carl Fillon and Robert Lepage, which included blow-up caravans, fold-out dolls' houses and a mattress-cum-Hoover sucking in lovers. Attention-seeking stuff . An initial interested "ooh" become a more circumspect "oh?"; bored eyes gave Read more ...
fisun.guner
This exhibition may claim to reveal the real Van Gogh through his letters, but what of the Sunflowers, the Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear, oh, and Starry Night, with its roiling night sky and dark, mysterious cypress tree? What even of the dizzying Night Café, with its migraine-inducing electric lamps, its violent clash of reds and greens and the walls that threaten to collapse inwards, as if the painter had been hitting the absinthe all night? Surely these are the knock-out masterpieces that we expect to see in the first major UK exhibition of Van Gogh’s work for over 40 years?We may know Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Born out of the spurious Radio 4 phone-in show Down The Line, created by Fast Show veterans Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, Bellamy’s People takes bogus broadcaster Gary Bellamy out on the road and in front of the cameras to meet his public. On Radio 4 (before being unmasked as a spoof), Bellamy was bombarded with angry listeners decrying his sexism, racism and all-round witless stupidity.As portrayed on telly by Rhys Thomas, Bellamy seems slightly less likely to suffer a fat lip, and is a subtly calibrated mixture of vanity and ingratiating chumminess. Yet, as he trundles ostentatiously Read more ...