Reviews
Robert Beale
John Wilson conducted Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony with the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester just over a year ago with great success, in a programme of music from the 1940s. This time it was the very different, troubled Fourth, and the context was British composition.Two contrasting masterpieces from the 1930s made up the bulk of it: Walton’s Violin Concerto (premiered in 1939) and the symphony (first heard in 1935). They make a remarkable contrast. Wilson began with Arnold Bax’s November Woods – suitable enough, as VW dedicated his symphony to Bax – but it’s the product of another world, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Primatologist, ethologist, zoologist, biologist, social psychologist, behaviourist – how may ‘ists’ can one person have? Dutch-American scientist Frans de Waal has helped revolutionise how we think about the attributes of fellow animals. He writes for the lay reader without condescension, mixing anecdote with plenty of citations from controlled experiments.De Waal has spent more than forty years studying primate colonies, notably chimpanzees and bonobos, mostly at the National Primate Centre in Georgia, helping to transform and change human understanding of our fellow animals who inhabit this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The sticker on the sleeve says “Marvin Gaye’s Lost Album.” A prime internet sales site states “You’re The Man was the album that was proposed to follow-up the monumental What’s Going On.” According to the marketing and promotional material, You’re The Man is “Marvin Gaye’s never-released 1972 Tamla/Motown album” and that it’s the “music legend’s shelved follow-up to What’s Going On.”Let’s be clear: the new double album You’re The Man is not an unreleased album.Instead, it marries the 1972 single “You’re the Man” with recordings taped the same year at separate sessions with various Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Maggie Smith is not only a national treasure, but every casting director's go-to old bat. Now 84 years young, she is our favourite grande dame, or fantasy grandma. With an acting career of nearly 70 years, an instantly recognisable face and voice, and several shelves groaning with awards, she returns to the London stage for the first time in 12 years, tempted by Nicholas Hytner to perform a one-woman show at his high-profile Bridge Theatre. This time, the much-honoured Dame will be playing neither a dowager nor a professor, nor a Shakespearean heroine, but instead a real-life German secretary Read more ...
james.woodall
If you were a fan of “Rock Island Line” when it became a pop hit, you’d have to be at least in your mid-70s now. In 1956, Paul McCartney heard Lonnie Donegan perform it live in Liverpool, and Paul’s rising 77. How many below that age know it is moot, though that doesn’t necessarily disqualify it from the hour-long documentary treatment. For blues lovers, it’s a benchmark. “Rock Island Line” dates from the late 1920s and was first recorded in 1934.Billy Bragg dependably and articulately fronted up this BBC Four history of the song, a protest paean to, or (as it might once have been called) a Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Oumou Sangaré is not a woman to be trifled with – tales of people who have crossed her and lived to regret it abound: one story (of many) has her personally hiring a bulldozer in a land dispute and getting a recalcitrant local official sacked. She looked super-glamorous at Earth in a white dress and blue nails, and her backing singers looked and sounded ravishing in vertiginous heels and 70s hairdos.The Dalston venue is becoming a great addition to London’s music venues – a little run-down with wooden seating but with a warm atmosphere and excellent sound centring on Oumou’s extraordinary Read more ...
David Nice
Goethe's cosmic Faust becomes Gounod's operatic fust in what, somewhat surprisingly, remains a repertoire staple. You go for the tunes, hoping for the world-class voices to do them justice and prepared for a pallid quarter-of-an-hour or two. David McVicar's 15-year-old production as revived by Bruno Ravella is beginning to date, Royal Opera trad with a few scandalous add-ons and wacky choreography by Michael Keegan-Dolan. Two things are startling this time round: the conducting of Dan Ettinger, which makes the score sound much more interesting than I remember, and a phenomenon, unique to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
No one was waiting for another Hellboy film, but here this rude, crude reboot is anyway, stomping all over Guillermo del Toro’s 2004 original with freewheeling energy. Based on Mike Mignola’s long-running comic about a grouchy demon summoned from Hell as a baby by Nazis, but raised to do monster-bashing good by adoptive dad Professor Bruttenholm (Ian McShane stepping into John Hurt’s ’04 shoes), this minor franchise has the advantage of existing outside Marvel and DC’s crowded universes.British genre specialist Neil Marshall draws deeply on Mignola’s stories. But where del Toro reverently Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sigrid Raabe bounced onto a tiny stage, fizzing with energy, and launched straight into her recent single "Sucker Punch". Following her recent support slot with George Ezra, this concert was the 22-year-old Norwegian's big thank you to fans who have recently been supporting her. It wasn't just a gratitude gig. This was a special "all age" event in a suburban nightclub and the whole thing was over by nine o'clock. That didn't stop moments of goosebump exhilaration coming thick and fast.Partly it was down to the sheer quality of the material. Sigrid may have only just released her debut album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record Store Day is tomorrow which means that your local record shop will be packed with all sorts of exclusive, limited edition goodies as well as major label cash-ins. There are hundreds of releases but many aren't available before the day itself so below are the ones that theartsdesk on Vinyl got their hands on this year. Dive in.theartsdesk on Vinyl's RSD ChoiceHot 8 Brass Band Working Together EP (Tru Thoughts)The look of this release fairly shouts Record Store Day Special. In a transparent plastic sleeve embossed with the band name/logo in gold, it’s a bright blue transparent 12”. On Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Munch’s The Scream is as piercing as it has ever been, and its silence does nothing to lessen its viscerally devastating effect. It was painted in 1893, but it was a lithograph produced two years later – now the star of the biggest UK exhibition of Munch’s prints for a generation – that would make it famous. Munch's now rare black and white lithograph includes an inscription, which translated from the German reads: “I felt a large scream pass through nature”. Perhaps by spelling out the true subject of The Scream it gilds the lily, but in conveying the agony of empathy it offers an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was the fabled Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard who commented that country music is “three chords and the truth”. Rose-Lynn, the protagonist of Wild Rose, just happens to have the surname Harlan, and she has the “three chords” motto tattooed on her forearm. Singing country music is the only thing that has meaning for Rose-Lynn, a bossy, brassy 24-year-old Glaswegian single mother fixated on her dream of moving to Nashville and making a career in music. Only snag is, she has managed to blank out the whole motherhood aspect of the equation, and if she’s given it any thought at all Read more ...