Reviews
David Nice
You can brush aside any problems septuagenarian pianists may have in the toughest repertoire, especially if they give you more than glimpses of why they’re legends in the first place. Those were frequent from the masterly Dmitri Alexeev, long inclined to prefer passing on wisdom to a new generation of pianists as Professor at the Royal College of Music and in his other home in Rieti over the treadmill of recital giving.This was Alexeev's only London recital this season. Enriched by the extraordinary surroundings of the newly-restored Leighton House, and the fine acoustics of the big studio Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With the total loss of its Arts Council funding, Hampstead Theatre’s future as a specialist new writing venue is in doubt. But before anything drastically changes, the playwrights and plays developed by Roxanna Silbert, who was edged out as artistic director in December last year, are still coming through.One of them is Ruby Thomas, whose Either, her 2019 drama in the studio here, was thrillingly experimental. Boy, can she write! Her latest, this time on the main stage, is Linck & Mülhahn, a historical queer love story which features a gender-pioneering couple.The scene is Saxony in the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“They say there are only two stories,” explains director Treasa O’Brien. “A person goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town.” O’Brien was born in Dublin to a naval family that had to up sticks and move every two or three years. Her first school was in Malta, where the other kids would neither speak to her nor play with her since she was an outsider.In Town of Strangers she invites people who likewise live far from home to recount their stories. Gort, a small town in the west of Ireland, is the perfect setting for her enquiries since, per capita, it has the most diverse population in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In this context, what’s named “diamond road” is a metaphor for staying on course rather than, as the lyrics of the song “Diamond Road” put it, letting yourself go or sprawling all over the floor. Follow this route and life won’t be a mess.Barefoot On Diamond Road is the third album from the Netherlands’s Amber Arcades, the recording persona of Annelotte de Graaf. Away from music, her work as a lawyer has brought a role in the international war crimes tribunal. Previously, her music was a form of Eighties-ish indie with touches of shoegazing. Beyond her glass-like voice, guitar was a main Read more ...
India Lewis
Eliza Carthy has been busy, as she always has. Recording various albums with various artists during the pandemic, her show with her band, The Restitution (and many others), at the Barbican on Saturday, was well stuffed with music, musicians, laughter, familial connections and celebrations. Arguably the reigning queen of folk in England, Eliza has inspired a generation (including a friend of mine whose imaginary friend she was), simultaneously reinventing the form and honouring her roots, the melodies and lyrics brought once more to life. This concert was an excellent way of showing this Read more ...
mark.kidel
I have wanted to visit the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar for many years: the home of Matthias Grünewald’s masterpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-1516), one of the great works of North European religious art. The opportunity finally arose in an oblique way, as the museum has been hosting a major exhibition by the French painter Fabienne Verdier.The show was commissioned as an invitation for the artist to respond to the Grünewald and other works in a treasure trove that lies hidden away in the east of France, only just over two hours train from Paris, and yet somewhat off the beaten track. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
No work gives its listeners such pleasure on the way to hell (and back) as Berlioz’s rule-busting “dramatic legend”, The Damnation of Faust. It delivers not just flamboyant thrills, but low comedy, high drama, pathos, terror, nostalgia, pastoral lyricism and crazy episodes of sheer delirium.The musical and formal prodigality the composer drew in 1846 from a beloved French translation (by Gerald de Nerval) of Goethe’s Faust: Part 1 dooms every effort to refit the piece as a conventional opera to tepid compromise. Given a $200m. Hollywood budget, with Peter Jackson or Guillermo el Toro at the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Saint Omer is a psychological and sociological mystery, unpicking the enigma of Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), a French Senegalese woman who drowned her 15-month-old daughter in the ocean.Director Alice Diop recognised her own Senegalese heritage and circumstance in the case of Fabienne Kabou, the murderer of a mixed-race child much like her own, who was racially pathologised in the French media. A prize-winning documentarian, Diop’s first feature adapts Kabou’s trial transcripts, and was filmed next-door to her courtroom in the depressed northern town of Saint-Omer.We glimpse the Paris life of Read more ...
Robert Beale
It’s good to think that there are some opera productions – not just compositions – that in themselves can have the status of classics. David Pountney’s 1980 interpretation of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen must be high on a list of contenders for that accolade. It was first seen at the Edinburgh Festival that year, performed by Scottish Opera in a co-production between them and Welsh National Opera.Now Opera North have revived it for their audiences, and it’s lost none of its inspirational magic. That comes both from Pountney’s English translation of the text and from the wonderful Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A play’s title can be an almost arbitrary matter – there’s no streetcar but plenty of desire in that one for example – and it might have crossed Kim Davies’ mind to call her play Ms Julie, since it is a reimagining of August Strindberg’s 1888 masterpiece, Miss Julie. Thankfully, that title was spiked and not just because it’s trite. Smoke gives us a key to unlock a complicated, clever and challenging play unafraid to treat its audience as grown-ups and all the more rewarding for that.Sami Fendall’s set comprises a square shallow pit filled with black sand with an upturned Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The New York Dolls, The Ramones, Suicide, Television, Blondie, The Dictators, The Heartbreakers, The Shirts, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. From 1974 onwards, New York buzzed with bands. There were also Tuff Darts, The Fast, Pure Hell, Von Lmo and others who didn’t quite grab the brass ring. Out of towners like The Dead Boys, Pere Ubu, Devo and The Real Kids jostled for attention too.Despite the crowded market, The Senders were central to this mix. Formed in 1976 by ex-pat Frenchman Philippe Marcade, who had arrived in New York in 1974, they issued one single in 1978, a seven-track 12-inch EP Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Bald, barrel-shaped and pugnacious, Doron Kavillio (Lior Raz) could have been conceived as the anti-Bond or the un-Ethan Hunt. But as action heroes go, Doron can mix it with the finest as he tracks down terrorists with his comrades in Israel’s Mista’arvim Special Forces team.Raz is the star – or one of them – of Fauda, as well as its co-creator (along with Avi Issacharoff). As a real-life veteran of an Israeli counter-terrorism unit operating in the Palestinian territories, he’s been able to bring a raw edge of verisimilitude to the show, even if the action has obviously been shaped for a Read more ...