Reviews
Jessica Duchen
Perhaps the most surprising thing is how good natured they all sound. There’s no anger. At least, not much – one can’t help wondering what they say off air. Through a kaleidoscope of vocation, hopes, dreams, inspirations, and worries about stuff that their male counterparts do not have to consider, nine conductors who happen to be female share their stories in this engaging and long-overdue film, with humour, intelligence and an occasional dose of major frustration.Women are increasingly stepping to the fore in the world of orchestral conducting, but my goodness, it has taken a long time. In Read more ...
Robert Beale
Omer Meir Wellber, who once used to do magic with music for children, pulled a whole set of rabbits out of the hat in his reading of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony on Saturday. Others may make the work's rhythms and melodies alluring through the sheer forward momentum of a steady beat. Not Wellber. The most striking thing about the first two movements, as he directed them, was that the contrast of mystery and vigour embodied in the shapes and dynamics of the music’s rhythm, melody and harmony was also represented in its speed – or rather, speeds.It's a way of conducting Beethoven symphonies that Read more ...
David Nice
As RuPaul's best squirrel friend Michelle Visage, co-doyenne of the amused and amusing judges, put it, "that was some next-level shit". She was referring to a high point in the contest's weekly lip sync-ing finales, right at the end of the new season's first entertainment (on Netflix), but it's true of the majority of the 13 queens presented over two episodes to compete for the crown. Usually you detect a weak link or two, and they're gone in the first weeks; you never got to know who they were. But this time no-one was sent home, and the quality looked like the best ever - a return to form Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There is something enjoyably spikey about Halsey, even when she is adhering to pop convention. At one stage she told the crowd how good they looked, before dryly adding it was praise they wouldn’t have heard before. These are brave words when playing to a Glasgow audience. She is a pop performer possessing an actual personality, one that has survived the step up to playing arenas, and when she spoke during the encore of how her fans had helped keep her alive during tough times, it came with a raw emotion rarely present in big gigs.The New Jersey native was also very much the show here. Her Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It may seem strange to watch a play about four English people on a kibbutz in the Seventies, and find yourself thinking about Brexit, but that’s precisely what springs to mind here. Culturally blinkered and politically ignorant, most of the characters seem to see their first trip to Israel as little more than an opportunity for sex and better weather. The Finborough Theatre has a fantastic record in digging out overlooked theatrical gems – not least last month’s On McQuillan’s Hill which played to packed houses. Not Quite Jerusalem was a huge hit for playwright Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There's nothing you can't joke about, say all stand-up comics, but Tom Rosenthal has entered new territory with Manhood – a riveting and often raucously funny show about his circumcision. He is here, he says, “to avenge the theft of my foreskin”.Despite the face and the name, he tells us, it wasn't done for religious reasons, as the family have been non-practising Jews for four generations, although he is happily “kosher for cash”, as some acting roles, including in Friday Night Dinner, about a north London Jewish family, come his way at least in part because of the monicker. In his Read more ...
David Nice
Spectacular success couldn't have happened to a more interesting person, or a better writer. The pithy but imaginative prose in the third and final instalment of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, which as you may just have heard was published this week, flies off the page in readings by Ben Miles, Nathaniel Parker and Lydia Leonard of the RSC's Wolf Hall adaptation and Shiloh Coke (Lady Anne Clifford in Emilia at Shakespeare's Globe). There are commentaries by three men very well acquainted with Mantel's progress - you'd like at least one woman - but the Read more ...
India Lewis
Rebecca Solnit’s autobiography, Recollections of My Non-Existence, is just as you might expect it to be – tangential, changeable, deeply feminist, and imbued with a sense of hope that undercuts her wild anger at the world’s injustices. It says much for how quickly our thinking about women’s rights and those of minorities has evolved recently that her feminist rhetoric almost feels dated at points. However, Solnit’s energy is still fresh, urgent, and vital, reminding the reader that although the battle seems to be on the way to being won by powers of good, we are still far from victory, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In common with her literary forebear, Joanna Trollope’s light hand refrains from the introverted angst so common in contemporary novels. Her immensely readable, witty renderings of English middle-class life have entertained and enlightened over almost two dozen novels. She portrays characters on journeys for which they’re missing the map and exposes common dilemmas along the way. Her characters search for answers to situations obscured by habit and solutions to personal problems they hardly recognise. Her underlying optimism is alluring – from recognition may come change.In Mum & Dad Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Through previous archive releases or bootlegs, deep-digging Cream fans will already be familiar with much of what’s on Goodbye Tour – Live 1968. The legitimate 1969 album Goodbye Cream included three tracks from the 19 October 1968 Los Angeles Forum show, heard here in full. Another trio of tracks on this set, from a 4 October 1968 Oakland show, appeared on the 1972 Live Cream Volume II album. The 26 November 1968 Royal Albert Hall set has done the rounds in various forms. As for bootlegs, all the shows collected on Goodbye Tour have circulated in their complete form.What's new is Goodbye Read more ...
David Nice
"All true spiritual art has always been RADICAL art": thus spake the oracular Georges Lentz, composer of the pitch-black odyssey for electric guitar that took everyone by surprise last night. In that vein, why not add that all the greatest performers always push the boundaries, and that 28-year-old Sean Shibe, though included by the sponsors of this concert among "emerging talent", is already in their select company. This amazing Wigmore concert took us from a first half of fragrant miniatures by David Fennessy and minimal magic from Sofia Gubaidulina elided into radical Bach to the " Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 2020 Formula 1 season will commence in Melbourne next weekend... unless the race is cancelled because of the mounting coronavirus panic. Everyone will have to self-isolate and watch Netflix instead, so how fortunate that the ‘flix has delivered this second series of Drive to Survive in the nick of time.The first series last year was impressive, but this one seems to have taken a quantum leap upwards. Across the 10 episodes, it picks and probes at all the salient issues of F1, exploiting an amazing degree of backstage access and brilliant high-def action photography to reach back and forth Read more ...