Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
In 1018, the Princess of Chen – a member of the Liao dynasty that ruled northern China – was buried in a treasure-filled tomb in Inner Mongolia. Excavated in the 1980s, her grave contained luxury items sourced in Egypt, Syria, Iran, India, Sumatra – along with prized adornments in carved amber imported from the Baltic shores of Europe, 6500 km away. It hardly counts as news, perhaps, that the Chinese elites of a thousand years ago stood at the wealthy heart of an international trading and information system that spanned distant continents. “They lived in a globalised world, pure and simple,” Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The battle of Long Tan in Vietnam isn’t well known to the casual observer, but it has entered the military folklore of Australia and New Zealand. On 18 August 1966, 108 men of Delta company, 6th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment found themselves under ferocious attack from 2,000 Vietnamese troops, and only some stubborn leadership, dogged resistance and the New Zealand artillery saved them from complete annihilation.Kriv Stenders’s film tells the story with an unpretentious straightforwardness you wouldn’t get in a bigger-budget Hollywood production, even though the story isn’t Read more ...
David Nice
Bach, being The Greatest, can take any amount of adaptation. I'm especially addicted, for instance, to CDs on which the Japanese percussionist Kuniko plays cello suites and violin sonatas on the marimba. So it was going to be fascinating to hear a truncated St John Passion for Good Friday arranged, in this needs-must time, for percussion and harpsichord/organ, with a tenor taking all the lines bar the chorales, livestreamed by ensembles which would have participated in this year's Bachfest in Leipzig plus a vocal quintet in the same church, the Thomaskirche for which Bach wrote his great Read more ...
Veronica Lee
I must confess the sum total of my knowledge of Clarence Clemons before watching this documentary was that he was, for many years before his death in 2011 at the age of 69, the mighty saxophone player in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. And what a sax player...Nick Mead's film shows him to be much more than The Boss's sidekick (although that would not be a bad epitaph). Much of it is from Who Do I Think I Am?, which was about the saxophonist’s spiritual pilgrimage to China in 2003; Mead and his subject hit it off, so he kept shooting material after they returned to the US.Clemons, known Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the second of our lockdown specials. It’s a small but vital dip into what’s new on plastic. Other than that, theartsdesk on Vinyl wishes you well in these strange times. Stay at home, play records, turn up the volume.Various Cadence Revolution 1973-1981: Disques International Vol. 2 (Strut)Welcome second volume of Strut Records’ carefully collated history of Guadeloupe’s Disques Debs International, “the longest-running and most prolific label to have come out of the Francophone Caribbean”. It follows An Island Story: Biguine, Afro-Latin & Musique Antillaise 1960-1972 which Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Crying never solves anything. Be strong.” An admonishment from a stern grandmother haunts this low key first feature film by Alan Yang (Parks and Recreation, Master of None), loosely based on his father’s 1950s immigrant experience of leaving Taiwan and coming to New York City (his father does the voice-over in the film) and on Yang’s own recent trip to Taiwan with his father.No tigers in evidence here, kings, tails or otherwise. It’s a gentle, elegiac Asian-American story of lost love and emotional repression, told, in Mandarin and English, from the perspective of a disappointed middle-aged Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The National Theatre’s online broadcasts got off to a storming start with One Man, Two Guvnors – watched by over 2.5 million people, either on the night or in the week since its live streaming, and raising around £66,000 in donations. Let’s hope that engagement continues with their next offering: Sally Cookson’s dynamic adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, a Bristol Old Vic and National Theatre co-production which also toured the UK.Cookson’s devised work blows past the problems associated with transferring literature to stage. There is nothing stuffy or static about her version; on the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Given the times, theartsdesk’s New Music section is starting weekly round-ups of new streaming fare to liven the spirits and entertainingly pass the time during this lockdown. Here are our first five suggestions. Dive in!Light In The Attic ShowcaseThe archival/reissue label Light In The Attic put together an impressive continent-hopping set of live-from-home performances, running the gamut from veteran Brazilian musician Marcos Valle to Alex Mass of Texan fuzz-rockers The Black Angels. Mostly cover versions, the biggest name is probably Jarvis Cocker who, psychedelically shadowed, offers a Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
The world might have changed drastically in the wake of Covid-19, but thankfully those hyperactive, candy-coloured Trolls haven’t. Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake are back as the delightful odd-couple, Poppy and Branch, for round two of pop-infused peppy animated adventure in the land of felt and feelings, where music can solve a myriad of problems. The first movie was a gleeful delight. Yes, it was slight on plot, but it possessed an infectious optimism and a message of love and acceptance. It wasn’t going to have the bosses at Pixar quaking in their boots, but it was an undeniable Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
When I saw that the Berlin Philharmonic had thrown open the doors to its virtual concert hall the thing that most interested me was to see some Karajan. When I was a child in the mid-1980s I lived for a while in Berlin and my father took me to the Philharmonie several times. I remember seeing Karajan, then in the final years of his long Berlin reign. His conducting was minimal – helped onto the stage, seated on the podium and conducting with sometimes barely perceptible gestures – but there was an aura that was palpable.Although by the mid-1980s Karajan was physically diminished, in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Creating the opening episode of a new comedy series is like flipping pancakes with one hand while playing the Moonlight Sonata with the other. You have to introduce your characters and invent the world they live in, while squeezing in enough plot to keep the action moving.So high-fives to Sophie Willan, the first recipient of the BBC's Caroline Aherne writing bursary, for getting Alma’s Not Normal (BBC Two) off to a flyer. It’s a story of grungy, low-life Bolton, peopled with characters teetering between tragedy and farce. Willan plays Alma, the unemployed and barely educated daughter of drug Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“They say we all have a beast locked up inside of us,” a character observes early in this Korean crime movie. Monsters are certainly chewing at the moral fibre of police captains Jung (Lee Sung-min) and Han (Yoo Jae-myung) as they corruptly pursue promotion. The serial killer they race to capture, like the schoolgirl he’s torn to pieces, become incidental to ambition, and the tendrils of vengeance which turn jungle-thick in its wake.Jung-ho Lee’s remake of the French thriller 36th Precinct, which starred Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil as romantic as well as career rivals, throws elements Read more ...