Reviews
Gavin Dixon
This programme was a bit of a calling card from the Carducci Quartet. They have previously recorded all three works, and the three composers, Haydn, Shostakovich, Beethoven, clearly play to their strengths. Add to that a modest running time, the Shostakovich Seventh and Beethoven op. 95 are the two composers’ shortest quartets, and the result is a perfect offering for casual Sunday morning recital.Not that the Carduccis ever rest on their laurels. They have a distinctive tone, rich and darkly burnished with real complexity and depth, and they bring a keen interpretive sensibility to every Read more ...
Robert Beale
How would you solve the problems inherent in a production of Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master, bearing in mind the need for social distancing for performers, comparatively miniscule budgets for scenery and props, and the uncertainty surrounding just about everything in a summer opera festival these days? Do it on the radio, of course. Educating Rita’s solution to a weighty academic question proves a very practical one for Susan Moore, director and designer of Buxton International Festival’s revival – the first professional production it has ever had and closely based on a recent CD Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A new band called the Sex Pistols played their fifth live show on 28 November 1975. The appearance at a ball at Kensington’s Queen Elizabeth College got them their first mention in the press. New Musical Express remarked “they are all about 12 years old. Or could be 19.”The same day, The Count Bishops released their debut record, the four-track, seven-inch EP Speedball. It’s reissued on pink vinyl with new mastering which doesn’t seek to sound as clear as possible in a straight-from-the-tape way, but instead adds a punch lacking on an original pressing. It sounds authentically vintage, but Read more ...
Heather Neill
Pinter wrote The Dumb Waiter in 1957 (although it wasn't seen in London until 1960) the year before The Birthday Party received its notorious première at the Lyric Hammersmith. When a friend described them both as political plays, about power and victimisation, the playwright readily agreed. And it is this aspect of the 50-minute, one-act piece that director Jeremy Herrin foregrounds.Ben and Gus are two hit men waiting in a Birmingham basement for their latest victim to arrive. The room is furnished merely with two single beds between which is the dumb waiter of the title (although there is Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Even for this reviewer, who was brought up on Tove Jansson’s quirky children’s books (and is the owner of some 50 different Moomin coffee cups), it’s a stretch to recommend dropping everything to go and see Tove in the cinema. There’s nothing wrong with the film as far as it goes, but unfortunately it doesn’t go quite far enough. This is a pretty straight biopic of the not-so-straight Finnish artist and writer. It concentrates on her on/off love affair with the aristocratic and promiscuous Vivica Bandler, somewhat at the expense of exploring her work. Those lucky enough to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director and co-writer Michael Shevloff’s film about Max Mosley, who died in May this year, is a curious beast, perhaps reflecting the difficulties of pinning down such a complex character. In fact, each of the several phases of Mosley’s remarkable life could make a self-contained documentary of its own, so fitting them into a 90-minute film was a virtually insurmountable task.For Formula One aficionados, there’s an insider’s perspective on how Mosley co-founded the March manufacturing and racing team (once described as “four guys and a telephone”) and enjoyed amazing success in the early ‘ Read more ...
Clark Rundell
It’s taken me a day to try to find some words to share at the passing of my dear friend, mentor and guardian angel Louis Andriessen and I’m grateful to theartsdesk for giving me the space. It is such a profound loss because of the profound gifts he gave us. His fabulous music is deep, tender, highly personal and achingly beautiful but also funny, ironic, joyful and deliciously vulgar. Generations of composers will attest to the inspiration and encouragement he gave, challenging performers and creators alike to reach new heights. He was unbelievably kind to me and the faith he showed in me Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
A lot’s changed since Kiln Theatre boss Indhu Rubasingham directed The Invisible Hand’s first UK outing in 2016, not least the theatre’s name (it was known as the Tricycle back then). But in Rubasingham’s capable hands, American Ayad Akhtar’s taut exploration of greed and blame still hits like a punch to the chest, ratcheting up the tension over two hours to an almost unbearable level.The premise is relatively simple. American banker Nick Bright (Daniel Lapaine, pictured below) has been kidnapped by accident – the unnamed organisation keeping him prisoner in rural Pakistan wanted his boss Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1966 was anyone under the age of 25, why couldn’t a teenage student write a musical in 1967? There are plenty of answers to that question of course, none of which stopped the composer Stephen Schwartz, who conjured Pippin while still at Carnegie Mellon University. By 1972, with a little help from Bob Fosse, the show was on Broadway. And now it’s back in London, having been seen here as recently as last summer. The work has lost none of its craziness in the half-century or so since it was first picking up Tonys. Pippin himself is still a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Crisis-management has always been part of a choreographer’s skillset, but staging a new ballet with two large alternating casts has rarely been fraught with so much risk. It was one hell of a week for Valentino Zucchetti, first soloist at the Royal Ballet and creator of Anemoi, the 20-minute work that opens the final programme in the company’s 90th birthday season. In the last days of rehearsals the 33-year-old was already on the back foot, re-jigging sections of the piece as several dancers fell prey to injury. Then, 24 hours before opening night, disaster struck and half his cast were Read more ...
David Nice
It’s a wonderful thing to hear a nine-piece Broadway-style band at full pelt, and to see real show dancing – the first time for me, in both cases, since early 2020. Wonderful, too, is this sassiest of 1950s musicals, for which those great lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green deserve almost as much credit as Bernstein for his incomparable melodies – all of them winners, melded into a musical whole which keeps the interest through the picaresque adventures of two girls from Ohio in and around New York’s Greenwich Village.Let’s get the big hitch over with first: you can’t hear enough of the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Edinburgh-based Dunedin Consort are regular visitors to the Wigmore Hall, and their concert on Saturday night was greeting by a full house. In these Covid times, that meant an audience of just 200, but from the applause, they were clearly enthusiastic for John Butt’s programme, centred around two Bach favourites, the D minor Two-Violin Concerto and the cantata Ich habe genug. The ensemble is a period instrument orchestra who play one to a part. That is a controversial choice in Bach, as there is little evidence that he used such small groups himself. However, it suits the generous Read more ...