Reviews
Kieron Tyler
The famous names on Kreaturen Der Nacht: Deutsche Post-Punk Subkultur 1980–1984 are Christiane F., Die Haut, Malaria! and Mania D. Committed collectors of German post-punk and those who there at the time might be familiar with Ausserhalb, ExKurs or Leben Und Arbeiten. In eschewing DAF, Die Krupps, Der Plan, Einstürzende Neubauten, Liaisons Dangereuses, Holger Hiller, Palais Schaumburg and Die Tödliche Doris, this deep-digging compilation paints a picture of German music from the first half of the 1980s as stimulating as it’s unfamiliar.Kreaturen Der Nacht collects 16 tracks by 16 bands/ Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Not really a song recital, nor a chamber music programme, this musical grab bag definitely was definitely popular. The programme of predominantly recent music was sold out weeks ahead. The notably younger-than-usual audience received it enthusiastically, and rightly so.Although part of King’s Place's latest ‘unwrapped’ series, Time Unwrapped, the thematic linking of the pieces was fairly loose. But they made an effective sequence thanks to a unity of scoring, with harp and celesta popping up several times in support of the extraordinary voice of countertenor Iestyn Davies (pictured below).The Read more ...
Saskia Baron
When a film is about a crime family, audience expectations tend to involve mobsters and thrills, but that’s not the territory that Hirozaku Kora-eda is exploring here. He opens his tale with a camera tracking leisurely across a Tokyo supermarket. A scrawny man and a young boy are picking out supplies to slip into their bags and take home. There’s very little drama in their thieving, it’s an everyday necessity that they’ve honed into a routine. Kora-eda isn’t going for high tension, there’s just a pause in the subtle jazz-infused soundtrack that allows us to listen to the rustle of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Destiny is all. The first two series of The Last Kingdom debuted on BBC Two, but for series three it has been fully embraced by Netflix. Global domination surely looms, since these latest exploits of Uhtred, the warrior who was born a Saxon but raised by Vikings, find the show hitting new peaks of throat-slitting, skull-crushing action and intense personal drama.Mostly penned by lead writer Stephen Butchard from Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories, the action again takes us to a bleak and chilled ninth-century England (it’s shot in Hungary). It’s a land of mud, snow and woodland seemingly in the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Aside from her incredible time feel, exceptional range and consistently beautiful timbre, what was most impressive about Jazzmeia Horn’s bravura performance at a sold-out Ronnie Scott’s was the sense of joyousness and vitality that coursed through her music-making.Listening to the singer’s phrasing in a blistering, gear-changing account of “Willow Weep For Me”, she took more risks during the course of a single chorus than some vocalists do throughout their entire career. And while Horn has always been quick to give her esteemed musical antecedents, vocalists Sarah Vaughan and Betty Carter, Read more ...
Ellie Porter
It’s a freezing cold, wet night in north London and Denver-based musician Brent Cowles is braving the grimness to play his first ever UK gig, at Highbury’s tiny, mirrorball-stuffed Thousand Island (the latest incarnation of The Garage’s upstairs venue).After an excellent opening set from Londoner Dan Lyons, the former Fat White Family drummer who’s swapped the kit for a guitar to front his own trio, a black-clad, Cuban-heeled and wild-maned Cowles takes to the stage. He goes straight into soulful acoustic track “December Sun” – a song from the days of his old band, You, Me & Apollo – Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The enthronement of Claire Foy has been quite a spectacle. Perhaps some of Her Majesty’s mystique has rubbed off, as she is now entering that territory known to few young actors, where you’ll happily pay to see her in anything. Should that policy extend to her newest incarnation?In The Girl in the Spider’s Web Foy becomes the latest actress to give her Lisbeth Salander, the super-damaged Swedish gender-neutral vigilante boffin. First off it was Noomi Rapace, then Rooney Mara. Now Foy wears the tats, the piercings, the leathers and the semi-shorn side-crop and steps astride a throbbing Read more ...
The Unknown Soldier, Infra, Symphony in C, Royal Ballet, review - WWI ballet honours obscure tragedy
Jenny Gilbert
Pity fatigue is a risk for any artwork marking the anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. There can’t have been a man or woman in the Royal Opera House on Tuesday night who hadn’t already read, watched, or otherwise had their fill of the horrors of the Western Front and the never-ending debate over the futility of it all. So a 30-minute ballet, coming nine days after the Cenotaph solemnities and commissioned by the Royal Ballet, inevitably felt like an unrequested encore.The Unknown Soldier, a collaboration between choreographer Alastair Marriott, designer Es Devlin and composer Dario Marianelli Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This production of Tennessee Williams’ neglected classic, Summer and Smoke, arrives from the Almeida into the West End with five-star plaudits for its pitch-perfect performances and pressure-cooker intensity. In an ideal world, this should guarantee a high-octane evening – but the chemistry of a space counts for a lot in theatre – so there’s inevitably concern that a larger venue will dissipate some of the essential dramatic steam.It is a pleasure to be able to report, therefore, that Rebecca Frecknall’s boldly expressionist production – with its electrifying soundscape – galvanises the Read more ...
peter.quinn
After failing to make the charts on its release 50 years ago this month, Astral Weeks has long since passed into pop mythology, its unique amalgam of jazz, folk and soul influences inspiring musicians, writers and filmmakers alike.Martin Scorsese said that he based the first 15 minutes of Taxi Driver on the album, Rickie Lee Jones has called it “still daring, still innovative”, Bruce Springsteen, who chose “Madame George” when he was a guest on Desert Island Discs, stated that the album “made me trust in beauty, it gave me a sense of the divine”, while in the 1979 anthology Stranded: Rock and Read more ...
David Nice
Getting the look right is half the battle: in that, Peter Groom's one-time-Captain Marlene Dietrich is a winner from the start. The looks at the audience nail it too, heavy-lidded and lashed but transfixing, charismatic, winning instant complicity. As with all the best one-(wo)man cabaret-style shows, though, this is no mere impersonation. Groom has the mannerisms and the mostly soft-grained delivery, but he delivers the familiar songs in his own register, with a special intensity that helps to make this selective light shone on a great 20th-century figure ultimately elegiac.It isn't Groom's Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
It’s Christmas already at Wigmore Hall. Or advent at least – this concert of Bach Advent cantatas was presented by the English Concert without apology or qualification, despite it still being the middle of November. But it proved a welcome fillip for a wet and dreary November evening, with the energetic and engaged playing of the small ensemble bringing out all the life and playfulness in Bach’s scores.Balance was a problem though, with the players often overpowering the singers (no choir here, the chorales and choruses all sung one to a part). The orchestra was bigger, with two desks each of Read more ...