Reviews
Veronica Lee
What a year that was. Live performance was stopped dead in its tracks for most of 2020, and comedy – as viscerally live as you can get in dark and sweaty enclosed spaces above pubs or in club basements – was particularly hard hit. Never again, I suspect, will comedy fans complain about the privations of broom-cupboard venues at the Edinburgh Fringe.I'm so glad I went to Glasgow in March to see what turned out to be one of the last major gigs of 2020, Steve Martin and Martin Short (pictured below), who were great fun. But while it wasn't a bumper year for comedy overall – how could it be Read more ...
theartsdesk
Okay, so some people taught themselves the violin or wrote a novel, but under this year’s circumstances, it was inevitable that television (terrestrial, cable, online or otherwise) was going to clean up. With large chunks of the population forced to stay home, what could be more natural than to reach for the remote controller to magic up another bingeable boxset or Walter's latest noir thriller? Above all, with its seemingly infinite catalogue, this felt like the moment that Netflix became the generic term for "home entertainment", joining Amazon and Google in dividing up the planet between Read more ...
theartsdesk
Unhappy as it is to be ending the year with museums and galleries closed, 2020 has had its triumphs, and there is plenty to look forward to in 2021. Two much anticipated exhibitions at the National Gallery were delayed and subject to closures and restrictions, but these seem relatively trivial inconveniences in the long lives of Titian’s "poesie", reunited after four centuries, or the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi, brought together for the gallery’s first major exhibition dedicated to a female artist. These works of art, so fragile and yet so long-lived, helped to maintain a long view Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If dance lovers have learnt anything in recent months it's to take nothing for granted. How could we ever have been so blasé about The Nutcracker, whose annual reappearance in multiple productions was as inevitable as crowds on Oxford Street? As a long-departed dance critic once Eeyorishly observed, each year “brings us one Nutcracker closer to death”, a quip that now has a bleaker resonance than even he can have intended.In 2020, productions of Tchaikovsky’s evergreen two-act ballet were planned by almost all the UK’s ballet companies, but only a smattering of performances took place before Read more ...
David Nice
No picture of a musician tells more of a story about 2020 than the above image of cellist Steven Isserlis, stepping out on 8 July to play, what else but Bach, to his first live – albeit small – audience in just under four months. At that point it took a rare missionary to check out government guidelines on concert presentation and dare to bring back live music to London. The missionary in question was Raffaello Morales of the Fidelio Orchestra Cafe in Clerkenwell. His programmes lasted while the rules said they could, adapting to earlier closing times (no spontaneous music-making from the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s dangerous territory, remaking a classic British film as a TV mini-series. In 1947 when Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger created Black Narcissus, a heady adaptation of Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel, they never set foot in the Himalayas. But somehow, out of glass painted backdrops, cinematographer Jack Cardiff evoked the vertiginous, intoxicating landscape that overwhelms an order of nuns sent to do God’s work among the natives.Cardiff won an Oscar for his dazzling Technicolor work on the sound stages of Pinewood; those are quite some footsteps for Danish cinematographer Charlotte Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Goodbye": The single word lingered heavily in the air last March 16, as the scripted closing both of the terrific Southwark Playhouse revival of The Last Five Years and as an ancillary farewell to live theatre. Late afternoon on that same day, in response to the gathering spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, a decision had been taken to shut theatres down, but the Jason Robert Brown two-hander (plus band) decided to go ahead anyway for the simple reason that the talent were already assembled in the building.And so it was that an audience sat held both by the musical's depiction of marital woe Read more ...
David Nice
Surreal fantasy came off best this year, before and after the fall. It seems like a decade ago when audiences of all ages were packed tight to crack up - or not get it - at Covent Garden for the UK stage premiere of Gerald Barry's Alice's Adventures Under Ground in a tirelessly resourceful production by director/designer Antony McDonald. Another brief flourish to a much smaller Royal Opera House audience in October reached many more spectators online with the realisation of the house's new Director of Opera Oliver Mears' idea for staging song cycles/cantatas in the dazzling 4/4 sequence.In Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 2020, one archive release exerted a more forceful presence than any other. Live At Goose Lake August 8th 1970 caught The Stooges as they promoted their second album Fun House. The source was a previously unknown, professionally recorded tape documenting the whole album as it was played live, in its running order. Iggy Pop and the band were hard yet sloppy, tight yet rough, always blazing. Wonderful – and a reminder that musical surprises still crop up.While contemplating what’s been covered in this column over the last year, the feeling that archive releases can shift perceptions rises to Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I gave a rare five stars to the first half of the Voces8 LIVE From London Christmas online festival and the second five concerts matched the first in their vitality, virtuosity and variety. It is astonishing how many different approaches there can be to the basic template of a filmed chamber vocal ensemble concert, which made each episode a treat in its own right, and the festival as a whole a complete triumph. From Bach to Bo Holten, from traditional Irish folk music to newly composed carols, from young choristers to vastly experience professional singers, there was a range and depth that Read more ...
theartsdesk
It all started so promisingly. Parasite's triumph at the Oscars was a resounding response to 2019's saccharine and problematic Green Book. Art house was in and here to stay. And in some ways, this came to pass - with cinemas caught in a cycle of opening and closing, the blockbusters were nowhere to be seen. Instead, it's been the indies and the streamers keeping us entertained through these days of isolation.This year's Best Of selection reflects the strange and diverse release calendar of 2020. Film has proved to be resilient, and a sparser schedule allowed for some hidden gems to shine Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It’s become something of an end-of-year list cliché to say that 2020 has been a great year for music despite being a catastrophic shitstorm when judged by any other metric you care to mention.“Ah!” says 2020, “but clichés are clichés because they’re true,” and sits back smugly, arms folded, conveniently forgetting that this is a cliché in itself and so leading us into a whirlwind of circular reasoning. That’s just so 2020, right?Whatever, the sheer volume of staggeringly good albums released means that honourable mentions go to records that would have walked it in years gone by. Untitled ( Read more ...