Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Although it conforms to a realistic chronology of events, this third season of Peter Morgan’s remarkable voyage around the House of Windsor (on Netflix) has the feel of a sequence of standalone dramas, linked together by its interrelated characters and their shared history. The action commences in the mid-Sixties, and there’s been a changing of the guard among the cast. Because the bar has been set so high, all the new players act their socks off, and among a raft of brilliant performances, Tobias Menzies as the Duke of Edinburgh, Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret (pictured below) and Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
How do you begin to dramatise one of the most extraordinary conversations of the 20th century between two of its most charismatic and complex intellectuals? When the philosopher, and then First Secretary at the British Embassy in Moscow, Isaiah Berlin met the Leningrad poet Anna Akhmatova, it proved a transformational experience for both of them, though the political repercussions it had for Akhmatova were devastating. The playwright Olivia Olsen, whose passing physical resemblance to Akhmatova also allows her to bring her elegantly to life, has made a slightly curious decision. One of Read more ...
David Nice
If you're going to run a music festival with flair, it's not enough just to have a run of star performers who pop up for single events. The 11th Wimbledon International Music Festival can offer those – Christian Tetzlaff and Lars Vogt, for instance, were there a week ago. But founder and festival director Anthony Wilkinson had also witnessed the phenomenal programming of violinist Hugo Ticciati at his own O/Modernt festival in Sweden, and booked him as Artist in Residence for five events. I heard two of them on Saturday, Labyrinths: A Double Bill, and witnessed some of the most hyper-refined Read more ...
Owen Richards
Beck stands on the front cover of his new album Hyperspace with a vintage Toyota and Japanese text resplendent above. It’s the perfect scene setter for an album you could easily imagine soundtracking a midnight drive through Tokyo. Or if the lyrics are anything to go by, an intergalactic voyage. Following on from 2017’s excellent Colours, Beck has settled into a reliable late-career groove that mixes deceptively simple songwriting with intricate production. The best example of this is the aptly-named “Chemical”, creating sounds that wash over your synapses like a psychoactive compound. Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
People who derive comfort from Classic FM’s strapline that European classical music is “The World's Greatest Music" are going to have a major problem with this book. American music historian Ted Gioia has marshalled 25 years' worth of his own life and several centuries of music history into 500 pages which put that complacent assertion in doubt.“The scope of this book is the full history of music,” he writes in his introduction. And his aim? "Above all, I hope to topple established hierarchies and rules, subverting tired old conventions and asserting bold new ones."Gioia argues that new music Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In a first for this column, what’s cropping up is a cassette reissue. The Clash’s third album is so familiar, going into what it is or was in any depth is redundant but it’s worth considering what’s going on here.London Calling was originally issued on 14 December 1979 and is celebrating its 40th anniversary. Naturally, it’s hitting the shops again. The definitive reissue came out for the 25th anniversary in 2004, when the album was teamed with rehearsal recordings taped on cassette at Vanilla Studios, a DVD of The Last Testament: The Making of London Calling documentary, promo videos, film Read more ...
peter.quinn
Jazz Voice unfailingly supplies a gigantic sugar-rush of auditory pleasure, and this year’s edition was no exception. Arranged, scored and conducted by the brilliant Guy Barker, the evening’s opener saw rising US vocalist Judi Jackson and the EFG London Jazz Festival Orchestra transform Nirvana’s brooding “Come As You Are” into a swaggering, Vegas-style workout.With a sound firmly rooted in classic Motown and Stax, the US-born, Liverpool-based singer-songwriter Jalen N’Gonda gave the world premiere of his self-penned “Angel Doll”, displaying a marble-smooth tone and pitch-perfect falsetto, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Like almost everything that it touches these days, English National Opera’s autumn season of shows rooted in the Orpheus myth has enjoyed a fairly mixed reception. The company’s programme of visits to the Underworld concludes with another high-risk journey: Philip Glass’s 1993 opera Orphée, inspired by the 1950 film that Jean Cocteau spun from his own earlier drama on this theme. From the off, as director Netia Jones (in her ENO debut) tells us, Glass and Cocteau have drawn us into a hall of endlessly reflecting mirrors, a game of shadows and doubles in which each story and treatment of the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It should come as no surprise that the writer of Side Effects and Contagion, Scott Z. Burns, is capable of directing a whip-smart drama like The Report. Known for his collaborations with Steven Soderbergh, most recently on Netflix drama The Laundromat, Burns has made a career of turning complex material into engaging viewing.Echoing All the President’s Men by way of Spotlight, The Report focuses on Daniel Jones (Adam Driver), tasked by US State Senator Dianne Feinstein with investigating the "Enhanced Interrogation Technique" employed by the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
My friend, let’s call her Kit, is having a rubbish time. Kat (that’s me) is too. If life’s got a flavour, it’s a shade darker than 99% cocoa. Kit and Kat are bitter. But if life is akin to boxed chocolates (or even foil-wrapped), there’s an entire world of tastes out there. What better than to add some sweetness, stir in some sugar? That’s where Craig comes in. Oh, Craig! Who in the world could be more delicious than this honey-tongued, smooth-talking lady charmer? Who in the world could deny he’s not been to their taste since before the millennium? (And shame on you if that’s you).Craig may Read more ...
Katherine Waters
For a loved one to die by suicide provokes both pain and hurt. Pain, because they are gone. Hurt, because it can feel like an indictment or a betrayal. For Charlotte Salomon, the suicides that ripped holes in her family were also foreshadowings which provided the structure for her monumental cycle of narrative paintings Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?) which is now on show at the Jewish Museum in Camden.About a third of the 769 gouaches that Salomon selected of the roughly 1,300 she painted over the course of two years are displayed in the exhibition. Like the full work, and in Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Channel 4’s The Accident closed with a bang and a whimper. Jack Thorne provided a definitive answer to his series’ central question, but his characters and subplots petered out in the meantime.Over four episodes, this series examined the fallout of a fatal explosion, in a town cloaked by the long shadows of Grenfell and Aberfan. Each episode centred on a kind of reckoning: between old friends, husbands and wives, mothers and widows. But its core tension, as tonight’s episode hammered home, was the standoff between a broken-hearted community and a corporation unmoved by their loss.The finale Read more ...