Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
It began with a Gothic funeral procession. A drum beat ominously as a line of figures with shabby black suits, whitened faces, and jagged mascara around hollow staring eyes walked solemnly through the audience. We were sat in the dry dock of the Cutty Sark, dominated by the historic ship’s elegant copper-clad hull suspended three metres in the air, a permanent reminder that this would end with Aeneas’s departure across the sea. Ahead of us, the museum’s cluster of ship figureheads – including Disraeli and Elizabeth Fry – formed a simultaneously colourful and sinister backdrop to the drama Read more ...
David Nice
So polished and passionate are the 11 world-class players of Ensemble 360, pioneering music in the round in Sheffield and elsewhere for the past 21 years, that you'd be grateful enough to hear them in wall-to-wall standard fare. But the Sheffield Chamber Music Festival has been about so much more, featuring special curator-performers - pianist Kathryn Stott and cellist Steven Isserlis in previous festivals I was fortunate to attend, this year soprano Claire Booth - and working with top-class folk from other disciplines. This year's triple bill of Samuel Beckett, Morton Feldman and the two Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This blistering account of Brecht’s classic – which he wrote in a white heat of fury as news reached him of Hitler’s invasion of Poland – pitches us headlong into the cynicism and casual obscenity of war. Elle While’s uncompromising production is like a Mad Max cabaret at the end of time, a post-apocalyptic vision of a world corrupted by violence and greed. The impact is heightened by a punchy, expletive-stacked translation from Anna Jordan that vividly demonstrates the corrosive impact of conflict on language. Eight years ago, her acclaimed play The Unreturning – written for Frantic Read more ...
David Nice
Are Oscar Wilde's plays comedies of manners or just mannered comedies? Can they be kept afloat for today's audiences if they stick more or less to the period setting (this one does; the Lyric Hammersmith version reviewed, also today, by Helen Hawkins, doesn't)? An Ideal Husband offers Wilde's richest dramatic pickings, its timeless tale of political and personal corruption laced with an artifice that gives way to reveal the jungle beasts beneath the sharp, barbed facades.In its racy, trippy entr'actes, Irish-Catalonian director Marc Atkinson Borrull's Gate Theatre production seems to take its Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In 1595 a new Doge was invested in St Mark’s in Venice, an occasion celebrated with the full musical panoply at the state’s command. Which was a lot, the Venetians not doings things by halves. In 1990 the Gabrieli Consort and McCreesh made their name – and a fine album – by speculatively recreating the music of this occasion, in all its church-ceremony-meets-political-showcase splendour. And last night they revisited this programme at Temple Church in London and gave a sold-out audience a glorious glimpse of what that might have sounded.The Gabrieli Consort made a second Venetian Coronation Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s safe to say Oscar Wilde enjoyed a good party, so it’s very likely he would give a big thumbs up to the Lyric’s An Ideal Husband, which director Nicholas La Barrie has souped up as an Afro-Caribbean comedy of manners, featuring added workouts on the dance floor.This turns out to be a timely play: a tale of a politician who once passed on key insider knowledge to a third party, whose return favour set him up for a stellar career. Insert the names of our former US ambassador and his cronies, and you can sense the magnitude of the error of judgment the younger Robert Chiltern made. Now his Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It took me a long time to "get" the English Middle Class, though I don’t think I completely understand them even now. Sure drowning in accents and assumed privilege in a Russell Group university Law faculty was a helluva’n education (some of it even on the curriculum). But it was only up close and personal, in their natural habitat, that allowed me to start on deciphering their arcane codes.Until then, as a kid does, I thought everybody just talked all the time, whether another person was speaking or not, said exactly what they thought and felt and that listening was optional (at best). If Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Philharmonic’s chief conductor John Storgårds was enjoying the taste of his pure, northern native air in Saturday’s concert: Sibelius at the heart of it, with the Violin Concerto played by a brilliant fellow-Finn, plus Rautavaara and Nielsen.Simone Lamsma gave an outstanding account of what is surely one of the most attractive violin concertos for any listeners: her performance was characterized by panache, lyricism and fearless virtuosity – in fact everything the concerto encapsulates and requires.The concert’s beginning was intriguing. It’s not often, in that randomised period before Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Will viewers tire of Rivals before It runs out of Rutshire Chronicles to adapt? Not if these screen versions of Jilly Cooper’s novels about toffs and hot totty in the Cotswolds are executed with the brio of the first two series.Like The White Lotus, Rivals has already set out its stall as a brand. It luxuriates in its idyllic location, all imposing sandstone piles and legions of big dogs and polo ponies, and has recruited the cream of the acting profession to inhabit it. The dialogue is smart, the tone exceptionally cheeky. Like the US show, it has a distinctive musical landscape – here, a Read more ...
David Nice
Vivacious Carolin Widmann clearly adores her fellow players in the Irish Chamber Orchestra, where her brother Jörg served as Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Partner until 2021. His successor, Henning Kraggerud, has already set his idiosyncratic mark on the ICO, most recently at a bracing all-Mozart programme. Haydn brothers Joseph and Michael don't sell nearly as well in Dublin, it seems, but this concert deserved equal success at every turn, with violinist Carolin begging comparisons but bringing her own lovely style to a similarly well-calibrated programme.When Michael lost a silver Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
I was excited by what I had heard of this quartet – guitarist Julian Lage, keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Kenny Wollesen – on their album Scenes from Above, which came out in January; I thought it was Lage’s strongest album in eight years.Their concert in front of a full-ish and highly appreciative Royal Festival Hall audience on Friday night absolutely fulfilled the best expectations. But perhaps above all I am excited by where this band can go over the next few years. Lage has had seven Grammy nominations until now, but never won one. Maybe that is about to be Read more ...
Mark Kidel
A gig with Tricky remains a trip to the Underworld: forever shrouded in almost total darkness, his haunting voice barely audible, he’s an artist who’s always shunned the spotlight, seen through the charade of celebrity fame, and made a virtue out being a shade rather than a hero. He’s never been shy of plumbing the depths – drawing, with tons of originality and creative energy, from a family and community background steeped in violence, the curse of suicide, and a super-sensitivity that prejudiced his breath and skin. His preference for a darkened stage might suggest a parallel with Read more ...