Reviews
Bernard Hughes
In reviewing Sunday night’s LSO Prom I was impressed by the innovative and exciting programming and that was also a hallmark of Tuesday’s Prom, although this was more true to form for the London Sinfonietta. Since its inception the Sinfonietta has sampled both ends of the contemporary spectrum and everything in between, and that was the case here. The theme was “city life” but the music was also united, as the conductor Geoffrey Paterson said, by having pulse – and sometimes more than one at the same time.The most pulsing – if not pulsating – piece was Philip Glass’s Façades and actually the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC’s version of James Herriot’s books about his life as a Yorkshire vet became a weekend TV staple, running for seven series and a couple of Christmas specials between the late Seventies and the start of the Nineties. This elegantly-mounted revival is a partnership between Channel 5 and PBS in the States, and judging from this opening episode it has the potential to pick up where its much-loved predecessor left off.It’s 1937, and in dingy, depressed Glasgow, the young James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph) has trained as a vet but is having trouble finding a job. His father, an unemployed Read more ...
Doric Quartet, Bandstand Chamber Festival, Battersea Park review – radiance on a late summer evening
David Nice
Wonderful as the livestreamed Proms are for players working together again and for viewers/listeners who wouldn’t be able to get to the Royal Albert Hall even if they could be admitted, I’d sacrifice them all for one evening of live musical communication like this. There’s nothing like late Mozart in serene mode to make you feel connected to your surroundings, at one with a world in which everything seems completely right, especially on a sunny evening with the first hint of autumn in it; from the first bars of the Quartet in B flat, K589, led by Alex Redington's supremely cultured melodic Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If two dozen DJs spin tunes and no one’s there, did a rave really happen? There is plenty of time for such questions during the 25 hours of livestreams substituting for SW4’s annual bank holiday party on Clapham Common. It’s a benefit for the Mind mental health charity, and the illegal raves springing up unstoppably across the country show visceral physical and mental needs social distancing can’t meet. Feeling your sweaty body and breath move close with others in fuggy air is potentially dangerous, but an unforgettable frisson. More than most Covid-crippled activities, it’s also digitally Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Viennese operetta is like that other great Central European treat, goulash. It comes in many forms. In Vienna it’s coffeehouse comfort food; in Slovenia they add bacon for a smoky tang. And in the marketplaces of Transylvania it comes in bubbling iron cauldrons, practically fluorescent with paprika. But it’s all goulash. You know it when you taste it, and all that matters is that it tastes good. And when it’s really good, it tastes even better when warmed through and dished up second time around.Which is by way of saying that I can’t honestly get too worried about the authenticity or Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On a normal bank holiday weekend there would be festival events held in the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey. But in this anything-but-normal year, choreographer and director Andrew Wright instead gathered together a group of people who live in or who have an association with Somerset to donate their talents for free to put on a musical fundraiser. Local artistic bigwigs Michael Eavis and Sir Cameron Mackintosh gave their backing, the latter with permissions for songs from his productions, and the former with something more prosaic – as MC Jane Milligan said: “Thanks for the bins.”There was Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Sunday night’s Prom by the London Symphony Orchestra was Simon Rattle’s 75th and surely his strangest. But, in his best style, it was eclectically programmed, balancing novelty with tradition, responded imaginatively to the restrictions in place, and was very well played in the circumstances. These circumstances allowed for more inventive programming than would normally be entertained, but the biggest irony was that the spatial effects that would have sounded so amazing in the hall were only possible because the hall was empty.The required distancing between players became the basis of the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
For a riveting, cathartic – and often surprisingly humorous – 50 minutes Ralph Fiennes paces the stage at the Bridge Theatre to deliver an account of Covid-19 that is as political as it is personal. In a script written by David Hare – who contracted the virus at the point in March when the government was still dithering about lockdown – he arrestingly describes the illness as "a sort of dirty bomb thrown into the body".The fact that it now feels quite so radical to be sitting in an auditorium, which once seated 900 but has been reconfigured for 250, is just one indication that the metaphor Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comedy is all about timing, and the owners of the UK's newest comedy club should know. Just days after they obtained the final licences they needed to open, the national lockdown was announced in March. Now the brave souls are opening 21Soho at a third of capacity; thankfully audiences are keen to see live performances after being starved of them for so long, and the first of regular comedy nights – 21Soho presents – had a fantastic line-up.The club (which can hold live music events as well as comedy), is in a listed building in the heart of London's West End and has a pleasing Read more ...
David Nice
“Did you bring any Bach?” was not a question to ask of Jonathan Scott before he launched into his jaw-dropping Prom on the Royal Albert Hall's 1871 Henry Willis organ – the largest in the world at the time. augmented in its 2002-4 overhaul to 9,999 pipes. What Stokowski did for the Toccata and Fugue in D minor Moore achieved, in reverse as it were, for four orchestral classics in a feat of stamina live on Saturday evening.Circumstantial swings and roundabouts in this fairground turn were plentiful: what you lost from not being there to hear the hall shake and reverberate you gained from the Read more ...
Gaby Frost
What stands between Beirut and the moon? Between Lebanon’s capital and the limitless possibility beyond? It is a question as complex and immense as the nation itself. In the wake of the devastating explosion on 4 August, as well as longstanding government corruption and an unprecedented economic crash, it feels, now more than ever, as though the answer is: everything.The beauty of A. Naji Bakhti’s Between Beirut and the Moon is that it refuses to take the easy route. It embraces the city’s paradoxes and complexities, acknowledges its defects and limitations, and celebrates its freedoms and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Turnamat is a type of washing machine made by AEG. In the composition titled “Turnamat”, Seventies-type synths, wobbly keyboard lines and hard-grooving drums give way to a brass-led interlude suggesting an acquaintance with the compositions of Lalo Schifrin. It’s as if a jazz-inflected soundtrack from 45 years ago has been shoved into a blender rather than a washing machine, then reconstituted and given a major buff-up. “Turnamat” is by Skarbø Skulekorps, an oddball Norwegian jazz outfit.“Surrender” is as impactful. On this, over just-short of five minutes, the sax player Bendik Read more ...