Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Memória das Águas hasn’t figured in lists of great Brazilian albums. Its creator Fernando Falcão isn’t as celebrated as fellow countryman and musical maverick Tom Zé. The reissue of this arresting yet previously obscure album should help change these oversights.Although it was recorded in Paris in 1979, Memória das Águas came out in Brazil two years later on Poitou, a label which may have issued only one other record – a live album by a band called Synco Jazz. Falcão’s album was released to coincide with two shows he played at a São Paulo art gallery in April 1981. It was his first time Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Since time immemorial the Edinburgh International Festival has started with a juicy choral epic designed to show off the Festival Chorus and the opulent Usher Hall. So this performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony would normally have been billed as the opening concert. But the forces of democratisation and outreach have been at work. In recent years the festival has kicked off with a large scale free “opening event,” aptly mirrored by the popular free fireworks concert at the end.This year the grand opening event was in fact a concert on Friday evening by the very same orchestra as that Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The English-language drama Holiday, Danish filmmaker Isabella Eklöf’s feature debut, is an anthropological study of the corrosive effects of absolute male power and calcified misogyny. Inspired by a book written by Eklöf’s co-writer Johanne Algren and drawing on their experiences, as well as those of their gifted lead actor Victoria Carmen Sonne, it’s a harrowing movie – one of the most urgent of the #MeToo era.After deplaning at an airport that serves the Turkish Riviera and coaching into the port town of Bodrum, the protagonist Sascha (Sonne), a fragile woman of about 22, crouches on Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
It’s a curiosity of music that a performance can occasionally be better – more persuasive and impressive – than the work itself. Even Britten’s most devoted advocates would find it hard to rank the Piano Concerto among his masterpieces. In his account at the BBC Proms last night, however, Leif Ove Andsnes carved out a niche for the piece as a confident yet quizzical response to the genre, standing diffidently to one side.Yes, the opening Toccata sounded more than ever like fluent but second-hand Prokofiev; the following wrong-note waltz limped along as a poor cousin to the Spanish-accented Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is a scathing and heartfelt coming of age drama, though not of the adolescent kind. Tyler and Laura are soulmates and flatmates, two single women blazing a riotous trail of booze, sex and drugs through the bars and basements of Dublin. But with Tyler turning 30 and with Laura two years ahead of her, the spectre of delayed-action adulthood is looming.“Sooner or later the party has to end,” warns Laura’s sister Jean. We know she used to be a wild one herself, from an incandescent scene of her carousing naked and vajazzled in a crowded bar, but now she’s a wife and new mother facing grown- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The well-spring of certain musical genres and hometowns of certain influential musicians have long been a source of civic pride – and a boost to the tourist industry – in many clued-in parts of the world. One only has to think of the co-opting of Bob Marley’s life and influence in attracting tourist dollars to Jamaica or the raising of the Beatles to mythic status – bus tours and all – in Liverpool. Birmingham, arguably the birthplace of heavy metal through the music of the magnificent Black Sabbath, however, has been slow to give appropriate due to its own sons and rock’n’roll heroes. For, Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
“Movies are all the same,” says one character in Photograph, the latest film from India independent director, Ritesh Batra. It’s true, the plot feels familiar, but if stories are all the same, it’s how you play with the form that makes a film a success or not. Batra once again shows he knows how to craft a good story. Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a struggling street photographer. His days are spend snapping tourists next to the Gateway of India in Mumbai. It’s in this tourist trap that he meets Miloni (Sanya Malhotra), a younger woman who is still living at home and studying to become Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Montrealers exude a particular kind of happiness and have wonderfully snappy expressions to convey it: “Chu correc”, means ‘I’m fine’, and “C’est l’fun” means...exactly what it looks like. Yannick Nézet-Séguin is a distinctly proud Montrealer (“It’s where I live, it’s where my partner lives, it’s where my cats live...it is where I feel truly and fully myself,” he has said), and that special effervescence was plainly visible in both of his concerts at the Proms with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.In the second concert, he brought it notably to the Suite from Richard Strauss's Der Read more ...
bella.todd
A great hunk of rotting meat hangs centre stage, suspended over a rusty wheelbarrow. A figure in a bloody butcher’s apron picks through the stalls, searching for cans of ‘xxxtra cheap lager’. From the direction of the band, sinister Wurlitzer sounds begin to stir the air. If the words "family musical" fill you with certain wholesome expectations, you are likely to have them gleefully subverted by the National’s new summer show. A musical staging of a cult children’s book, Mr Gum and the Dancing Bear features Gary Wilmot in a flying fat suit singing about snacks, a demented sea captain with a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
“You know twinkle toes, in another life I bet me and you could’ve done some serious damage.” When Jason Statham’s bad guy turned good finally warmed to Dwayne Johnson’s cartoon-like lawman in Fast & Furious 8, it could well have been a cue for this spin-off focussed on the two bickering beefcakes.It seems a smart call. Once the Fast & Furious franchise swapped its custom car testosterone and faux-Zen philosophy for more extravagant action and tongue-in-cheek banter, it became infinitely more enjoyable. And the rivalry between Statham’s Deckard Shaw and Johnson’s Luke Read more ...
Liz Thomson
There is a video, part of Greenpeace’s laudable Save The Arctic Campaign, in which Ludovico Einaudi sits at a Steinway atop a small ice flow performing his Elegy for the Arctic. As he plays a descending scale, the camera pans slightly to the right just in time to see a chunk of glacier break away and crash into the sea. Perfect timing! The pianist-composer presumably needed to quickly warm up his hands after his performance, which was observed by a seal, and it would be interesting to know what treatment the piano required – humidity is the everyday enemy of pianos but they do not take kindly Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This was a year of superb musical standards, smooth organisation and a real sense of celebration. In the last couple of years, WOMAD being more liberal and internationalist than nearly anywhere else, there was a sense in the air of a collective political shock - maybe the future wasn’t with our tribe of happy cultural globalists after all. This year, even with the new PM, there was a more defiant sense that the WOMAD spirit will prevail after the current nationalist neurosis blows off some steam. For WOMAD is not just about music - the considerable presence of Extinction Rebellion confirmed Read more ...