Reviews
Gavin Dixon
This year’s Proms for children were entitled “Off to the Moon”, and audiences were invited on a musical space voyage to mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. The format was a mix of orchestral music, kids’ programmes on big screens and CBeebies presenters keeping the show rolling. Grumpy adult pedants in the audience would have found plenty to complain about, the orchestra was amplified, and the music was barely mentioned, but the young audience was attentive throughout and clearly enjoyed every minute.Top billing among the CBeebies stars went to Justin (everything was on first name terms Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Light creeps under the church door. Entering as a slice of burning white, it softens and blues into the stone interior, seeming to make the walls glow from the inside. Beneath the lintel, a milder slot of sun pours upwards. To the right, a plain column, only half in the composition, supports an arch which merges with the back wall, disappearing against its horizontal plane. The chapel is empty but its stillness feels peopled. Here, absence is watchful.The Door, 1884, was painted at the Chapelle de Trémalo in Pont Aven by Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck. A grant from the Finnish Senate Read more ...
Owen Richards
With sapphire blue waters, year-round sun and architecture that spans centuries and cultures, it’s little wonder that Malta is a favourite location for Hollywood. To celebrate its long featured history, Radio 2 brought the BBC Concert Orchestra to Valletta for a special Friday Night is Music Night. It was a suitably bombastic evening, featuring soundtracks and songs from cinema, topped off by the Maltese favourite, fireworks.Our guide for this cinematic journey was the ever-effervescent Charles Dance, bouncing between anecdotes and impressions, wearing a smile rarely seen in his screen roles Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Eighty years ago this summer, Neville Chamberlain’s indifference to the peoples of Czechoslovakia – “a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing” – reaped its harvest of total war. These days, we have no excuses for not knowing a lot more. And the opening concerts of this year’s BBC Proms have shown why we should. After the first-night offer of Dvořák and Janáček, yesterday saw an all-Bohemian rhapsody, with Dvořák’s Violin Concerto the elegant appetiser for a hearty, full-flavoured main course dished up in the form of Smetana’s complete Ma Vlást. Under its Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
In cricket, timing is everything. Played a fraction early and that silky cover drive finds a batsman out to lunch as the ball cannons into his stumps. Too late and it dribbles uselessly to mid-off.Ex-cricketer turned journalist Vic Marks has made it his business to be in the right place at the right time. First as a mean spin bowler, sharing a Somerset dressing room with Botham, Richards, Roebuck and Garner, perhaps the most outrageously talented side in county cricket’s history. Then as a tidy presence in England’s one-day side of the 1980s, facing up to the West Indies and Australia. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“As much as I love New York City, it’s all too obvious that Cleveland is about to become the musical focal point that the Big Apple has been on and off since the beginning of the century,” wrote Peter Laughner in October 1974. “I want to do what Brian Wilson did for California and Lou Reed did for New York.” To a degree, the new five-album/five-CD set Peter Laughner achieves this, albeit 42 years after his death.Laughner’s full-page article in Cleveland newspaper The Plain Dealer pointed to the north-east Ohio city’s 15-60-75, Jimmy Ley and Mirrors as the bands who would represent this Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If there was a downer during the giddy, gleeful Glasgow stop of Gossip’s recent run of shows, it was only when front woman Beth Ditto introduced the band as being “not really together but we’re here”. The dance-punk trio - joined, for this short run of reunion shows, by pre-split touring members Chris Sutton on bass and Gregg Foreman on keyboards - were made to front sweaty rooms, with Ditto in particular a gleaming vision in a sleek black wig and metallic pink dress.The occasion may have been the 10th anniversary of the band’s Rick Rubin-produced 2009 album, Music For Men - hence the huge Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A new commission, a Romantic tone poem and a choral spectacular – standard fare for the First Night of the Proms. Traditionally, the First Night sets out the themes for the season ahead, but the rationale behind much of this programme was paper-thin. Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass was included because Henry Wood had conducted it, part of a series featuring pieces Wood introduced to the UK. Dvořák’s The Golden Spinning Wheel was played because Henry Wood had not conducted it, a Proms first performance “reflecting Wood’s fondness for expanding the repertoire”. So the Czech theme turned out to be a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In Tell It to the Bees, sex is aberrant unless it’s conducted by a straight married couple. Since Annabel Jankel’s low-key drama is set in a grim Scottish mill town in 1952, you can add “white” to that dictum. We’re in the land of John Knox here and the suffocating mood of repression is summed up in the taut face of the factory forewoman Pam (the great Kate Dickie), who tells the machinist Lydia (Holliday Grainger), her Mancunian sister-in-law, “What was my brother thinking of, bringing home a wild one like you?”Based on the semi-autobiographical third novel by Fiona Shaw, Tell It to the Bees Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Die Zauberflöte rarely attracts the plain cooks of the operatic world. Mozart’s farewell opera chucks so many highly-spiced ingredients into its outlandish pot – pantomime and parable, burlesque and ritual – that many productions opt for one show-off recipe that promises to unify all its flavours into a single, spectacular dish. Seldom though, can a high-concept Magic Flute have served up its menu with such delirious dedication to a Big Idea as this, the Glyndebourne Festival’s first version for more than a decade. The Franco-Canadian design-and-direction duo of (André) Barbe & ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One of the most memorable moments in Ron Howard’s documentary about Luciano Pavarotti is one of its earliest scenes. It’s a chunk of amateur video shot when Pavarotti visited the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, a splendid Belle Epoque structure in the midst of the Amazonian jungle. In front of a handful of curious onlookers, Pavarotti climbs onstage and sings Tosti’s "A Vuchella", a favourite piece of his idol Enrico Caruso, who also used to sing at the Teatro Amazonas. It’s a lovely tribute from one superstar-tenor to another from an earlier generation.Modern technology and media meant Pavarotti Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The City of London is an ecological disaster. Around Bank, Mansion House and Cannon Street there’s scarcely a green leaf to be seen. Glass, steel, concrete and tarmac create an environment that excludes plant life, birds and insects and is detrimental to human health.Everyone in the Square Mile seems to be ignoring the twin disasters of air pollution and climate change – everyone, that is, except Bloomberg. Over the summer, they are hosting Beuy’s Acorns, an installation of 52 saplings grown by artists Ackroyd & Harvey (Pictured below right). They harvested the acorns from trees planted Read more ...