Reviews
Miranda Heggie
In its 40th anniversary year, the Ryedale Festival once again brought live music of the highest quality to the beautiful villages and venues of the Yorkshire Moors. Reinvented for the current climate, the festival featured 40 events to mark its 40 years, with shorter concerts, and multiple performances to enable as many people to attend events with smaller audiences.The stunning Ampleforth Abbey – home to a community of Benedictine monks – was the perfect location for Tenebrae’s “Spanish Glories'' concert – a performance of Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Requiem Mass, preceded by two shorter Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There are advantages and disadvantages about opera-in-the-round, and it’s a format that suits some operas better than others. Longborough’s Cunning Little Vixen, staged by Olivia Fuchs in their new big-top tent, makes the very most of the advantages and pushes the disadvantages into the shade, without entirely obliterating them. It’s a lively show, very well sung, cleverly, energetically acted and directed; but the problems, of which more below, refuse quite to go away.This is a production under the festival’s Emerging Artists scheme combined with its Youth Chorus, and I have to say that it’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anyone in San Francisco on 15 and 16 June 1968 would have had a tough choice if they wanted to see live music. On Saturday the 15th, Big Brother & the Holding Company and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown were playing The Fillmore. That night, The Charlatans were on at The Straight Theatre. The Sunday saw Big Brother billed with The Steve Miller Blues Band, Dan Hicks (without The Charlatans), Sandy Bull and Santana at The Fillmore. On both dates, Booker T & the MG's headlined The Carousel Ballroom.At the Carousel, the Booker T combo was supported by local stars It’s A Beautiful Day. Read more ...
David Nice
Did absence from Albert’s colosseum from early September 2019 until now and a roof-raising finale hoodwink many of us into thinking Dalia Stasevska’s interpretation of Sibelius’s Second Symphony among the greats? Having listened to it again on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer this morning, I'm convinced not; this was the real deal. Without that guarantee, a BBC Symphony Orchestra on top form would not have entrusted its second Finn – Stasevska is its Principal Guest Conductor – with the music of a composer (their composer) its Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo has already presented with unsurpassable Read more ...
Saskia Baron
How lovely it must be to direct a documentary about your favourite musicians and have no one stop you from cramming in everyone who has ever loved them too. The British director Edgar Wright, best known for his feature films (including Hot Fuzz, Baby Driver and Shaun of the Dead) and TV work (Spaced), is a superfan of the American musicians Ron and Russell Mael. With The Sparks Brothers, Wright gets to chronicle in loving detail, every moment of their 50-plus years in the music business.It’s a sugar rush of a documentary, very few of the 80 interviewees get to speak for more than 30 seconds, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Displacement looms large over every quietly impressive frame of Limbo, writer-director Ben Sharrock's magnetic film about a young Syrian man called Omar (Amir El-Masry) who finds himself biding his time in the remotest reaches of Scotland on the way to some unknown new life. Adrift from his family, who have made their way to Turkey, and thrown into the company of a motley array of fellow asylum-seekers, Omar spends his days thinking back on the glorious music he once made on his beloved oud and dealing with locals who are happy enough to provide a lift. If only they didn't pepper their Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A gorgeous song exists in search of a show to match over at Bagdad Café, the 1987 film that gave the world the memorably plaintive "Calling You", which is threaded throughout Emma Rice's stage adaptation of the movie with understandable insistence.What hasn't yet been achieved in this Old Vic premiere is much narrative heft to go with the abundant heart of an evening that ends with a collective Zoom, a reminder in our fraught times of the collective call-out to community. All that's needed now is something more of substance. Rice has always been great when it comes to feeling and Read more ...
stephen.walsh
King Arthur, as every schoolgirl knows, never actually existed, so it made perfect sense that the Gabrieli Consort’s Worcester Cathedral performance of Purcell’s semi-opera about the mythical British king and his battles with the Saxon incomers made not the slightest mention of Arthur.Nor was much made of his bitter enemy, the Saxon Oswald, nor the fair, blind Emmeline, nor even the great magician, Merlin, who, in Dryden’s original waves his wand in the final scene and summons up "A Vision of Britain, the Queen of Islands."All these personages figure in the play, but none of them ever sing. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Before seeing this play, I decided to eat a steak. It seemed the right culinary equivalent to David Mamet, one of America’s most provocative and, at times, especially past times, red-blooded writers. This play, whose British premiere was at the Royal Court in 1993 – when it starred David Suchet and Lia Williams – now arrives in the West End from Bath’s Theatre Royal. Oleanna was one of the most controversial dramas of the 1990s, and its ending – when audiences routinely cheered an older man’s violent assault on a younger woman – showed the power of theatre and its ability Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Most Beautiful Boy in the World is the most harrowing film you are ever likely to watch, but don’t let that put you off. This was a documentary waiting to be made. It tells the story of a young beauty propelled into international stardom before gradually descending into alcoholism and abject despair.The opening shot is of a man walking down the corridor of a derelict building – the remains of the Grand Hotel des Bains at Venice’s Lido. Björn Andresén is revisiting the place where, 50 years earlier, he appeared in Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice as Tadzio, the exquisite boy Read more ...
David Nice
Now that the summer opera-house companies have pulled off staged triumphs under the most difficult of circumstances, it’s time to celebrate semi-al-fresco concerts. Not so many have cropped up as I’d hoped after the success of the Battersea Park Bandstand Chamber Music series last year. The Wigmore Hall made a start in nearby Portman Square and we have a host of impressive August events planned by Bold Tendencies in Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park, building on the successes of 2020. Opera Holland Park's dazzling mini-festival of song, dreamed up by enterprising baritone Julien Van Mellaerts Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s the trivia question no one ever thought to ask: where was the only Tennessee Williams play premiered outside America first performed? The unlikely answer (so unlikely that even artistic director Roxana Silbert apparently didn’t know it until now) is the Hampstead Theatre where, in 1967, Williams’ The Two Character Play was first staged to slightly baffled critical response.Now, as part of the theatre’s “Originals” series, the play Williams himself described a “my most beautiful since Streetcar, the very heart of my life” returns in a new production by Sam Yates. It’s a gift of a quote Read more ...