Reviews
Hanna Weibye
The run of Giselle that opened at the Royal Opera House last night was completely sold out before it even started, and no wonder. Pair Sir Peter Wright's eerie production with some very fine casts and the reliable classiness of the Royal Ballet's corps de ballet and you have an enchanting package indeed.Last night's Giselle was Marinela Nuñez, impeccable in every respect, but particularly charming as the merry, hopeful peasant girl of the first scenes (pictured below), and the loving spirit of the second act (the mad scene does not come quite so easily to this naturally sunny ballerina). The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sara Lund and Saga Norén have a lot to answer for. Their adventures in the murk of murder as they grapple with their own dysfunctional psychology entranced audiences who don’t speak a scrap of Danish or Swedish. The search has since gone on for other gripping instances of Nordic noir. How long can it be before we accept that The Killing and The Bridge both had ingredients that aren’t easily reassembled?The "Walter Presents" strand has coughed up all sorts of potential replacements, while BBC Four continues to pan for gold on Saturday nights. There’s already been one Swedish drama premiering Read more ...
David Nice
This was an evening of Iberian highways re-travelled, but with a difference. At the beginning of 2016, the centenary of Spanish master Enrique Granados's untimely death, two young pianists at the National Gallery shared the two piano suites that make up the original Goyescas; finally last night at the Barbican we got the opera partly modelled on their deepest movements. And back in 2008 Josep Pons and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brandished the revised, full-orchestral 1925 ballet score of Manuel de Falla's El amor brujo rather than the intriguing chamber orchestra original, making a virtue out Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is modernism dead and buried? Anyone considering the long haul of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party from resounding flop in 1958 to West End crowd-pleasing classic today might be forgiven for wondering whether self-consciously difficult literary texts have had their day. In Brexit Britain, where everyone is a populist now, there might not be much of a demand for difficult art, but people still seem to crave entertainment. So it’s good to see that this 60th anniversary revival of Pinter’s most canonical work still works both as a funny situation comedy and as a thought-provoking disturber of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What did the Romans do for us? On the evidence of new drama Britannia, they pillaged, murdered and tortured, but also found themselves mesmerised by the psychedelic Druid magic that hovered over our ancient land like fairy dust.Creator Jez Butterworth dug into a resonant, folklorish notion of British history and identity in Jerusalem, and took something of the same idea across the Irish sea for The Ferryman. Here, in cahoots with his writer-brother Tom (who co-wrote Sky Atlantic's Tin Star), he lets himself get a bit more fanciful in his treatment of first-century history. The coast upon Read more ...
Robert Beale
Alisa Weilerstein is making two visits to Manchester in just over three weeks. Last night it was with the Hallé, next time she’ll be guesting with the Czech Philharmonic. This one was to play the solo in Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, with Sir Mark Elder conducting. She played it here, with him and the Hallé, just over five years ago, and it was her combination of technical brilliance and expressive ability that impressed then and did so again.It’s a deeply emotional work (written originally for Rostropovich), full of both agonies and challenges, and Weilerstein's qualities combined Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
"The Times They Are A-Changin'" has never sounded so menacing. The Brothers & Sisters’ gospel version accompanies the end credits of The Final Year documentary as we watch the stunned UN ambassador Samantha Power unpinning her son’s drawings from her office wall and moving out of the White House on the day before Trump’s inauguration.It’s only towards this grisly end that director Greg Barker’s film gathers momentum. It starts with a promise of intimacy – Power getting her bouncy kids ready for school, secretary of state John Kerry forgetting his cell phone before he’s driven off in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It beggars belief that, from the moment Steven Spielberg took delivery of the script by first-timer Liz Hannah, it took a mere 10 months to get The Post in the can. Its subject being the race to publish, that's a fitting rate of production. Introducing the film at its London premiere, Spielberg stressed the urgency of a story about the media under renewed attack. For Richard Nixon, who tried to suppress the bad news about Vietnam, read Donald Trump’s confected concept of fake news.The Post has since acquired an extra timeliness. There’s an indelible image towards the end of Katharine "Kay" Read more ...
David Nice
Living-museum recitals on a variety of historic instruments pose logistical problems. Telling The Arts Desk about his award-nominated CD of mostly 19th-century works for horns and pianos, Alec Frank-Gemmill remarked on the near-impossibility of reproducing the experiment in the concert-hall: playing on four period horns would need several intervals, and colleague Alasdair Beatson would hardly be likely to have the four pianos in the same room. Last October came a breakthrough, for me at any rate: Roman Rabinovich playing on three pianos in the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands, Surrey. Yesterday Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's the people who are problematic, not the play. That's one take-away sentiment afforded by Caroline Byrne's sparky and provocative take on All's Well That Ends Well, that ever-peculiar Shakespeare "comedy" (really?) whose title is in ironic contrast to its emotional terrain. Making her debut at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, having previously directed The Taming of the Shrew on the Globe's main stage, Byrne widens the abyss between the sexes that has always marked out this troublesome late play. Not for the first time, its supposedly tidy resolution makes one wonder what further Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
In the dark days of January, white cube galleries are luminous spaces. This is especially true of Pi Artworks right now: the Fitzrovia gallery is showing an incandescent array of 23 paintings by Selma Parlour. Taken in at once and at first sight, her abstract works arrest the eye with unlikely chords of colour and angular planes that suggest competing vanishing points. This is a show that releases both dopamine and mild anxiety, thanks to the pleasure of the warm hues, and the stress caused by an indeterminate focal point.The London-based painter has laid claim to a palette of lively yet soft Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Say what you like about Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s partnership with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – and plenty has already been written – but sometimes the facts speak for themselves. At the end of this midweek matinee concert, an audience that had presumably been lured by the promise of Haydn and Max Bruch exploded in laughter and cheers at the end of a piece by György Ligeti.True, it was an unadvertised encore: the final movement of his Concert românesc (1951). But as Ligeti’s Transylvanian hoe-down hurtled onwards, with leader Vesselin Gellev’s solo violin spiralling ever more Read more ...