Reviews
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHEmily Saunders Moon Shifts Oceans (The Mix Sounds)It’s de rigeur nowadays, if you love music, to love Joni Mitchell. She is, of course, a great soul, but her music never connected here. That said, I have a favourite Joni Mitchell song. It’s the 1975 number “The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines”. I also have a soft spot for the parent album, Mingus. Mitchell was accompanied on it by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Jaco Pastorius. A red hot line-up. Jazz fusion usually goes down like cold sick round here but Mitchell's foray is the exception to the rule. A decade ago Emily Read more ...
David Nice
So here in Paris, as at Salzburg in 2022, it’s no longer “Puccini’s Trittico” but “the Asmik Grigorian Trittico 3-1-2”. Which would be a very bad idea if she were a lazy diva like Anna Netrebko. But Grigorian works selflessly within wonderfully strong casts. In league with Christof Loy’s viscerally demanding productions and Carlo Rizzi’s infinitely sympathetic conducting, she sets the seal on one of the greatest operatic events I’ve ever experienced.In recent years, having returned to the three masterpieces – in their totality probably Puccini’s supreme offering – in Zoom classes, I’ve found Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Grief takes unexpected turns over the course of a long Icelandic day in Rúnar Rúnarsson’s romantic tragedy, a Prix Un Certain Regard contender at last year’s Cannes.It starts with Una (Elín Hall) high on love with fellow Reykjavik art student Diddi (Baldur Einarsson), wandering the shoreline together at dusk then comfortably falling into bed. Diddi just has to head west the next morning to dump hometown girlfriend Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir), then life together can officially begin. When a catastrophic explosion destroys that future, Una is left secretly bereft as the nation and Klara mourn. Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
James Crabb is a musical magician, taking the ever-unfashionable accordion into new and unlikely places, through bespoke arrangements of a spectrum of pieces which brim with wit and inventiveness. This lunchtime concert with violinist Anthony Marwood was a sheer joy, as they together traversed a range of style and tone, richly entertaining a very decent Bank Holiday crowd in the Wigmore Hall.The starting point was an obvious one: the tangos of Astor Piazzolla. This sequence of three run together had a reassuring familiarity, and a strong whiff of the Parisian café. The swooning violin melody Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
"How long is Wagner’s Ring Cycle?" That’s not the opening to a joke, it’s a genuine question asked by a friend who I’d met up with before heading to Edinburgh’s Usher Hall to hear the Royal Scottish National Orchestra perform "Wagner’s Ring Symphony". His question is one I really don’t know how to answer: technically it’s 15 hours, but does a cycle ever really end? Is a piece of string as long as the ties that bind? How long would it take to wrap up the whole world?Fortunately, I didn’t really have to. "They’re not doing the entire thing!" I said. ‘I’d be in that hall until next week! The Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Dara Ó Briain’s has described his previous show So… Where Were We? – in which he describes his search for his birth mother who gave him up for adoption when he was a baby – as his Philomena, while his latest, Re: Creation, is his version of Elf, in which a grown man travels across the world to find his birth father.It’s a neat joke, but also underlines a difference between the two shows which, while companion pieces, are very different tonally. Where the first had moments of raw emotion, Re: Creation – while also tugging at the heartstrings – feels as if it’s played much Read more ...
David Nice
Three live, very alive Symphonie fantastiques in a year may seem a lot. But such is Berlioz’s precise, unique and somehow modern imagination that you can always discover something new, especially given the intense hard work on detail of Antonio Pappano and what is now very much “his” London Symphony Orchestra. They and Lisa Batiashvili also helped to keep Szymanowski’s hothouse First Violin Concerto in focus, too.There can’t be a more exhilarating curtain-up to a concert than Berlioz’s equally fertile Le Corsaire Overture. The whiplash timpani, the unison helter-skelters of strings later meet Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Johnnie Taylor’s big break came with the ever-fabulous September 1968 single “Who's Making Love.” His ninth 45 for the Stax label, it went Top Ten on the Billboard Hot 100. Up to this point, the Arkansas-born singer had been on the R&B charts only. Hitting the mainstream countdown had taken a while: Taylor’s first solo single had been issued in April 1961.Before this, he had been in gospel outfits The Five Echoes – who he joined in 1951 or 1952 at age 17 – and, from 1957, The Highway QC’s, who Sam Cooke had passed through. In August 1960, he took on the Cooke role in the Soul Stirrers – Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Satan come to me!” The Devil doesn’t so much appear in David McVicar’s Faust as reveal himself to have always been there. We discover him – travelling trunk and brandy glass to hand, lazy smile on his lips – considering the interior of designer Charles Edwards’ magnificent church in Gounod’s own Second Empire Paris. And why not? This, after all, is his playground, not the rutting crowds of the Cabaret l’Enfer, the riotous drinkers, brawlers and hypocrites in the streets, or – in the screw-turning final reveal – the audience seated in the opera house itself: followers already all of his cause Read more ...
Matt Wolf
How do you make Bernard Shaw sear the stage anew? You can trim the text, as the director Dominic Cooke has, bringing this prolix writer's 1893 play in under the two-hour mark, no interval. And you can introduce a non-speaking ensemble of women in period bloomers and the like as a silent commentary on the depredations indicated in the text. Best of all, perhaps, is to cast as the brothel-keeper, Kitty Warren, and her Cambridge-educated scold of a daughter, Vivie, the actual mother-daughter pairing of Imelda Staunton and the stage legend's own daughter, the splendid Bessie Carter, who was Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
There is a dark, spectral quality to this compassionate film about Southeast Asian migrant workers in rural Taiwan. At the centre of this story is Oom, played with quiet stoicism by Wanlop Rungkumjad, who is one of many Thai, Cambodian and Myanmar nationals who have entered Taiwan illegally to find care work in its remote mountainous regions. The group of mainly Thai migrant workers we follow have the bad fortune of working for Hsing, a capricious boss who promises a pay day that never comes. Oom slowly becomes Hsing’s right-hand man which invariably strains solidarity among the migrants Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata spent eight years performing and recording a complete edition of Mozart’s piano concertos with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as soloist, together with conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy, and inevitably there was the question: what next?Their next step has been the four horn concertos, and their soloist is the enthusiastic and polished Martin Owen. As with the piano concertos, these are not period performances – everyone plays on modern instruments – but they are historically informed, and the dynamics and sound qualities of a chamber orchestra are often an ear-opener to the nature of the Read more ...