Reviews
Adam Sweeting
When the first series of The Capture arrived three years ago, theartsdesk liked it so much that we reviewed it three times. Writer-director Ben Chanan had successfully, and addictively, tapped into a secret dystopia of blanket digital surveillance and so-called “correction”, in which anyone might be manipulated by shadowy state agencies to serve their own hidden agendas.That sense of an apparently “real” world subsumed by a malign virtual facsimile which can be rewritten and modified at will again underpins this second series. As we saw in a chilling opening scene, the technology could even Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Voces8 Live from London, now in its seventh iteration, has progressed from streaming choral chamber music from an empty studio to an 80-strong visiting choir in a packed Christ Church, Spitalfields. In doing this the festival has retained its best features – a variety of repertoire, collaboration with a range of ensembles – while adding scale and the warmth of a live audience.The final concert of the current series of ten saw TUKS Camerata (pictured below), a student choir from the University of Pretoria, singing both alone and alongside Voces8 themselves, in a programme called “Hope” Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
For the penultimate concert in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s residency at the Edinburgh Festival, the chosen repertoire was evidently considered so obscure that the box office managers didn’t even try to sell any tickets in the Usher Hall’s cavernous upper circle. To shut off nearly half the concert hall for a world class orchestra that has crossed the Atlantic shows either a healthy disregard for the fickleness of audience taste, or a near suicidal disinterest in box office revenue.That, you could say, is what festivals are all about, an approach that might have found some justification in a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Academy 2 may not be the biggest venue in Birmingham, but it was packed on Friday evening for the first gig of Dope Lemon’s much delayed Rose Pink Cadillac tour – to support an album that was finally released after delays of its own back in January. In fact, such was the mass of bodies waiting in anticipation for Angus Stone’s crew to take the stage that it took the best part of half an hour just to get served at the bar before the action started.Dope Lemon eventually took to a stage that was wrapped in a fog of dry ice, illuminated by blue stage lights, dressed like the Grateful Dead in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In late August 1962, Liverpool’s Swinging Blue Genes were booked to play Hamburg’s Star-Club for the first time. At the opening show of their season, they were booed and the curtain was pulled across them. The audience took against their mix of skiffle and trad jazz. A musical rethink was needed.In mid-May 1964, The Swinging Blue Jeans, as they now were, were booed while touring the UK on a bill with Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, The Animals, King Size Taylor & The Dominoes, The Other Two and The Nashville Teens. They were pulled from the dates. The R&B and rock ’n roll fans in the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Marie (Laure Calamy), the efficient fortysomething sex worker protagonist of the French drama Her Way, doesn’t have life easy, but she calmly works the badly paid street corners of Strasbourg because she can choose her clients, some of them long-term regulars, and dictate her hours. What Marie doesn’t need is having to find €9,000 euros in a few weeks.As the frustrated single mother of lethargic 17-year-old Adrien (Nissim Renard), who says he aspires to being a chef, Marie steers him toward a college that is both more prestigious and expensive than the one from which he's already been Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Schoolteachers know – even if only the very best can put it into practice – that faced with a noisy classroom you shouldn’t raise your voice, but rather speak quietly. Over recent Proms seasons audience coughing has reached extreme levels, so the charismatic Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto took the bold course in playing Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending as softly as it is possible to do – and the hall responded with the most silent, rapt attention I can remember there.It's been fashionable to mock The Lark as long as it has been topping the Classic FM hall-of-fame, but hearing it last Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Covid has been devastating for all the arts, but especially opera – the riskiest and most expensive gamble of the lot. And it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near done yet. On one memorable night this summer the number of covers stepping into principal roles across the various country-house opera companies hit double figures. And not small ones. So what do we do? Crash on as before and hope for the best? Scale back and build in safeguards, both human and financial? Or throw out the whole setup and start afresh?It's the latter that we’re currently seeing in action at If Opera, whose first real Read more ...
Gary Naylor
What will get audiences back into theatres? Revivals of old favourites. Works from popular genres like musicals. Pantomimes. This production of Into The Woods kinda ticks all those boxes, but it also ticks the box that matters most. It is a unique experience – not podcastable, not downloadable, not multiplexable. Co-directors, Terry Gilliam and Leah Hausman, have worked together before and it shows in a vision that is both coherent yet also continually surprising, even a press night audience (who’ve seen it all – or think they have) going full “Wow” time and again, as the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Just under two weeks ago, Fleet Foxes finished their US tour at the 13,000-capacity Forest Hills Stadium. Now, here they are kicking off their European dates in an auditorium attached to a North London town hall. Capacity 890. Unsurprisingly, it’s sold out. And very hot. After he comments on the heat, someone shouts at head fox Robin Pecknold to take his hat off. “Never” is his response.Although the continents and venues contrast, this leg of what’s dubbed the Shore Tour 2022 after their September 2020 fourth album cleaves to what American audiences have seen. Bar a few solo Pecknold Read more ...
Simon Thompson
It’s not an opera, of course, but of all Handel’s oratorios, Saul is probably the one that is best suited to being presented as an actual drama. Several productions, most notably Barrie Kosky's at Glyndebourne, have shown how it can work on stage, but this performance at the Edinburgh International Festival proved that you can have a great evening’s drama with nary a prop or costume in sight.The key to Saul’s dramatic success is partly the condensed nature of its story but, more importantly, the vast range of music colours that Handel draws upon. It’s the most diverse orchestra he used in any Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Queen of Glory is a passion project, nurtured for almost 10 years as a script by Nana Mensah, who ended up not only directing the film but taking the lead role as well in order to get it made.It’s the story of Sarah Obeng, an ambitious second-generation Ghanaian teaching at Columbia University. Her plan to move to Illinois with her lover and finish her PhD in oncology is derailed when her mother dies unexpectedly and leaves Sarah as the owner of a bookstore in the Bronx.Filmed in Mensah’s parents’ actual Christian bookstore on Sundays – the only day it was closed – and on local Read more ...