Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
Cut almost anywhere into the lesser-known seams of Handel’s oratorios and you may strike plentiful nuggets of the purest gold. It may not be quite the case that Handel's Belshazzar, its score studded with nearly-forgotten musical treasures, has entirely disappeared from view. A decade ago, the Berlin Staatsoper staged an all-star operatic version of this work from 1744, which later travelled to the Aix-en-Provence festival. William Christie and Les Arts Florissants have recorded a meticulous account, and given it in concert here.But as a fully-staged piece, as The Grange Festival’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It has become routine to accuse Brexiteers of wanting to bring back the British Empire (though obviously it's OK to run an empire from Brussels), but the charge might more accurately be levelled at ITV. They’ve brought the ratings rolling in with their saga of the early years of Queen Victoria, and Beecham House, set in late-18th century India, is being touted in some quarters as “The New Downton”, itself a relict of Edwardian pomp and ceremony.Though I must admit, Beecham House doesn’t look much like Downton Abbey to me. True, it’s full of spectacular palaces peopled with wealthy potentates Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. Anne Boleyn is number two on the list, so anyone who can remember even that much Tudor history can guess that Donizetti’s Anna Bolena is not going to end well. The overture has hardly ended before we’re told that Anne’s star is falling, and it’s not exactly a spoiler to reveal that our social climbing heroine is destined (in the words of a better librettist than Donizetti’s collaborator Felice Romani) for a short sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block. We already know where we’re going. The success of the opera Read more ...
Stephanie Sy-Quia
Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is written as a letter to his mother, who cannot read. She cannot read because, when she was five, her schoolhouse was burnt to the ground in an American napalm raid. “Our mother tongue, then,” writes Vuong, is the “mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”Vuong, whose debut poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, won the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1988 and emigrated with his mother and grandmother to Hartford, Connecticut via a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Like Lemmy, the bassist with their fellow London-based freaks Hawkwind, Pink Fairies crossed the bridge between the late-Sixties underground and the great British punk rock boom of 1977. After being sacked from Hawkwind Lemmy formed the punk-friendly Motörhead, whose debut album was issued in ’77. Their short-stay first guitarist was the Fairies’ Larry Wallis. After he exited Motörhead a fleetingly reformed Fairies issued a single on Stiff in 1976, the label’s second release.Wallis then produced The Adverts and issued his own single on Stiff in 1977. His pre-Motörhead band’s drummer Twink re- Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The publicity said it would be dark. But who would have guessed The Mother would be this dark? With its tally of dead and dying babies, gouged eye sockets and flayed skin, Arthur Pita’s latest dance-drama vehicle for the phenomenal Natalia Osipova, loosely based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen, gives HBO’s Chernobyl a run for its money.Even Yann Seabra’s set – a revolving suite of poorly furnished rooms, all dingy wallpaper and stained sanitary ware – seems to have come from the same job lot. Russian folk memory seeps from every blood-smeared pore of this grisly tale with its cast of Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Treatise by Cornelius Cardew is the defining work of the graphic notation movement. The score, completed in 1967, is made up of 193 landscape pages, each with two empty musical staves running along the bottom, with an array of graphic designs above, often incorporating elements of musical notation, but rarely specifying pitches or rhythms.Throughout the summer term at Goldsmiths, a series of concerts have presented different interpretations of an 11-page excerpt from Treatise (pp. 115-126), and this, the conclusion of the Treatise Project, brought six readings together. The Project, Read more ...
Chloe Allen
“I want to be just like P!nk,” a little girl screams as the lights begin to dim and the introductory music grows louder. It’s no wonder this leg of the Beautiful Trauma World Tour sold out in under 15 minutes. The whole stadium is packed full of adoring fans, in a sea of varying shades of pink, visiting from all over the UK and some further afield. A man takes to the stage offering an out-of-tune version of the 20th Century Fox intro sequence, gesturing towards a popular viral video shown onscreen.The pink satin curtain at the stagefront falls, the lights go up. P!nk is already onstage Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The Barbican Hall hardly boasts the numinous acoustic of Gloucester Cathedral for which Vaughan Williams composed his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, but Sir Simon Rattle has long known how to build space into the architecture of what he conducts.No indulgences needed to be made for the students of the Guildhall School of Music next door. They slotted seamlessly within the ranks of the LSO to conjure a luminous halo of string sound, untroubled by the sense of loss which belongs to the piece in more lean and urgent performances. Their wind colleagues then filled the stage for Percy Read more ...
David Nice
Is the terrifying past of Germany in 1933 also our future? Having had nightmares about the brilliant dystopian TV soap opera Years and Years, which built like all the best of its kind on present fears, I wasn't expecting to be confronted so soon by another pertinent disaster drama. In a sequence of all too unforgettable theatrical images, Ivo van Hove finds the present and the future in the pith of Visconti's's discomfortingly luxurious 1969 fantasia about a family which turns into a 1930s House of Atreus under pressure from the newly ascendant Nazi party.Visconti's Italian title was La Read more ...
Ellie Porter
“You want heavy?” Metallica frontman James Hetfield already knows the answer to that question, and he and his three fellow horsemen of the apocalypse certainly deliver that tonight. This stop on Metallica’s mammoth Worldwired tour is the second of only two UK dates this year – they played an extremely rainy Manchester a few days ago – and they are very pleased to be back. A Metallica show always begins with Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of Gold”, from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, so when the lights go down and those unmistakeable notes ring out, the crowd goes nuts before being Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Making it to the fourth film in a series and maintaining quality is a feat pulled off by very few franchises, (see last week’s dreary Men in Black: International). But Pixar has done it with Toy Story 4. It might not have quite as many nifty gags without its originator John Lasseter at the helm, but the quality of animation has reached new heights and the story reduced me both to tears and helpless laughter. The original Toy Story was the first animation feature created entirely digitally; almost 25 years later computer technology has made another huge leap forward. The opening Read more ...