Turner and Constable, Rivals and Originals, Tate Britain, November 2025Whoever thought of creating an exhibition comparing the brilliance of JMW Turner with that of John Constable deserves a medal. Even if you are familiar with the work, seeing their paintings hung side by side reveals surprising similarities as well as differences.Turner relished the visual drama of smoke, fog and inclement weather. When the Houses of Parliament went up in flames in 1834, he seized the opportunity to paint the sky filled with billowing smoke and the river glowing red with fiery reflections ( Read more ...

The stylish gentlemen pictured above are Crimson Earth, a band active from 1970 to 1976. Regardless of their longevity, the Dorset-based outfit failed to attract national attention and didn’t release any records. There was an audition for EMI, local media support and a deal with a Bristol booking agency but cigars were not forthcoming.Even so, a 1972 tape of the band has been disinterred and one track from it – the explosive, irresistible “Heathen Woman” – was included earlier this year on the agenda-setting Yeah Man, It's Bloody Heavy!!, an extraordinary, wild-ride compilation of never- Read more ...

If it's possible for snippets from live theatre to play in the mind on a perpetual loop, the London theatre during 2025 offered many such moments that I am (very happily) finding it hard to shake. I won't soon forget, for instance, the first glimpse of the furry, pint-sized Peruvian otherwise known as Paddington bear in Paddington the Musical, that rare homegrown musical painstakingly nurtured over time that spoke to the effort paid in bringing Michael Bond's creation to the stage. Amidst the bouquets that have quite properly been thrown the direction of the show's creatives - Luke Read more ...

It’s 1952 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, seven years after the Enola Gay dropped a bomb on the Japanese empire, but one skinny New Yorker is still waging war against it, armed with street savvy, a motormouth and a traditional table tennis paddle.This is the unlikely subject of Josh Safdie’s first solo directing release, Marty Supreme, loosely based on elements from the life of Marty Reisman (here called Mauser and played by Timothée Chalamet). Most Japanese sportspeople had to observe a post-war travel ban, but not the low-level celebrities of the table tennis world, which was barely Read more ...

Alabaster DePlume, aka Mancunian Gus Fairbairn, has been an antically charming performer, confounding unsuspecting crowds with tenderly comic philosophy, voice Tiny Tim-eccentric yet alive to mental fragility, and attuning listeners to the brave possibilities in their every breath. Operating at a quizzical angle to London’s jazz scene, he surfs his own, sui generis wavelength.Working with West Bank Palestinian musicians during the Gaza War had clearly changed DePlume in gigs in Brighton and Norway’s Moldejazz festival, and A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole. He sometimes found elevated Read more ...

If this time of year should prompt everyone to count their blessings, then one precious musical gift shines brightly over Smith Square Hall this week. For the choral ensemble Polyphony, its director Stephen Layton and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, it’s just a normal Christmas festival in Westminster: Bach’s Christmas Oratorio last night, Messiah this evening.Yet I came away from the Bach reflecting that, four decades or so back, period-conscious Baroque music-making of this quality and commitment would still have struck most listeners as a revolution – perhaps a miracle of sorts Read more ...

Peace and Goodwill to All Men outside. Inside, on stage at least, there’s not much peace nor goodwill to be had on the horror-filled Saturday afternoon before Christmas. A high-spirited full house is set to spend a couple of hours with spirits of a very different kind. In every sense, it's a shocking contrast.Of course, this is no original IP, many punters, having seen what they liked in the Paranormal Activity movies, sitting down, drink in hand, bag of merch tucked under the seat, for a new fix, this time in the West End. That said, ghost stories are a Christmas tradition, whether Marley Read more ...

Vox Luminis, the vocal and instrumental group based in Namur and led by Lionel Meunier, continued their residency at the Wigmore Hall, hot on the heels of a memorable rendition of Bach’s B Mass at the Spanish Church a few blocks away, with an equally breathtaking evening of works by Bach and his predecessor as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, Johann Kuhnau.There were two wonderfully celebratory Magnificats, the first by Kuhnau, and the second by Bach – his earlier version in E flat Major ( BWV243a). Although not specifically for Christmas, they have both traditionally been associated with the year’s Read more ...

UK prog-rockers Gracious! acquired their exclamation mark when their first album was released in July 1970. Up to this point, they were Gracious. Barney Bubbles, who designed their LP’s sleeve, added the symbol without asking or telling anyone.The sleight typifies the story of Gracious! The band had breaks, but their path through the music business was bumpy. They recorded a second album between January and March 1971, but split in August that year before it was scheduled for release. When the LP was issued in April 1972 the band were not informed. The label “just flopped it out there with no Read more ...

When, in late 2021, I heard the UK premiere of Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio, it truly felt like a heaven-sent gift of musical and vocal splendour after the long famine of our lockdown purgatory. Four years later, with the renewed thrill of large-scale live performance no longer so acute, how does it hold up? For the most part, with undimmed brilliance: at the Barbican, the composer himself conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a signature work that gathers four centuries of sacred music into a 100-minute meditation on the Christmas story. It transcends pastiche to Read more ...

Whether there really was a poisonous professional rivalry between Mozart and Antonio Salieri, composer to the Imperial court in Vienna, seems less than likely, but the success of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, on both stage and screen, has convinced the world otherwise. In Shaffer’s view, we see a Salieri consumed with envy and jealous rage at the effortless brilliance of Mozart, who seemingly had access to a continual stream of divinely-inspired inspiration. Salieri, by contrast, would be remembered only as “the patron saint of mediocrities”.Sky Atlantic’s adaptation, written by Joe Barton, Read more ...

“The wonderful Mirra exists in its own space.” Back in August, that was the conclusion of my review of Benedicte Maurseth’s then-new album. Living with this “stunningly intense,” “haunting, intense evocation of Norway’s uplands and its wildlife” hasn’t changed this impression. Moreover, over the ensuing months, the impact of this exceptional collection of eight interrelated compositions has increased. Benedicte Maurseth is Norwegian. Her main instrument is the Hardanger fiddle – with its second set of sympathetic, drone-generating, strings. This, together with Mirra’s concern with Read more ...