Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Merrell Fankhauser's first outing on record was with Californian instrumental surf band The Impacts, who issued their sole album in 1963. Thereafter, he was the prime mover in an unbroken succession of pop, psychedelic and freak-rock bands. His first solo album arrived in 1976.Commercial success? None that was measurable. The Impacts had a track titled “Wipe Out” but The Surfaris scored a hit with a different instro with the same name. His top-notch psychedelic-era band Fapardokly were only heard as part of an album with random other Fankhauser-related tracks which was issued in early 1968. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What a fascinating work Mahler's Ninth Symphony is! Marvellous and astonishing as well, of course. But these qualities are, so to speak, written into the score (did Mahler ever compose anything not designed to astonish?).Yet the fascination comes from outside, from the music’s time and place. And for various reasons Markus Stenz's performance, in front of a surprising number of unoccupied seats in Cardiff’s St.David’s Hall, hinted strongly at this aspect while by no means downplaying the others.Powerful and profoundly engaged though it was, this was not a performance that bled visibly, as so Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Life is full of coincidences and contradictions. As I was walking to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was on his feet in the House of Commons delivering yet another rebalancing of individual and collective resources. On reading a couple of fine essays in the excellent programme, I saw the acknowledgement of the production’s sponsor, Pragnell.The first item that appears on the jeweller’s website is a pair of earrings retailing at an eye-watering £71,500. Which is to say that the inequalities that fired Charles Dickens’ anger in the 1840s are still with us in the Read more ...
David Nice
David Hill, long-term driving force of the Bach Choir which Vaughan Williams sang in for 18 years before becoming its music director in 1921, claims VW as “a quintessentially English composer”.That was rather less the case in Thursday night's choice of works gilded by the Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall. The Overture to The Wasps is influenced by French and Russian examples, the early Swinburne setting The Garden of Proserpine offers a kind of late-romantic lingua franca, and, sea shanties apart, A Sea Symphony unfurls what its chosen genius Walt Whitman calls “a pennant universal”. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
First off, I must confess that fibre or textile art makes me queasy. I don’t know why, but all that threading, knotting, twisting, coiling and winding gives me the creeps. So it’s all the more extraordinary that I was blown away by Magdalena Abakanowicz’s huge woven sculptures.Scale is the key; the Polish artist did nothing by halves. Dominating the central space of her exhibition are ten magnificent forms (main picture) that hang from the ceiling to create a forest of darkly intriguing presences. Made from rope, sisal and horsehair died black or rich brown, they are reminiscent of hollowed Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Was it lockdown that did it? Forcing filmmakers to sit at home, contemplate their lives, and conclude that just as soon as the masks came off, it was time to shine a light on their youth?Since Covid struck, we’ve seen Kenneth Branagh’s growing-up-in-the-Troubles memoir Belfast, Richard Linklater’s nostalgic animation Apollo 10 1/2 : A Space Age Childhood, and The Souvenir Part II, in which Joanna Hogg mines her film student days yet again.There's also Charlotte Wells’s superb debut Aftersun that looks back from a grown daughter's perspective on a Turkish package Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester's champions of contemporary music, just stripped of support by Arts Council England, are undaunted and last night continued doing what they do best. A small ensemble of virtuoso players brought a large and appreciative audience at Hallé St Peter’s a set of four challenging pieces, with a world premiere and a UK premiere among them.Challenging, because the music was all complex and in each case spoke a language of its own – but rewarding, too, because of the sense of exploration and the sheer ingenuity of the sounds being heard. Two of these were by young composers championed Read more ...
joe.muggs
Quite how Shabaka Hutchings manages to be Shabaka Hutchings is one of the great mysteries of modern culture, and one that could probably teach us all a lot of value to society if we ever worked it out. From the devastating energy of The Comet Is Coming and Sons Of Kemet to the gentlest of shakuhachi experiments posted near daily on his social media, he consistently pushes the boundaries of style and genre. He’s played with everyone from Courtney Pine to the Sun Ra Arkestra, Mulatu Astatke to the Ligeti String Quartet, and he’s still only in his thirties. And on top of that, he is a mentor to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The New York-based Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells's feature debut Aftersun is a sublime example of how an opaque style can be wedded to an ambiguous storytelling technique without cost to psychological truth. Though the movie is minimalistic on every level except its retrospective late Nineties Turkish seacoast setting, which Wells resists exploiting too pictorially, her mastery of film language is so uncanny as to make exposition almost redundant. Nothing much happens in Aftersun beyond a pre-teen’s first kiss and what might or might not be her young father’s first or second Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If anyone in the audience at the Eventim Apollo was expecting Jerry Sadowitz to rein things in after the spot of bother he ran into at the Edinburgh Fringe in August, then they were quickly disabused.The Pleasance had cancelled the second of two planned shows of his latest show Not For Anyone at the festival after complaints by venue staff about the comic exposing his penis during one gag and the use of the P-word to describe the man who has become our new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.No Sadowitz member on display at the Apollo – playing the biggest venue if his career – but plenty appearances Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A fine cast, starring Ralph Fiennes as a deranged super-chef along with Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult, Janet McTeer, Rob Yang and an exclusive restaurant serving horror as a main course – it sounds deliciously promising. But although there are some arresting images, this black comedy doesn’t quite deliver.Directed by Mark Mylod with a script by Will Tracy (both have worked on episodes of Succession) and Seth Reiss, the dialogue is disappointing, the plotting inconsistent and it’s hard to care about any of the characters. If you want culinary drama, Boiling Point and The Bear are far more Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the past, playwright Terry Johnson has mixed sex and comedy with hilarious results. His Freudian farce, Hysteria, and his tribute to traditional British Benny-Hill-style comedians, Dead Funny, share a bed of giggling gyrations with his love letter to Carry On films, the innuendo heavy Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick.But now, as his latest show reopens the Menier Chocolate Factory, which has been closed for a while, does he still have the magic touch? With its lurid title, The Sex Party is certainly a come-on, but is it also a turn-off?Johnson’s idea for a sex comedy is very promising: a Read more ...