Reviews
Adam Sweeting
It’s an intriguing question. If a new Messiah appeared today, what kind of reception could he (if it was a he) expect? Possibly something similar to the one which greeted Jesus, according to Netflix’s new series Messiah.Created by Michael Petroni, it stars Mehdi Debhi in the role of Al-Masih, a man who never makes explicit claims for his divine powers, but who is accompanied by a trail of miraculous phenomena as he travels around the world. Al-Masih resembles a Christ-figure as imagined by a painter from the Italian Renaissance, and radiates a charismatic aura which compels people to follow Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sky Atlantic is usually where you go for big-hitting dramas, so this quartet of observational documentaries is an unexpected development. Each film follows a single family over three years, and each family faces particular challenges.In this opener, director Clare Richards went to Newport in south Wales to follow the progress of Tony Borg and his wife-to-be Emma, due to marry in May 2018. Both of them had a fair amount of baggage to bring to the party. Tony, an ex-boxer turned successful boxing coach, had eight children, and Emma had four. Indeed, by the end of the film, Tony had acknowledged Read more ...
David Nice
"What is it about Mozart?" asked Sviatoslav Richter in 1982. "Is there a pianist alive who really manages to play him well?...Haydn is infinitely less difficult to play (he's almost easy, in fact). So what is Mozart's secret?" Just over a decade later, he went a long way towards unlocking that secret in a Moscow recital, playing three sonatas and the C minor Fantasia in Grieg's two-piano adaptations with Elisabeth Leonskaja, the younger colleague whose playing he so inspired. And I'm sure that if he were alive today, he would have given the ultimate accolade to his one-time protégée's recital Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Filmmaker Tom Costello’s opening question in this quixotic but fascinating documentary for Channel 4 deftly skewered the journey he was about to take us on. Was making change or finding fame more important? he asked, and by the end of the story it was crystal clear where the main protagonists stood.Costello’s subject was the passionate, sometimes demented-looking conviction with which committed vegans advance their cause, in particular the way vegan activists are exploiting the potential of online channels including Instagram and YouTube. The likes of Earthling Ed and Earth Angel Jacqueline Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Alongside the heartfelt tenderness, there is an emotional weight - as well as a compositional sophistication - prevalent in Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs. Perhaps this correctly discloses the word "early" as pertaining to the composer’s journey as an artist, as opposed to his lived years. Having written around 30 such pieces in his twenties, whilst being taught by Arnold Schoenberg, Berg chose to both publish and orchestrate these seven when he was forty years old. Though each penned by a different author, there’s more than an echo of wistful nostalgia in the text of every piece, and Read more ...
David Nice
Why go to hear a cello-and-piano recital in a large hall, and a rather unsatisfying programme (delayed without explanation for 15 minutes, incidentally) spotlighting a transcription of a work which was created for the violin? Two good answers would be Gautier Capuçon and Yuja Wang, sophisticated artists right at the top their respective leagues, communicative in a way that can reach out, tone-wise, into big spaces or pull you in to another, magical world.Capuçon the cellist didn't solve all problems in Jules Delsart's arrangement of Franck's A major Violin Sonata - a work ideally played by Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The soap-opera saga of the House of Windsor may not have been what the executive director of the London Mozart Players had in mind when she announced from the stage that Sheku Kanneh-Mason “is completely relevant for us”. Four years on from winning BBC Young Musician and two years since playing at the wedding of the wantaway Duke and Duchess of Sussex, the 20-year-old cellist bears an impossibly heavy burden summed up in another dread phrase, “the future of classical music”. Yet he wore it lightly and with some style last night, playing the First Cello Concerto by Saint-Saëns to a full house Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Scrounger is no comfortable evening in the theatre, for reasons both intentional and inadvertent. Athena Stevens’ new play recounts her 2016 battle with British Airways and London City Airport, who subjected her to the humiliation of being taken off a flight to Edinburgh because they couldn’t fit her custom-built electric wheelchair into the hold. Injury was added to insult when in the process of trying to cram the wheelchair into the plane, it was irreparably damaged. And all this happened despite the fact that Stevens had given them its dimensions well in advance. In the absence Read more ...
David Nice
Not everyone who flocked to Day Two's evening concert in Kings Place's year-long Nature Unwrapped: Sounds of Life celebrations will have realised that they were catching parts two and three of a trilogy. The masterpiece had come earlier, in a 5pm screening: Phie Ambo's poetic documentary Good Things Await, about the tenacity of eccentric Danish biodynamic farmer Niels Stokholm and the obstacles he faces from rigid authorities. There's choral music in there, from Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, performed on the soundtrack by Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices, whose first soprano Else Torp Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s a good few years since Judy Collins last toured Britain and Ireland, though in the US she’s rarely off the road. Over the last couple of years she has notched up more than 100 concerts (and an album) with Stephen Stills, who famously celebrated their 1960s love affair in the magnificent “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”. Her latest album, Winter Stories, with Jonas Field and Chatham County Line, had American critics reaching for superlatives and put her in the charts once more.Her eyes are still as blue and even up close you’d never guess she celebrated her 80th birthday last May Day. The pink Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A mixed bill rarely pleases all comedy tastes – whether in style or content – and so it proved at the launch of the Leicester Comedy Festival, which starts next month. In a line-up of eight comics that had few star names, the best came last – but more of that later.The gala was presented by the hugely likeable Charlie Baker, a Devonian who gets great mileage from his home county, approaching middle age, being married for nearly 20 years and liking his food too much. And while there was a lot of cheeky interaction with the front row along those lines, he was always the butt of the joke; Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
According to Gabrielle Aplin, the delicate piano ballad which closes, and provides the name of, her first album in over four years was written as a letter to herself; and one penned at a particularly turbulent point in her life. “It’s not easy for me, but I know that I’m close,” she sings, as if willing the emotion into being.Dear Happy – which arrives on Aplin’s own Never Fade label following her 2017 split from Parlophone – is full of little moments like this: of resilience, reflection and recovery, providing a consistent through-line on a record which ranges from bubblegum pop and electro- Read more ...