Reviews
David Nice
It’s dangerous to claim a sense of absolute rightness about a musical performance; that could mean no more than responding to an interpretation which happens to chime with your own subjective expectations. Yet I’m happy to stick my neck out and say that the partnership of septuagenarian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja with the young Staatskapelle Quartet of Berlin felt absolutely right in works by Brahms that cry out in every bar for authentic musicianship (★★★★★).Maybe that’s true of all the great chamber works. But Brahms draws on a unique wellspring of original melody and rhythmic ingenuity in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Frantic Assembly’s Othello, originally co-developed with the Lyric in 2008, is back in its third iteration, and it’s still not exactly the play you studied at school or saw other companies perform. In some ways, that’s all to the good.Frantic’s strength is its use of co-opting high-energy dance moves into the action. In the 1990s, the company typically performed bespoke pieces, often exploring social issues, where dance added a thrilling layer to the narrative. When the company’s Steven Hoggett and Scott Graham (who directs at the Lyric) decided to move on to Shakespeare, they had to adapt Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This concert was advertised as the completion of an Elgar symphony cycle, though in the absence of the reconstructed Third, that meant the second of two. Both were planned with interesting concerto couplings. The First Symphony was presented with the Tippett Piano Concerto earlier in the week, and early publicity for this concert promised a new piano concerto from Mark Simpson, with Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson.For reasons unspecified, that concerto failed to appear, so instead Ólafsson performed the more familiar Schumann. The result was an audience-pleasing combination, though the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Ever been to a queer club? You know, drag cabaret night at Madame Jojo’s, or the Black Cap or Her Upstairs. No? Well, not to worry – the Royal Court’s latest provides a fabulously extravagant simulation of the experience with its staging of Sound of the Underground, a play written by Travis Alabanza – whose classic Burgerz is coming to the Purcell Room in March – and directed by his co-creator Debbie Hannan.Billed as having “haze, strobe, flashing lights, sudden light changes, sudden and loud noise, strong language, nudity and audience interaction”, so we certainly know what to expect. And Read more ...
Robert Beale
Ben Gernon’s calm and clear way of conducting an orchestra (something he once told me he’d observed in the work of his mentor, Colin Davis) is good to watch and, I would guess, welcomed by those he directs. Since his time with the BBC Philharmonic as principal guest conductor (2017-2020) he’s been a welcome visitor to them in Manchester and Salford, and this programme pulled a good crowd and was indeed very rewarding.That doesn’t mean that everything they did together was perfect, but when it worked, it worked beautifully. Beginning a programme with something that needs instant Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Reflections on how the past relates to now suffuse The Candle and the Flame. The album’s closing track is “When I Was a Young Man.” When he was 21, sings Robert Forster, “I wrote songs, I was unsung, unheralded and undone”. His figurative brothers David and Lou showed him the way. Now in his mid-Sixties, he has a considerable artistic inventory to look back on. Including The Go-Betweens, solo albums, his writing. Messrs Bowie and Reed would be proud of what they helped initiate.However, this is not the source of such retrospection. The Candle and the Flame’s opener “She’s a Fighter” lays it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Ka Huma” by Ivo Nilakreshna sounds as if a jazz band was taking on rock ’n’ roll. There’s a swing and sway, busy rhythm guitar and a lead female voice singing a yearning melody. An instrument which seems to vibes is in there. But there’s more than the familiar elements. Most of the influences are unrecognisable.Zaenal Combo’s “Tandung Tjina” is an rocking instrumental with a comparable otherness. There’s a kinship with California surf band The Pyramids’s “Penetration” but, again, the primary building blocks are out of reach. Both tracks appear to have sprung from an unfamiliar well.And so it Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Spielberg sometimes directed The Fabelmans through a film of tears, as he recreated his cinema’s origins. Lightly fictionalising his own family history, it turns an autobiographical key to previous films, while being fundamentally different to anything he’s made before.His destiny’s zero hour is October 1, 1952, as nervous six-year-old Sammy Fabelman prepares for his first cinema trip, to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show On Earth. Dad Burt (Paul Dano) tries to demystify moving pictures’ illusion. Mum Mitzi (Michelle Williams) drops to Sammy’s level so he dwarfs her on screen, and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A film telling just the story of photographer Nan Goldin’s campaign against Purdue Pharmacy would have been worth the ticket price alone.But Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed offers so much more. It moves between two interlocking strands: the twin stories of Nan the activist and Nan the artist, and, fascinatingly, shows how one informed the other. Goldin grew up in New Jersey but at 14, silenced by her older sister’s death, was sent away to reforming schools and was only saved when she ended up at a hippie establishment that didn’t believe in expelling Read more ...
David Nice
There’s life in the old overture-concerto-symphony format yet – especially if the conductor not only shapes every phrase but takes care over the number of string players needed for each work, the soloist lives every bar of a concerto you thought you knew inside out, and the symphony is a relatively rare neighbour to another regularly on concert programmes.It would be foolhardy to claim that Prokofiev’s Sixth, his symphony of suffering, is better than the ever-fascinating Fifth, no straightforward warhorse, but it’s certainly more consistently dark and deep. The London Symphony Orchestra has Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s a chance – a slim one – that you haven’t seen Noises Off, Michael Frayn’s farce about a farce that, as legend has it with The Rocky Horror Show, must surely be going up somewhere in the world every day.If you’re in that minority, its origin story tells of Frayn observing the chaos backstage at one of his shows in 1970 and realising that things were a lot funnier there as actors desperately worked to get every entrance just right, than it was sitting in the stalls watching the shiny professionalism that emerged for the audience's amusement. The challenge for director, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Seventy-eight years ago, on January 27,1945, Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army. The iconic images of the ovens with charred skulls and emaciated survivors peering through barbed wire were filmed by Russian cameramen over the following weeks and not on the day itself. And from the very beginning, there was a degree of staging in what the world was shown.The troupe of children who marched between the electrified fences were dressed for the camera in the striped uniforms of adult prisoners, which they had never worn under the Nazis. The emotional power of those images – Read more ...