Reviews
Justine Elias
From James I’s campaign to wipe out witchery to the feuding sister sorceresses of The Wizard of Oz and the new film musical Wicked, spellcasting by supposedly wayward women has never been able to avoid persecution and misunderstanding.British filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey, who admits a childhood fascination with TV's “good witches”, like Bewitched's Samantha Stephens (Elizabeth Montgomery), recently found a deeper, more disturbing kinship with such figures. After the birth of her son, now three years old, Sankey suffered depression so severe that she spent months in a mother-baby Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Jazz music crosses, mixes and unites generations, and the 10 concerts I’ve seen at this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival (out of more than 300 in total) have really brought that home. The oldest musician I heard is a completely lovable miracle. Matt Pannell’s picture (above) shows the empathy and enthusiasm of the great Kirk Lightsey. The pianist was born in Detroit in 1937, the same year as Alice Coltrane, and they shared the same piano teacher. His magical solo piano album "I Will Never Stop Loving You" from 2021, incidentally, is required listening.Lightsey defies the seasons. On Read more ...
Tim Cumming
November can be a month to hunker down for the onset of winter and its weather, and where better to do that than in one of the myriad venues across the capital hosting the annual London Jazz Festival and its hundreds of concerts, from cosy clubs like Ronnie Scott’s and Pizza Express Dean Street to the big stages of the Barbican and South Bank.This review focuses on a trio of outliers from across the jazz cosmos – new band No Noise from Korea; the return of the propulsive, cinematic, muscular and sinuous grooves of Neil Cowley Trio, with a new album, Entity, after seven years away, and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
"All’s well that ends well". Sounds like the kind of phrase a guilty parent says to a disappointed child after they’ve been caught in a white lie and bought them a bag of sweets to smooth things over. It’s a saying that betokens bad behaviour, a need to sweep things under the carpet, portending a fresh start. There’s an edge of power in it too, implying that the speaker can now define their interlocutor’s feelings. In short, it’s ugly.So too is the play of the same name, a soi disant "problem play", Shakespeare at his more mean-spirited, sometimes giving the impression of indulging in a bit Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
There were points when this concert felt like the musical equivalent of watching the atom split – as well as notes there were animal shrieks, sinister rattles, sibilant serpentine sussurations, and primal throaty rumbles. Indian-American composer Shruthi Rajasekar, South African cellist and composer Abel Selaocoe (pictured below), and the never less than subversive Hermes Experiment unveiled a fascinating laboratory of noise in a lunchtime session that was as exhilarating as it was enjoyably unexpected.The programme opened with Selaocoe, one of the most charismatic and radically experimental Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For most of Canada’s listening public, their country-man Stefan Gnyś – pronounced G'neesh – wasn’t a concern. The 300 copies of his 1969 single didn’t make it to shops. There was little promotion and limited radio play. Gnyś had paid RCA Limited Recording Services to press the seven-incher. Beyond this transaction, there was no record company involvement.“Horizoning” and its B-side “Evangeline” were recorded on 21 April 1969 at St. Catherine, Ontario’s Heidebrecht Recording Services, a facility usually dedicated to recording radio jingles. Eight other tracks were recorded that day. John Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"No one mourns the wicked," we're told during the immediately arresting beginning to Wicked, which concludes two hours 40 minutes later with the words, "to be continued" flashed up on the screen. Will filmgoers mourn that they have to wait an entire year to see the second part of this supercharged screen adaptation of the stage musical blockbuster that London and New York audiences can currently absorb in a single sitting? (Not for nothing has the show taken up seemingly permanent residency at Broadway's largest theatre, the Gershwin.)Wicked does nothing by halves except, it would seem, make Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
London-born Akram Khan has come a long way in a 35-year career. He performed as a young teen in Peter Brook’s production of The Mahabharata, then progressed to dance training first in kathak then in contemporary dance. He then created his own company, forging alliances as a choreographer with the unlikeliest forces: English National Ballet, Juliette Binoche and Kylie Minogue. Four years ago he announced his retirement from the stage. Now, at 50, he’s back, unable to resist the siren call of his latest creation, GIGENIS: The Generation of the Earth. The capitalisation is typical Khan: he Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Pema Tseden's final film Snow Leopard is a Chinese Tibetan-language drama that addresses wild animal preservation. It serves as a kind of allegory for the circumstances that preceded the 53-year-old director's death from a heart attack last year. In 2016, Tseden was hospitalised after being roughed up by police when trying to retrieve his luggage at Xining Caojiapu International Airport. A diabetic, he was unable to take his pills while being held by the police.In the film, four guys from a local television station have been given a tip off about a snow leopard getting into a sheep pen Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Cleveland is probably the American city most like the one in which I grew up. Early into the icy embrace of post-industrialisation, not really on the way to anywhere, but not a destination either and obsessed with popular music and sports, it's very Scouse. Okay, the Mersey did not catch fire as the Cuyahoga River did in 1969, but it would not have surprised anyone in Liverpool had it done so.So it’s almost inevitable that Matt (Sam Mitchell) and Shawn (Enyi Okoronkwo) (pictured below) are like the lads with whom I grew up – okay, they’re like me, I’ll admit it. They bond over their NBA Read more ...
David Nice
From a privileged position in the Festival Hall stalls, I could see 97-year old Herbert Blomstedt’s near-immobile back as he sat on a piano stool with the score in front of him, but also his supremely expressive right arm and hand, every finger brought into play, the left hand occasionally visible to me as he raised it at moments of high emotion. The Philharmonia simply burned for him, every phrase and dynamic brought into focus to heighten an already assured vision.Only absolute mastery will do for Mahler's Ninth, his deepest symphony, its first movement alone a monumental test of ebb and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
London-based singer-songwriter Hannah Scott has warned her next song may reduce us to tears. It is, she says, inspired by events following the death of beloved father. The undertaker advised her, and her sister, that it wasn’t really done for women to bear the coffin. They considered this and ignored it. The resulting song, over a simply repeating piano motif played on her Roland keyboard, is called “Carry You Out” (“You carried me into this world/I will carry you out”). I look around and multiple hands are brushing at faces that silently stream with tears. Hannah Scott deals in weepies. But Read more ...