Reviews
Nick Hasted
Charli xcx’s cinema blitz includes seven acting roles and Wuthering Heights’ soundtrack, reinforcing her cultural ubiquity since 2024’s Brat summer. Film remains an adjunct to her sensational avant-electropop, not yet following Lady Gaga’s transition to Oscar-winner and pop part-timer. Pete Ohs’ micro-budget Erupcja anyway trades minimally on her persona, trusting her charisma to underwrite a character who credibly triggers volcanos.Bethany (Charli xcx) is in Warsaw from London for a weekend during which boyfriend Rob (Will Madden, pictured below left with Charli xcx) means to propose, a Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Okay, theatre is all about acting, but then so is most porn. Except for amateur stuff. Sort of. And then there is AI, deep fakes and digital manipulation, while not forgetting real-world sexual violence and missing children. But even these things can be manipulated by those in power. And by the media. In her debut play, Are You Watching?, staged in the Royal Court’s studio space, Georgie Dettmer explores the relationships between the real and the fake, the watchers and the watched. And she does this by breaking down a dozen storylines into a series of fragments, intermittent short scenes, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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By the time Marina Diamandis reaches “Cuntissimo”, Birmingham’s O2 Academy is a sing-along sauna. We’re squeezed in like rice in vine leaves, drenched in human juice. Attempts to dance are restricted to meagre hip wiggles and hands waved above the head. No-one seems to care. The outrageous, pop-ballistic single of last year hits the desired chord. “Your ex is hitting you up,” Marina sings, and holds the mic towards us all. “BUT YOU NO LONGER GIVE A FUCK!” the place roars as one.Marina is that curiosity, a cult female star making pop Read more ...
David Nice
Richard Strauss, who conducted this orchestra and programme to an audience of 7000 in the Royal Albert Hall on 19 October 1947 aged 83, would have shared our mixed feelings about the curious phenomenon that is Santtu-Matias Rouvali, the now-80-year-old Philharmonia's Principal Conductor. Not for Strauss Santtu's expansive, sometimes sluggish approach to his most popular symphonic-poem calling card, Don Juan. And in the 1940s he was quicker, too, with his mostly tongue-in-cheek, brilliantly worked saga of 24 hours in the life of the Strauss family, Symphonia Domestica. But he would have Read more ...
David Nice
If the Wigmore Hall sought perfection in its 125th Anniversary Festival, it found it in the two concerts I've attended this week - in the greater part of Lise Davidsen's and James Baillieu's Schubert cornucopia, and last night in the sublime Belcea Quartet's teaming up with similarly legendary viola player Tabea Zimmermann in two awe-inspiring string quintet masterpieces. Zimmermann held centre place in Mozart's G minor Quintet, telling from the start because Mozart has the first viola as the lower of the top three voices at the start, only to take the upper line with second viola and Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Sathnam Sanghera’s previous books have included a memoir about growing up Sikh in Wolverhampton, and two acclaimed (and very good) accounts of colonialism – so it wasn’t entirely obvious that his next should be a meditation on the life and work of popstar George Michael. But Sanghera, a fan since childhood, sets out to investigate Michael through a number of lenses (including those of “Queer Icon” and “Celebrity”) and to interrogate his own complicated relationship to the star. Not a biography, it instead often feels like an (over)extended magazine feature (Sanghera writes for The Times), but Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert is one of those albums that transcends its genre; it’s not only the best-selling jazz solo album of all time, but the best-selling piano album of any kind. And aside from its almost transcendental quality, this success reflects the mythical reputation of the one-off concert that it records.Ido Fluk’s film is a fictionalised account of that concert, which took place in Köln’s opera house in 1975, late at night, for a packed crowd of jazz afficionados. The legend of the performance lies in the fact that it should not have taken place: on the night, Jarrett Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
War Horse was without a doubt one of the boldest experiments in the National Theatre’s history. As Tom Morris, co-director with Marianne Elliott of the original production says in the programme, “Essentially putting a non-speaking central character on the Olivier stage was going against everything that everyone understood about that space. The design is for epic theatre in which text makes the space come alive. In this show, it’s movement, it’s puppetry.”Almost 19 years later, after more than 7,500 performances around the world attended by around nine million people, it’s all too easy to Read more ...
David Nice
It's nine years since soprano Lise Davidsen gave a Wigmore Hall audience her first credentials as a recitalist, in true partnership with a pianist to whom she's remained faithful since, James Baillieu. Alexandra Coghlan welcomed her then, and while I'd been bowled over by her role in Pappano's Royal Opera Verdi Requiem and was stunned by her Sibelius Luonnotar, I had some questions about the first half of her Barbican recital. Any here were purely a matter of taste; her Schubert programme with Baillieu was finely shaped in every respect. You couldn't fail to love her by the end.Suffering Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Whereas the more venerable European jazz festivals, founded from the 1960s onwards, are typically faced with challenges of mid- or later life, Montrachet Jazz is a newcomer and is different. 2026 was just its second edition, but its early steps are bold and impressive. Not only is a very clever artistic vision already in place, but it is also one which authentically complements and enhances the unique magic of its setting.Location is everything, and truly there is no place like Puligny-Montrachet. For lovers of dry white wine, this is, literally, hallowed ground. The village is within Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
South Korea’s soft power isn’t restricted to K-pop and K-drama. The latest Festival of Korean Dance, hosted by venues around the UK, is a demonstration that its contemporary dance scene is impressive too.Now in its ninth iteration, this year I caught two of the festival’s programmes, one indie, the other by the Korea National Contemporary Dance Company, who presented a piece on a double bill that was so good, I returned the next night to catch it again.The other offering from the KNCDC, Voyage, could have been from another planet. Indeed, it claims to be inspired by the Voyager spacecraft’s Read more ...
David Nice
Spirit of place first: Nevill Holt, which I was visiting for the first time, is a beauty. There's an Oxford college look about the facades, from 13th century to more recent additions, a lawn on the hill gives splendid views over the Welland Valley, while gardens and catering rival Glyndebourne and Garsington. Plus, most significantly, a purpose-built, RIBA award-winning 400-seater opera house in the handsome ironstone stable block (pictured below). All of these thanks to David Ross, an entrepreneur with a chequered history whose attention to detail is phenomenal. He bought the estate Read more ...