Reviews
Kathryn Reilly
Hilarious, potty-mouthed and mesmerisingly beautiful, Nadine Shah is on superb form at the Ramsgate Festival of Sound’s closing evening show. And aside from the banter there is, of course, that remarkable voice – hugely powerful and somehow perfectly suited to this enchanting outdoor venue. In fact, this is the first time the Winterstoke Sun Shelter has been used for a gig – I doubt it will be the last. It was simply magical. We are here to listen to possibly the last live performance of last year’s critically acclaimed album Kitchen Sink. The whoops and cat calls of “Club Read more ...
David Nice
After 14 years as principal conductor, Vasily Petrenko has left the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in top-league shape. The players must be as thrilled as we are that his successor, Venezuelan Armenian Domingo Hindoyan, carries the flame, catches the spark, call it what you will, with a distinct personality of his own, combining clariy and elegance in baton-wielding with a very watchable physical freedom. This Proms programme was well-tailored to presenting the new incumbent and the skills of each orchestral department in equal measure, and the star soloist, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Like any good writer, Claire-Louise Bennett loves lists. Lists are, after all, those moments when words, freed from grammar’s grip, can simply be themselves – do their own thing, show off, let loose. It doesn’t take much for Bennett to let one unfurl. At one point, she scans with obvious, epicurean delight an array of “little bottles and jars and ramekins” on a set of imaginary kitchen shelves, “each holding their own delectable though not always readily detectable specimen, capers, for example, capers, cornichons, cockles, truffles, tamarind, nutmeg, goose fat, juniper berries Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“We want you to see a doctor. You’ve changed, and not in a good way,” says Kathy’s underwhelming husband, Tim (Matthew Jure).We don’t know what Kathy (Cathy Naden, making her film debut) was like before, but as things stand she seems to be following her impulses gaily and uninhibitedly. In the first scene, we see her chatting to Nick (Jerry Killick), a laid-back, pony-tailed gardener at the museum where she works as an archaeologist. She admires his vintage BMW. He takes her up on her request to go for a spin; then they have sex in the back seat.This makes her late for a lecture she’s giving Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
In Klem (meaning "clamp"’), we find ourselves in the calm, ordered and ordinary world of Amsterdam-Zuid. There are parents’ evenings to be attended, school plays to be watched. The area’s many pretty parks are just perfect for the early morning jog. Tall green bins stand in neat rows. Evenings are for helping children with their homework, or for going to choir practice, at which a widowed, serious, bespectacled tax official in the tenors might notice a romantic gaze coming in his direction from a hospital doctor in the sopranos, to the strains of Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei...Except that these Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It has become so hard to find funding for non-fiction films that many documentary makers now feel compelled to sell their stories as racy detective yarns, larded with dramatic scores and sneakily obfuscating narratives. There’s a piece of deception at the heart of Sam Hobkinson’s Misha and the Wolves which in this age of Holocaust denial, is distressingly slippery.The film starts out as a portrait of a little Jewish girl, Misha Defonseca, who was hidden with a Belgian family during WWII. Decades later, living in America she tells her synagogue an incredible, heart-rending story of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“She is a 20-year-old white New Yorker who sings like a 55-year-old black lady from Mississippi. The experts say she will do for soul pop what Dylan did for folk.” Lillian Roxon’s verdict on Laura Nyro appeared in her ground-breaking 1969 book Rock Encyclopedia, issued before Nyro’s third album New York Tendaberry.In January 1970, Life magazine ran a feature on Nyro which was headed “The Funky Madonna of New York Soul.” By then, New York Tendaberry was out. Her follow-up, Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat, was being recorded when the article appeared.Both descriptions demonstrate a unanimity Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Turns out John Wilson was playing the long game from the start. The dynamic British conductor eased his way into Proms schedules in 2007, establishing his John Wilson Orchestra as an annual festival fixture just two years later. Film music from the Golden Age of Hollywood, Broadway musicals, Bernstein and more all arrived gleaming – freshly polished and ready for their close-up. But, over a decade later, it turns out that Wilson was just prepping the musical ground, as this game-changing concert made abundantly clear.The Proms debut of Wilson’s Sinfonia of London was always going to be one to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems Covid-19 may not be the only plague threatening mankind. The virus is nowhere to be seen in Netflix’s grippingly twisty mystery Clickbait, but it’s the use and abuse of social media that drives its tale of malice, murder and deception.The journey of one of the central characters, Nick Brewer (Adrian Grenier), mirrors the switchback ride of the narrative as it jumps between viewpoints and keeps throwing a new light on aspects of the story. Nick is a physical therapist at a school athletics department, apparently a popular guy with a perfect wife and two kids. Imagine everybody’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For more than three decades, playwright Winsome Pinnock has been at the forefront of new writing, often experimenting with form as well as documenting the lives of black Britons. Her new play’s original opening at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester was halted due to you know what in March last year, so it was then broadcast as part of the BBC’s Lockdown theatre festival on Radio 3, and it now arrives at the National Theatre, having already won the 2018 Alfred Fagon Award. As the story moves between London in the present and in 1840, multiple perspectives on the black British experience Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Choral singers have suffered more than most from erratic and irrational Covid prohibitions while riskier mass pursuits have gone ahead. So when one of the world’s great choirs returned to the Proms with the conductor who has guided them for over half a century, the sense of occasion was palpable. Last night the Monteverdi Choir numbered 30 – not huge by Royal Albert Hall standards – but the joyfully exultant music that they made filled the dome with a boundless grandeur. Sir John Eliot Gardiner led his singers and the English Baroque Soloists through a programme that nicely reflected the mood Read more ...
David Nice
“Now I’ve conducted Tristan for the first time,” the 27-year-old Richard Strauss wrote from Weimar to Wagner’s widow Cosima in 1892, “and it was the most wonderful day of my life”. Robin Ticciati, over a decade older but still young in terms of his profession, has just crowned his first run of Glyndebourne Tristans with this Proms performance, and I don’t know whether he felt the same on opening night; but it’s clear that with the house’s latest music director a new golden age of Wagner conducting has begun.You could sense it in the London Philharmonic Orchestra cellos’ opening tone-swell, Read more ...