Reviews
David Nice
Nobody would wish it this way, but orchestras playing on a stage specially built-up for distancing to a handful of invitees have never sounded better in the Royal Festival Hall. The Philharmonia’s outgoing principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is a master of exquisite textures, and Ravel, arguably the greatest orchestrator ever, has come under his sympathetic microscope on many occasions. It says much for Britten that his writing for strings and human voice stood the comparison with the French master last night in an enchanted hour of music.Britten’s haunting response to Rimbaud’s Les Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
A long shadow looms over Robert Zemeckis’ new take on Roald Dahl’s classic 1980s book The Witches, starring Octavia Spencer, Anne Hathaway and newcomer Jahzir Bruno. That shadow is cast by Nicholas Roeg’s strange and terrifying 1990 adaptation starring Anjelica Huston, which expertly captured the wicked humour of Dahl’s book. Roeg’s film may have diverted from Dahl’s original plot in some respects, but it shared the author’s peevish delight in terrifying and delighting in equal measure. Zemeckis’ film is a much more bubble-gum affair, made all the worse by an over-zealous Chris Read more ...
Owen Richards
When Mogul Mowgli was first announced, it was fair to expect something of a realist biopic. After all, you had documentary director Bassam Tariq and actor/musician extraordinaire Riz Ahmed helming a film about a British-Pakistani rapper. Even the title is partially taken from one of Ahmed’s songs (“Half Moghul Half Mowgli” by Swet Shop Boys). And then we meet Tuba Tek Singh (pictured above right), a beflowered hallucination of cultural heritage and trauma. This ain’t no realist biopic; it’s something so much more.Ahmed plays Zed, on the precipice of success after years of grinding. We find Read more ...
David Nice
Throughout this most difficult of years, the Royal Opera has done the right thing for the singers on its Jette Parker Young Artists Programme. They were fortunate to finish the run of Handel’s Susanna before the Linbury Theatre closed down for over seven months (yesterday saw its reopening to a necessarily small audience). Stunning South African soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha amazed as the heroine, and went on to appear in both the third livestreaming from the main house and as the soloist of Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 in the brilliant 4/4 event. Two of the lunchtime singers, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Neil Cross’s novel Burial was hailed for its skilful plotting and insightful characterisations, as well as its macabre atmosphere. Disappointingly, the author’s own adaptation of the book looks clumsy and uncomfortable on TV.It’s being shown in four parts on consecutive nights on ITV, and Wednesday’s part three left us poised on the brink of a denouement which may prove ugly and brutal. However, so far the story has failed to ignite, despite the way it keeps telling us how creepy, spooky and other-worldly it’s supposed to be. The main stumbling block is Russell Tovey’s leading role as Nathan Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Shirley is one of those films that the mood you’re in when you watch it will dictate whether you think it’s a great psychological horror movie or overheated and pretentious. Go to the cinema wanting to be plunged into a fever dream of gothic Americana, replete with glaucous close ups of Elisabeth Moss as a writer wreaking revenge on her unfaithful husband, and you’ll be more than satisfied. But if you’re hoping for a linear narrative that adheres to the actual biography of Shirley Jackson, the artful elliptical editing which blurs elements from her fiction with cherry-picked aspects of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Due to COVID-related nonsense too tedious to relate, this month’s theartsdesk on Vinyl was delayed. But here it is, over 7500 words on new music on plastic, covering a greater breadth of genres and styles than most major festivals. From reissues of some of the biggest bands that ever lived, to limited edition micro-releases from tiny independents, it’s all here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHKiko Dinucci Rastilho (Mais Um)São Paulo artist Kiko Dinucci has said, “The idea has always been to play the guitar as a percussion instrument.” Couldn’t agree more. Dinucci has iron in his musical blood and Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
To plan a programme around The Tempest, its symbolism and the idea of evanescence, the fragility of the human condition, is one thing. To pull it off convincingly is quite another. The young Russian pianist Pavel Kolesnikov not only did so in his Wigmore Hall recital on Monday night, but offered an evening so profoundly touching that it seemed at times to inhabit Prospero’s magic island, plus some. Music, as many have commented over the centuries, lives in the spaces between the notes; and here, however many (Liszt) or few (Schubert) were available to play, Kolesnikov carried its Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Among the French composer Claude Debussy’s greatest and characteristically subtle innovations was to put the titles at the end of his pieces. He did this in his piano collection Preludes: the titles, trailed by ellipses and clothed in brackets, appear more like suggestions than statements. Completing the collection a few years before his death in 1918, with it Debussy seemed to fulfil his mission of edging the cerebral late 19th century musical language towards the more sensuous zone of timbre, texture and colour. The player (Debussy’s ideal listener) is made to handle these Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There’s an old rule in the theatre that you don’t have to go on if there are more people on stage than in the audience. Last night I counted less than 15 people listening in the cavernous auditorium of the Royal Festival Hall pitted against a fairly full-sized Philharmonia (with the now familiar onstage social distancing) but the show went on anyway, for the benefit of an unknown number of people watching the livestream. It made for a somewhat dispiriting experience in the hall. I enjoyed the Philharmonia’s virtual Prom last month and I’m prepared to concede that this concert may have come Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Plenty of pedigree wattage has been packed into this slickly addictive new HBO drama (showing on Sky Atlantic). The twin headliners are affluent Manhattan couple Grace and Jonathan Fraser (Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, the latter basking in the high-end prestige which has accrued since his virtuoso performance as Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal). It’s written by telly-doyen David E Kelley, creator of (among other things) Big Little Lies, which also starred Kidman.Big Little Lies probed the private lives and murky secrets of a group of wealthy but insecure Californians, while previous Read more ...
Northern Chords Festival, Church of St James and St Basil, Newcastle review - high, lucid and bright
David Nice
Whatever happens next – and even in Tier 3 the Royal Liverpool Phlharmonic goes on playing to carefully distanced audiences – this will be remembered by all participants as a day of dazzling brilliance, its bright autumn light matched by so much of the music in a morning service and four concerts ending nine hours later.In the best (and shortest) of sermons flanked by the mostly buoyant settings of Haydn’s Nicolaimesse, the vicar of the light, airy church of St James and St Basil in the leafy Newcastle suburb of Fenham, James McGowan, made everyone beam by investing Jacinda Ardern as the very Read more ...