Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Last month, this column pondered a vinyl-only R.E.M. reissue. Despite the mystifyingly high sales price of original pressings, reissuing a best-of mostly collecting easily available tracks seemed a tad unnecessary. Moreover, it lacked imagination. If vinyl is an ascendant format, why not do something interesting or say something new? The questions again become apposite with the arrival of two imaginative new vinyl comps which set the (relatively) recognisable in unfamiliar contexts and promote fresh appreciation of what might be repeatedly trodden ground.Jon Savage's 1965–1968 – The High Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Day two of the seventh BST Hyde Park concert series, and despite darkening skies the rain held off until the last hour or so, at which point anything else would have seemed inappropriate – for Stevie Wonder was about to tell us that in September he is to have a kidney transplant. He had a donor, he would be fine, he told everyone – but there was a collective sense that we all wanted to call to say we loved him, this wonderful musician who has been with us since he was 11-year-old Little Stevie Wonder. Which is to say pretty much all our lives.Deprived of sight, Wonder is prodigiously gifted, Read more ...
Robert Beale
As end-of-term concerts go, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony is a biggie. In fact it’s hard to imagine any place of secondary education where they would even contemplate it.But for Chetham’s School of Music, the "Symphony of a Thousand" was a doable task, and for Stephen Threlfall’s last public appearance for Chetham’s as director of music it became a thrilling triumph. They’re only part of the way through celebrating 50 years of Chetham’s existence in 2019 – this was number 32 in a 50-concert series running through the year – but of those 50 it will probably be remembered the longest.Recorded for Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“You do like to have your cake and eat it, Vity. So many cakes, so many,” laments Harold Nicholson (Rupert Penry-Jones) to his wife Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) as she embarks on an affair with Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki).The Bloomsberries have been parodied so often – I kept thinking here that I was watching a version of Radio 4’s Gloomsbury, with Miriam Margolyes as Vera Sackcloth-Vest – that it’s hard to take director Chanya Button’s interpretation seriously.It constantly verges on pastiche, with everyone rolling their r's in a verry 1920s upper-class way and Virginia, when Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time hasn't necessarily been kind to this slow-aborning West End transfer of a show first seen (and lauded) in its 2015 debut in Leicester and then again two years later for a summer run at the Menier Chocolate Factory. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 has now reached the West End, and the obvious question is who is this musical version of the ever-popular Sue Townsend books for? It's difficult to imagine overly many of the Adrian Moles of today (or even their parents) latching on to jokes about Dallas or Elizabeth Taylor, and the retrograde sexual politics – "shut your Read more ...
Guy Oddy
There can’t be many bands who have been around (on and off) for almost 40 years and who choose to play the whole of their latest album as their live set. That kind of thing is more often reserved for 10- or 20-year anniversary tours. No one could accuse Al Jourgensen and Ministry (or any of his many bands, for that matter) from having ever taken the easy route at any point in their career though. Fortunately for a heaving O2 Institute, Uncle Al is still not playing “the game” today.To celebrate this year’s Fourth of July, Ministry played two sets on the Birmingham leg of their first UK tour Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The famous ambiguity of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is whether the ghosts that take possession of the two children are real or merely figments of the young Governess’s imagination. Britten’s opera resolves this unequivocally in favour of their reality: they appear alone together, and generally materialise so solidly that it never occurs to you to doubt their real existence. But now Louisa Muller, in her vivid new production for Garsington, casts a fresh and intriguing light on this question. She presents the Governess, the housekeeper Mrs Grose, and the ghostly Miss Jessel as three Read more ...
caspar.gomez
As ever theartsdesk’s Glastonbury report arrives after all other media coverage. Despite management pressure Caspar Gomez refuses earlier deadlines. He told Editorial, “The press tent is like an office, a place of work, full of laptops and coffee. Who needs that?” His annual saga doesn’t attempt to compete with Tweeted micro-reviews or ever-available BBC iPlayer festival highlights. It takes a winding road, explores the scenery, the musical-chemical highs and body-worn lows, capturing in fuller form than anywhere else a most singular plunge into Glastonbury 2019.THURSDAY 27th JUNEIt’s been Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Who would have thought that Ari Aster could top the satanic delights of Hereditary? Yet with Midsommar, a psychedelic twist on folk horror, he has. Aster abandons the supernatural to show that it’s not things that go bump in the night that scare us, it’s other people.Think of your worst romantic relationship, the one that churned you up inside and left you a sobbing mess for months. This is the territory that Aster mines in his latest work. Florence Pugh plays Dani, a post-grad student whose life is split between worrying about her suicidal, bipolar sister, and her relationship with Christian Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Crowned queen of the percussive heel and the trouser suit, Sara Baras has the audience on its feet long before the final number of her show Sombras (Shadows). The Spanish superstar is a familiar presence at Sadler’s Wells, having fronted its annual two-week flamenco festival several times before. She’s a natural headliner with her big, glossy theatrics. Her current offering, though, is a thing of deep contrasts: light and dark, sound and silence, conviviality and yes, loneliness. There are moments when she almost has you believe it’s just you and her in the room.Baras’s signature dance over Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Welcome to A Midsummer Night’s Dream as carnival – a blazing-coloured, hot-rhythmed, kick-ass take in which Oberon appears at one point as a blinged-up Elizabeth I and Puck exerts his powers as a flash-mob. Last month the glitter-ball hedonism of Nicholas Hytner’s gender-fluid Dream, which opened at The Bridge, felt like an impossible act to follow, but this riotous production by Sean Holmes at Shakespeare's Globe shows that the Battle of the Dreams is on.The Latin American vibe that pervades the romantic madness in the woods is given a sinister twist through the decision to introduce Theseus Read more ...
David Nice
Benjamin Britten's musical mystery tour is still bringing young communities together to work with professionals at the highest level 61 years on from its premiere in a Suffolk church, and Lyndsey Turner's sweet production at Stratford must have been as much fun to be in as any. But Britten also had special concerns about communication, speaking eloquently about a "magic triangle" of three equal points - the work, the performers and the audience. Confine much of Noye's Fludde behind a proscenium arch in an intimate theatre, and you immediately introduce the element of Them and Us. Place the Read more ...