Reviews
Bernard Hughes
Launched into an already crowded choral scene in 2016, the professional choir Sonoro has marked its second birthday with the release of a debut CD. Last night was the launch concert, featuring items selected from the disc. On the evidence of both CD and concert Sonoro is a very welcome new addition to the roster of excellent London choirs, with its own distinct sound and ethos.This was the second time I have heard Sonoro, but their relaxed and good-natured Christmas concert was in a different world from the serious-minded religiosity of last night. In the excellent acoustic of St Botolph- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In a revelatory interview for the Royal Court’s playwright’s podcast series, David Hare admits to a thin skin. In his adversarial worldview, to take issue with him is – his word – to denounce him. He’s quite a denouncer himself, of course. In Collateral (BBC Two), the denunciations were directed at something rotten in the state of, in no particular order, the Church of England, the Labour Party, the British Army, the Fourth Estate, the security services, the body politic, the establishment, old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Somewhere in there there was also a police procedural. This has been a Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Mortality inflects commemoration. So it is with portraiture: the likeness – particularly those which celebrate lives of status and accomplishment – will always be limned with death.The National Gallery’s tiny exhibition of Murillo’s two known self-portraits (Self-portrait, c. 1650-55 pictured below, and Self-portrait, c. 1670, main picture) – brought together for the first time since they were separated from the private collection of his son, Gaspar – is not only a tight and elegant reflection on Murillo’s art as he aged, but also a meditation on the purpose of Read more ...
David Kettle
There’s a Big Reveal that comes right at the end of this new indie movie from first-time writer/producer/directors Scott Elliott and Sid Sadowskyj (whose names, in retrospect, should have given the game away right from the start). For (complete spoiler alert!) this is Elliott and Sadowskyj’s own story, dramatised and put up on the big screen, with two young newcomers playing them as the movie’s leads. The film escorts us through their journey from York sixth-formers to successful young entrepreneurs, guided by a list of dreams they plan to pursue. One of which is – you guessed it – to make a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hedy Lamarr really ought to be the poster girl for the Time's Up movement. “Any girl can look glamorous," she once said. "All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.” She was the model for Catwoman and Disney's Snow White. It's less well known that she patented an invention which led to the creation of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. If she were alive now, she might be sitting on a £30 billion dollar fortune. As a star of the golden age of Hollywood, her story can be read as a lifelong laboratory experiment in the pros and cons of looking like a million dollars.That capacious narrative has been Read more ...
Robert Beale
Just over a year since his Bridgewater Hall début, Ben Gernon appeared with the BBC Philharmonic there again – this time well into his role as their Principal Guest Conductor, yet his first concert with them there since officially taking up the position. A lot has happened in his career in those 13 months, both with the Philharmonic and elsewhere, and his website now boasts many more laudatory quotes beside the one from me a year ago, that he “knows how to give his musicians the freedom to do what they do best”.But that’s still one of the main impressions of the way he works with the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
By most measures, minimalism is the most successful movement in 20th-century music, certainly orchestral music. The story of its inexorable spread from a tiny offshoot of the 1950s experimentation of John Cage, which was defined and promoted by two maverick visionaries, LaMonte Young and Terry Riley, then launched on a big stage by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, is a resounding vindication of the power a good idea has to defeat received wisdom. So widespread now is the influence of minimalism, with many a MOR-ish piano ensemble aspiring to an inoffensively contemporary wash of sound using Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan. The final third consists of a transcript of Ezra’s Desert Island Discs recorded some years later.The book focusses on how power imbalances inflect relationships. This is quite clear when Alice’s giddy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“That colourful character Zoot Money has recently been writing at length in support of psychedelic music. Now, what’s the score Zoot, has it got a contribution to make to the scene?” It’s 14 January 1967 and BBC presenter Brian Matthew is putting his guest on the spot.“I think so,” responds Money. “It’s an art form. Everything has to be broken open and seen in as many different ways as possible. I suppose that’s why we’re here, to break it open and find out what’s inside, that it was there all the time.”Six months later, Money announced the break-up of his group the Big Roll Band and Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are here to draw in the crowds, but also to set the tone of a Tate Britain exhibition that explores the equivalence of flesh and paint in depictions of the body that even at their most tender and sensual rarely stray far from the brutal and disturbing. No such survey could be without them, and their echo is heard in almost every room: Jenny Saville mines the possibilities of the body as base flesh from a specifically female viewpoint (main picture); Cecily Brown confronts us with forbidden sexuality. But if the prominence of Bacon and Freud suggests a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The woman of the title is not the first person we meet on screen; we meet her lover, a 57-year-old silver fox Orlando (Francisco Reyes). He’s getting a massage in a sauna and then returning to his office where he owns a printing company. We meet him again later. He’s looking for someone, a beautiful merengue singer performing in a fancy hotel. Marina (Daniela Vega, pictured below with Reyes) sings "Your love is yesterday’s newspaper" and they lock eyes.Marina has been Orlando’s lover for a year, they share his flat, she adores his dog Diabla. They enjoy a romantic birthday dinner in a Chinese Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Lord Clark – “of Civilisation”, as he was nicknamed, not necessarily affectionately – presented the 13 episodes of the eponymous series commissioned by David Attenborough for BBC Two in 1969; it was subtitled “A Personal View”, and encompassed only Western Europe (from which even Spain was excluded). The whole guide, narrated in that upper-class accent, wrapped in bespoke suiting and accompanied by full-scale orchestral throbbing, was the kind of documentary that families stayed home to watch. It proved, said those rightly enthralled by that authoritative patrician presence, that the Read more ...