Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
For Delius – then a young man, visiting Norway in the late 1880s to walk in its mountains – his first encounter with Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra was nothing less than an epiphany. Already high on the grandeur of nature in a country defined by its shimmering fjords and austere mountains, he found the text to be an intoxicating affirmation of the glories of the world in a humanistic universe.It took him several years to complete A Mass of Life, the choral work defined by many as his masterpiece, which was eventually brought to the public attention in 1909 at a London performance Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a Proms paradox that’s familiar to Early Music fans. Some works are too challenging – too big, too expensive, too uncommercial, too obscure – to do anywhere else. The trouble is, the Royal Albert Hall is the absolute last place you’d want to hear them.So you go, and half-hear, half-imagine a performance that requires you to fill in the blanks of acoustic, space and detail, superimposing cathedrals, ducal staterooms or Venetian balconies as required. It’s not nothing, but it’s not the full Monteverdi either.Luckily for us, Hervé Niquet and his Concert Spirituel had done quite a lot of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What would TV screenwriters do without drugs? In Flight, created by Mike Walden and Adam Randall, is yet another drama depicting the perils and pitfalls of getting sucked into the narcotics trade, though it does deliver a twist or two to distinguish it from earlier specimens.It revolves around Jo Conran (Katherine Kelly), a single mum who works as a flight attendant for an airline called Avalon. The fact that her job involves regular flights to various European and Far Eastern destinations means she could be very useful as a drugs courier, though this has never been her ambition. However, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Gibby Haynes is the wild-eyed crazy man who used to front the Butthole Surfers back in the 1980s and 1990s. At the time, there was none weirder or more out there than the Texan psychedelic punks – and even Ice-T was then prepared to step back and acknowledge their place in the pantheon of musical barbarians.Despite a recent avalanche of album re-issues, a new live disc and a forthcoming documentary film, the Butthole Surfers effectively came to an end 25 years ago. However, not being one to settle down and integrate into mainstream society, Haynes is presently back on the road with a group of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Cat Cohen, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★★In Broad Strokes Cat Cohen paints a fascinating picture of events leading up to the stroke that could have killed her. Thankfully three years on she is now fully recovered – and from near tragedy comes this superb show.The hour is her trademark mix of standup and music (with Frazer Hadfield on piano) and Cohen delivers it in her usual deadpan, knowing style. You might forgive her should some sentimentality creep in, but no, her cuttingly ironic comedy shines through – “I had a stroke at 30: isn’t that so creative?”Describing the health Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Love was the Norwegian climax of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo trilogy, the most lovestruck vision of his city and boldest prophesy of how to live there, beyond borders and bonds of sexual identity and shame. Released here between Dreams’ meta-memories of swooning first love and Sex’s look at desire undefined by gender, it also settles in Oslo’s heart.Gay nurse Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) and his straight doctor colleague Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) are complementary leads in a film as concerned with female desire as the queer lens Haugerud’s work is conceived through. The set-piece speech, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
George & James was originally released in March 1984. Stars & Hank Forever! emerged in October 1986. The two LPs were parts of – and, as it turned out, the only entrants in – a series of albums their creators, San Francisco’s Residents, designated the American Composer’s Series.Side One of the first was dedicated to interpretations of the compositions of George Gershwin. The flip was a heavily distorted reconfiguration of James Brown’s 1963 Live At The Apollo album. Stars & Hank Forever! tackled, respectively, John Philip Sousa and Hank Williams. In keeping with previous Residents Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Right from the bracing brass fanfare that began this Sea Symphony, you know exactly where you were: right in the midst of the deck, with the spray in your face and the wind in your hair. The London Symphony Orchestra is midway through a residency at the Edinburgh International Festival. They’ve been the classiest musical act to grace the Usher Hall stage so far this festival, and this bracing performance of Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony has been the best thing they’ve done, not least because they fully grasped the scale of the piece and the many moods it goes through. This Read more ...
David Kettle
Ordinary Decent Criminal, Summerhall ★★★★★ Frankie learnt a thing or two about the police and how they work from his years as an activist. Fighting for crucial political causes, however, never seemed at odds with a sideline in drug-dealing – which, when the authorities got wind that the chocolate bars he was importing from Spain weren’t exactly Cadbury’s, earned him a few years inside. Once banged up, however, Frankie finds himself immersed in prison feuds, struggles for power, conflicts and unexpected connections.Ed Edwards’s vivid, vibrant solo play fits its performer – comedy legend, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Emmanuel Sonubi, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★This show – Life After Near Death – is not about dying, it is about living, Emmanuel Sonubi tells us. Well, actually it’s about both, as in his case he nearly died of heart failure but, thankfully here he is.A physically imposing figure, the comic – an ex-nightclub bouncer – certainly looks good, but then he has always been fit. But not fit and healthy, as we learn he had a taste for big nights out that would include “party sugar”. There’s only so long you can cane it before the Grim Reaper starts taking an interest.Sonubi Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ridley Scott’s original Alien movie from 1979 was an all-time sci-fi/horror classic, and even an endless stream of sequels and spin-offs – Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, Alien vs Predator, Prometheus, Alien: Romulus et al – hasn’t diluted the electrifying impact of the original.Now FX and Disney have shovelled a shed-load of money into this glossily-produced series for TV, written and directed by Noah Hawley (Fargo, Legion etc). But can it boldly go where no Alien-related product has gone before?Er... not really, it's more a case of reshuffling themes from previous incarnations. Alien: Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“When have you ever gone off alone?” scoffs Magnus (Thomas W Gabrielsson) when his wife, Maria (Mirja Turestedt), expresses the wish to go to England rather than Morocco for their joint sabbatical. Famous last words.Caroline Ingvarsson’s debut feature, adapted from Swedish writer Håkan Nesser’s complex psychological thriller The Living and the Dead in Winsford, is big on atmosphere but leaves too much to the imagination, skimming over the surface of the book, which is well worth reading, and extracting only bare, unsustaining bones.Something bad goes down in a bunker, but it’s hard to tell Read more ...