Reviews
Kieron Tyler
The exhortations don’t seem necessary as the audience is already letting off the steam which has built up in anticipation of a full-bore show. Nonetheless, The Courettes’ Flávia Couri knows higher levels of excitement are there to be tapped, that it’s possible to get the crowd to liberate themselves from any restraint they may have left. Limits are there to be pushed.She calls out. They respond. She sings. They sing along. She gestures, beckoning for more. They howl. It’s not enough though. Then, boom. She’s off the stage, burrowing through onlookers and on the bar, holding-up her guitar to Read more ...
David Nice
For all its passing British sea shanties and folksongs, Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony does Walt Whitman’s determinedly global-oriented poetry full justice. That “pennant universal” was reflected in two superlative soloists from South Africa and the USA, our national treasure of an Anglo-Italian conductor, an Argentinian chorus director and a raft of international names in chorus and orchestra who just happen to be UK citizens.Only one aspect wasn’t big enough for this epic journey – the Barbican Hall itself. A Sea Symphony needs space above and around it: that you get in spades at the Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
Bowling For Soup are celebrating their iconic album, A Hangover You Don’t Deserve, on a fun-filled, energetic tour for its 20th anniversary. Their sold out stop at Wolverhampton’s Civic Hall was a joy to experience from start to finish, the light-hearted essence of the band evident from the minute we walked in. From comical merch to on-stage banter, the fun was infectious and made for a special evening executed by clear well-seasoned professionals. DJ Jon Mahon rallied the waiting crowd in the name of 2000s emo music, ramping up the excitement with his energy and perfect song choices. Read more ...
Jon Turney
Working on materials was basic to human culture from the start: chipping at flint to make a hand-axe; fashioning bone or wood; drying hides. In time, people discovered that some materials, especially when put to trial by fire, were special: harder, shinier, more attractive, or more deadly.Philip Marsden is interested in those materials, yes, but especially in the now-buried traces of their excavation. And his latest book – Under a Metal Sky: A Journey Through Minerals, Greed and Wonder – is interestingly difficult to characterise. It’s a blend (an alloy?) of geology, archaeology, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Annie Ernaux’s semi-autobiographical book Les Années charts a woman’s life across time and space, history and memory, through what the author describes as a collective consciousness. Perhaps the most satisfying thing about Eline Arbo’s superb adaptation is that it projects this idea through, fittingly, one of the most truly collective performances London has seen in years. More than that, the communal embrace extends to the audience, in ways that are not always comfortable – the life portrayed, from 1941 to 2006, has its share of hardship – but add to the play’s resonance and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“I really am the repository for all your shit,” Nina Conti’s famous Monkey hand puppet tells her. Monkey may have a point.The brilliance of Conti’s ventriloquism is that it seems to burst, unedited, from her id. Filth, surrealism and lightning-fast gags spume in a torrent whenever her teeth are closed tight. Her non-puppet stage persona is, by contrast, all light and loveliness, apparently bemused by what’s being dredged up. Quite apart from how she has the Brighton Dome in stitches, watched purely on the level of technical skill and psychological tightrope walking, her shows are astonishing Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It was the sonically adventurous, shiveringly atmospheric cello piece by Latvian composer Preteris Vasks that proved to be the first showstopper of this enjoyably esoteric evening. Dutch cellist Hadewych van Gent began the pianissimo movement of Vasks’ Gramata Cellam by creating a build-up of whistling harmonic effects on the A string, followed by a yearning feather-light improvisation in the cello’s upper registers that suddenly plunged vertiginously bass-wards.The rich, velvety chordal sequence that ensued was accompanied by Gent’s wordless soprano, as clear and piercing as a shaft of light Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Greek myths are all over theatre stages at the moment, their fierce, vengeful stories offering unnerving parallels with events in our modern world. The latest such project is a pithy double bill of opera and dance, both halves (though the first lasts only 20 minutes) featuring the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, and the havoc he wreaks, even in death.Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra – a work he called a cantata but which is more like sung psychodrama – uses the poet Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine’s Phèdre to explore the fallout from the character’s disastrous sexual journey. Marrying the Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Cyndi Lauper was preceded onstage by a brief video that zipped through her career, which she drily declared was just in case someone was at the gig by mistake. It’s tempting to wonder what an unexpected visitor might have made of this farewell tour, given it shifted from Rabbie Burns mentions to gestures of support for the LGBT+ community, wig changes and, at one point, Lauper climbing up from a trap door wrapped in what looked like percussive body armour.It was certainly never a dull evening, right from the familiar bounce of “She Bop” to kick things off. It offered an early chance for the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On its own, the second session The Lurkers recorded for the BBC’s John Peel show on 18 April 1978 is arguably a curio, a footnote. Four tracks of bracingly straight-ahead Brit-punk with a headstrong freshness undiminished by time. But whatever the impact, The Lurkers were never a main-agenda band, and the Peel session was an adjunct to their discography.The Peel session has resurfaced on a 12-inch, clear-vinyl EP as part of the Beggars Arkive series of releases: an archive exercise digging into Beggars Banquet, the label The Lurkers were on. Available as a stand-alone release, the record is Read more ...
Robert Beale
When a piece of music is heard for the first time ever, there’s always the delicious hope that, just by being there, an audience might witness something special, to be remembered fondly. It doesn’t happen always, but I think it did for Héloïse Werner’s Hidden Mechanisms, which received its first performance in Manchester last night.It's strange this should be so, when the ostensible logic behind the piece and its title seems somewhat abstruse. Werner describes the 10-minute, five-section piece for piano quintet as a metaphor for the small, hidden things that underlie an ecosystem – she Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Drained as they are at present of crucial funds, WNO are managing to put on only two operas this spring, and spaced out to the point where it could hardly be called a season. For their new Peter Grimes we must wait till April. Meanwhile we can relish Tobias Richter’s sparkling nine-year-old Figaro, skilfully revived, with a few tweaks, by Max Hoehn.Whatever the pressures, there is not the slightest diminution of standards. I missed the pre-pandemic revival. But Hoehn has now cut out the overture stage business (no great loss), and the opera is sung in its original Italian, which for my money Read more ...