Reviews
Jessica Duchen
I can’t deny that it’s great to be able to experience a recital by Benjamin Grosvenor live from the Barbican despite lockdown, streamed into your own home. The filming of this performance on Saturday night was superb, clear and well paced; we could see his hands up close, from a good variety of angles, and they are well worth seeing; and the coloured lighting was coordinated nicely with the music, for instance sea-turquoise for Ravel’s “Ondine”. Nonetheless, a certain heartbreak remains upon seeing the pianist adrift on a small platform constructed in the middle of the empty stalls, like a Read more ...
India Lewis
Fifty Sounds is translator Polly Barton’s first novel, conceived as part of Fitzcarraldo’s annual essay prize. The book begins with listed Japanese words or phrases (katekanas), translated into poetic English, setting the reader up for the central conceit of the book – vignettes each under the heading of one of these katekanas. These katakana introductions are elegant and often funny (for example: “koro-koro: the sound your teensy little identity makes as it goes spinning across the floor”), offering not just a literal translation but a whimsical one, weaving this into the proceeding text. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Speaking to America’s Hit Parader magazine in August 1967, Frank Zappa said “If you want to learn how to play guitar, listen to Wes Montgomery.” The article was titled My Favorite Records and the head Mother was being featured shortly after the release of Absolutely Free, the second Mothers Of Invention album. Montgomery was in good company. Zappa also namechecked Bartok, Pierre Boulez, conductor Robert Craft, Stockhausen, Stravinsky, Cecil Taylor and Anton Webern. No pop was mentioned.At this point, Montgomery had just released the A Day In The Life album on A&M. It featured covers of Read more ...
Tom Baily
Since launching his directing career in 2011 with The Showdown, Park Hoon-jung has established himself as a promising devotee of the bloody gangster genre. The pandemic may have slowed the South Korean director’s momentum, as the producers were forced to release the film belatedly on Netflix. Still, the move could provide an auspicious entry into the American market.The lonesome lead is Tae-gu (Eom Tae-goo), a lowly member of a notorious Seoul gang who is eager to up his rank. His cockiness is concerning to his sister, who worries that he may be killed. Tae-gu shrugs off the warnings. Soon Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sequin is the screen name for the questing 16-year-old at the slowly awakening heart of Sequin in a Blue Room, a 2019 Australian film only now reaching the UK. The graduation project of its New Zealand-born director and co-writer Samuel Van Grinsven, the 80-minute movie charts a mostly compelling path from multiply meaningless gay hook-ups through to something at least resembling a connection, if the image of shared popcorn at the end offers any indication of happier times ahead. Structured across a series of apartments that count down from ten to zero, the screenplay (co-written with Read more ...
David Nice
There are so many good ideas, so much talented hard work from the singers of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme and two dancers, such a cinematic use of the Royal Opera House, that Isabelle Kettle’s interweaving of two Brecht/Weill mini masterpieces ought to work better than it does. In jettisoning much about the fantastical scenarios of flawed human beings on quests to make or spend money in paradises that turn out to be hells, favouring instead the deconstruction of female and male archetypes, you need to be clear about your intentions, streamline their presentation. Too often here Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Polyphonic Concert Club is a collective of musicians – including Isata Kanneh-Mason and I Fagiolini – offering recorded chamber recitals released weekly through March and April. Like the festivals of Voces8 (I reviewed their Christmas series) they are aimed at a premium market: high-quality filmed content at a significant price, here £95 for the six concerts, not far off the cost of live tickets. Only the Club itself will know whether there has been enough take-up to make it financially viable, but on the evidence of yesterday’s recital by the Castalian Quartet, they have not compromised Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I once went to see Motorhead, back in the days when real men didn’t wear earplugs, and afterwards it was if somebody had completely sawn off the top half of my hearing register. Weird and scary, and the band were putting themselves through that every night.Darius Marder’s absorbing and ingenious Sound of Metal takes as his subject a thrash-metal drummer who suffers near-total hearing loss, and is suddenly faced with having to re-evaluate his life, his career and the central relationship with his bandmate, Lou. Marder pitches us head first into a stage performance by Lou and drummer Ruben ( Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It’s no surprise that 30 years on, the individuals most closely connected to the world’s biggest art heist are showing their age. Anne Hawley was a young woman just months into her directorship of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston when thieves made off with 13 works of art, including a Chinese vase and drawings by Degas, a Vermeer and Rembrandt’s only seascape.Speaking to the press soon afterwards, Hawley (main picture) was visibly shellshocked, desperation and disbelief mingled painfully in her comment that “I have to operate under the assumption that we are going to get these Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Illogical in its twists and turns, elusive as a fading dream but not stylistically dreamy – Christian Petzold’s optimistic romantic tragedy Undine is a ciné-conundrum par excellence. It seems, at first glance, a dismayingly insubstantial work for the maker of such discomfiting German cultural and political critiques as Yella (2007), Barbara (2012), Phoenix (2014), and Transit (2018), but nothing could be further from the truth. Undine (Paula Beer) is an apparently self-sufficient Berlin freelance historian in her mid-twenties who lectures on the city's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Channel 5 is rather partial to its four-night dramas, though recent effort The Drowning seemed to have sneaked unseen past the quality control department on its way to the screen. It pulled in the viewers though, and Intruder will probably do the same.Written and directed by Gareth Tunley (creator of 2016’s psychological thriller The Ghoul), it’s about what happens when a pair of youths break into the luxurious country home of Sam and Rebecca Hickey (Tom Meeten and Elaine Cassidy). They disturb Sam as they blunder clumsily around the house, and as one of them (Syed) tries to escape through a Read more ...
Jessica Payn
“I think it happened to you, too, the first time you arrived.” So begins Andrea Bajani’s second novel (Se consideri le colpe, 2007), recently translated from Italian by Elizabeth Harris, with the narrator’s characteristic reserve. “You”, that pronoun at once intimate and confrontational. “It”, denoting an experience yet to be defined but which (tentatively) has already happened. Lorenzo is addressing his now dead mother as he arrives in a Romanian airport for her funeral: a country he has never visited, for a woman he has not seen since he was a young boy, not since she left him behind in Read more ...