Reviews
Jo Southerd
What makes a great Christmas song? There’s an alchemy to finding the winning combination of whimsy and humour, juxtaposed with a healthy slice of Christmas angst. This formula has led us to spin the same handful of pop bangers that endure down the decades, soundtracking generation after generation of tinsel and mince pies.This Christmas Day makes no attempt to pen an original hit, it’s simply a covers album of all the classic festive tunes. "Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town", "Man With The Bag", "Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree" – are all given the Jessie J treatment with vocal acrobatics Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps belatedly prompted by the release of Barbra Streisand’s new album Walls, the worst-selling disc in her 55 years with Columbia Records, this documentary was an uncritical celebration of Babs’s brilliant career from her first stage appearances in the late Fifties to the joys of Hello, Dolly!, The Way We Were and Yentl. The somewhat arbitrary cut-off date of 1984 meant that we were even able to enjoy a nostalgic blast of “Woman in Love”, from her collaboration album with Barry Gibb, Guilty.These days Streisand (present here only in archive clips) has become a grandiose diva in aspic, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The double album The Sound Gallery was issued in 1995. It collected British easy listening and library music tracks which had been mostly overlooked by reissue compilers as they were beyond a form of musical pale. The 24 cuts were, up to a few years earlier, neither hip or trendy as they were by stuffy old geezers like Joe Loss, aimed at a low-cred easy listening audience, not rare or had been heard by barely anyone as they had appeared on subscription-only music library albums. As a foundational exercise in delineation, The Sound Gallery became as influential a compilation as Nuggets.Side 2 Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Mitsuko Uchida continues her world tour of Schubert sonatas with two concerts for the home crowd, this the second of her appearances at the Festival Hall. The tour coincides with Uchida’s 70th birthday, but the years have done little to diminish her technique. And Schubert is an excellent choice, arguably her strongest suit – perhaps a joint first with Mozart – though her many recordings and performances in the past are little preparation for her always unpredictable approach.Schubert’s piano sonatas make demands on the pianist, both in technique and interpretation, and every player Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is Natasha Gordon’s first play, and in it she has created an entire world. A world of grief and laughter, conflict and closeness. A world that is very specifically located within Britain's Jamaican community, yet one whose themes of loss and belonging cross boundaries. Between the tears and the recriminations, it is also frequently very, very funny.“Nine Night” refers to the protracted funeral wake ritual that follows a death, which brings family and friends together to remember the departed, to recall the stories over nine nights fuelled by food and drink, music and words. Gordon’s Nine Read more ...
David Nice
With eyes swivelled towards who'll take over from Esa-Pekka Salonen as the Philharmonia's Principal Conductor in 2021, two of the strongest possibilities are to be found within the orchestra's masthead of associates. Another Finn, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, currently a great choice as the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra's trailblazer, and that best of Czechs Jakub Hrůša, chief in Bamberg, are already serving up electrifying events unsurpassed on the London concert scene, and Rouvali's all-Richard Strauss programme last night was the real deal. Eventually.It started with quite some wilful pulling- Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
The Old Vic's revival of its successful Christmas Carol first seen this time last year had me at the mince pies: they were served before curtain up by a Bob Cratchit figure while we admired the shoal of Victorian lanterns lighting the way over a cross-shaped stage that cuts the audience into quarters. Top-hatted gentlemen and gentleladies in swishing black great coats strolled about tossing oranges. One waved a sign that said, "Please do not use your mobile phones in the auditorium," which could have been more appropriately phrased but did at least keep the devices from being doused in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite having enjoyed a prolific few years in which he has appeared in (among others) All Is Lost, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Truth and Our Souls at Night, Robert Redford has said that The Old Man & the Gun will be his last film role. That might have turned out to be a disastrous hostage to fortune, so it’s delightful to report that this is as fine and affectionate a send-off as any movie icon could wish.Written and directed by David Lowery and based on a New Yorker article by David Grann, it’s the real-life story of career bank-robber and inveterate jailbreaker Forrest Tucker Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
What do you gain by casting Dr Faustus and Mephistopheles as women? In the programme for this often illuminating production, director Pauline Randall declares, “There’s always a rather intimidating, institutional question of ‘why’ when it comes to these decisions, and especially when it comes to handling a classical text. Sometimes the right refute is 'why not?', and we’re choosing to respond to that more productive challenge.”Yet it doesn’t take long, when sitting in the candlelit intimacy of the Sam Wanamaker theatre, to work out how utterly apt it is to make a character who seeks forbidden Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Don't be deceived by Kit Harington's matted, slicked-back hair that is immediately visible the minute the audience enters the boisterous West End revival of True West. By the time the director Matthew Dunster's production has roared to a close two hours later, pretty much nothing is still intact, its leading man's locks included. That's as it should be with Sam Shepard's now-iconic 1980 play that I actually saw somewhat by chance during its world premiere engagement in San Francisco in 1980 and have returned to many times since. Now marking its commercial London debut (previous local Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Seldom has an encore felt so welcome. With Sir Antonio Pappano as his accompanist at the Barbican, Ian Bostridge tugged us through the mill of industrialised slaughter and the psychic devastation it leaves in an ambitious programme of song sequences that evoked “war, and the pity of war”. Requiem – a sort of launch gig for the recording of this programme that the pair have just released – concluded with four songs from Benjamin Britten’s 1969 cycle Who are these children?: settings of poems by William Soutar. The final song, a keening and jagged lament for children bombed in the Spanish Civil Read more ...
Marianka Swain
There’s a welcome alternative to panto hijinks in this gem of a Trevor Nunn musical revival – more attuned to the biting hardships of winter, and to the elegiac aspect of change, than to festive jollies. Which is not to say that there isn’t rousing fun to be had in many a slick set-piece, but this intimate, sensitive staging brings out the work’s soul, particularly its timeless call for empathy and compassion.Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick drew on Sholem Aleichem’s stories for their 1964 musical, and it initially feels like a folk tale: that of Tevye the dairyman (Andy Nyman) Read more ...