Reviews
Leila Greening
Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse is a collection of 515 notes, each contributing to an expansive kaleidoscope of mountain encounters. Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire in Prototype’s English-language edition, a narrator travels in the Swiss Alps across disparate fragments of prose, converging occasionally with five central characters.Gahse captures conversations in mountain refuges, in cars traversing steep cliffs, on journeys to ragged quarries or distant hikes across granite. Many of these notes are gestural. Note 229, for instance, reads, in full, "I am more of an observer of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
I came to Isata and Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s Wigmore Hall recital on Saturday armed with a certain degree of scepticism. Not about the siblings’ stupendous talent and technique – their manifold achievements speak for themselves – but about the popular idea that family connections make for closer, more cohesive music-making. Well, the more fool me. Sheku’s delighted little glances back to his sister at the keyboard as he waited for her opening notes in a movement or a work hinted at the solid but playful rapport, and rippling empathy, that bound the quartet of fairly disparate pieces they Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera North have recently pioneered a way of presenting some big works which they call “dramatic concert stagings”, performing in concert halls as well as theatres, with the orchestra on the platform behind the singers and a minimalist set, and the principals in present-day costumes symbolic of characters’ type.Some have had video projection as a backdrop, but it’s also been dispensable where necessary. This one has none, but the concept is much more than a concert performance and completely justified by its impact in theatrical terms.They’ve opened in St George’s Hall, Bradford, as an early Read more ...
David Nice
Transcendence is everywhere in Mahler’s most ambitious symphony, from the flaming opening hymn to the upper reaches in the epic setting of Goethe’s Faust finale. You’d think no visuals could match the auditory phantasmagoria, just as dance, music and design flunked the essence of Paradiso in the Royal Ballet’s The Dante Project. Mahler does compose a kind of concert opera in Part Two, though; sound, movement and image accorded well.The Southbank Centre has splashed out on its sound-and-vision Multitudes festival, which here meant further expense in a work that already calls for a large Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The blurb on the front of the double-CD set The Hamburg Repertoire says it collects “The original recordings of songs performed by The Beatles on stage in Hamburg.” Disc One opens with Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” Disc Two ends with Chet Atkins’ version of the “Theme From ‘The Third Man’.”In between, 86 recordings of varying familiarity: from Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” and The Shirelles’ “Will You Love me Tomorrow” to lesser-known fare such as Duane Eddy’s “3.30 Blues” and Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps’ “Wedding Bells (Are Breaking up That Old Gang of Mine).”Hamburg and The Read more ...
David Nice
“Let the music guide your imagination” was never going to be the slogan of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival. Its 13 events offer parallel visions, intended in the case of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (a shared project between the LPO and Australian dance company Circa I regret missing), not so in Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony: as that masterpiece begins to be freed of its Soviet-era load, William Kentridge shackles it again on his own brilliant terms.More of that later. The redemption came in the last hour and eight minutes I caught of Igor Levit’s marathon performing the short Read more ...
David Nice
Back in 2009, there were Ben and Wystan on stage (Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art). Last year came Ben and Master David Hemmings (Kevin Kelly's Turning the Screw), followed by Ben and Imogen Holst according to Mark Ravenhill. That RSC Swan production is now playing in the Richmond round. It grips, thanks to extraordinary performances by Samuel Barnett and Victoria Yeates, and taut dramatic structure, but how deeply is it rooted in truth, and does that matter?Up to a point, yes. Britten told “Imo” in July 1952 that “it has been wonderful to know there was someone one could trust, not only to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s been nine years since Ben Affleck’s original portrayal of Christian Wolff in The Accountant, who’s not only an accountant but also a super-efficient assassin working for the highest bidders. In this follow-up, again directed by Gavin O’Connor and written by Bill Dubuque, Affleck barely seems to have aged, and he's still solitary, anti-social and probably autistic.However, this time around, a little more black humour has leaked into the drama. There’s a delightfully tongue-in-cheek early sequence where Wolff attends the Boise Romance Festival, a kind of pile-on dating game which is Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Finborough has once again performed the miracle of creating a whole world in its intimate space: this time, inter-war France, where two young girls meet and form a strong attachment. The semi-autobiographical story comes from a 1954 Simone de Beauvoir novel, Les inséparables, never published in her lifetime. Some apparently considered it too intimate, and Jean-Paul Sartre disapproved of it.Or maybe the great existentialist had spotted that the story is a trifle thin. Two bourgeois girls move though puberty to Paris, where one goes to university and the other meets a handsome intellectual Read more ...
James Saynor
Although both of the Brothers Grimm died around 1860, they still insist on getting dozens of film and TV credits in each decade of our present age. They might be seen, in a sense, as inventing the modern horror movie far more than Poe or Shelley or Stoker – largely because of their stories’ especially swingeing violence.It’s therefore not giving much away to report that The Ugly Stepsister, a Norwegian horror take on Cinderella, climaxes as feet are stuffed into slippers after toes have been lopped off with a cleaver. That, after all, is what happens in the Grimm version (and is highlighted, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Documentaries about sports stars are now a dime a dozen, but you can only be as good as your subject matter. We know Andrew Flintoff (usually known as Freddie) is a larger-than-life character who has had his fair share of both success and failure, but in this new film for Disney+, directed by John Dower, he emerges as a charismatic personality who can inspire undying devotion among friends and teammates while being brutally honest about his own shortcomings.Though he suffered periods of despair and insecurity, not to mention numerous injuries, during his cricketing career, he has subsequently Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“They fuck you up your Mum and Dad; they may not mean to, but they do.” These lines from Philip Larkin’s 1975 poem, “This Be the Verse”, sum up the emotional fuel of many recent plays by young writers.They certainly apply to Personal Values, Chloë Lawrence-Taylor’s debut, which is currently running in the studio at the Hampstead Theatre. But as well as showing the negative influences of parents on their children, this play is also a study of sisters, who have to cope with grief, and includes a really vivid stage representation of hoarding, here presented not as a Reality TV entertainment, but Read more ...