Reviews
Marina Vaizey
Take Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, and add Handel and Mozart and the Frenchman Massenet, and you have the composers whose operas the Kansas-born mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato has made her own. She's one of the few who has become a classic opera diva while remaining true to her roots (she was born in Prairie Village, Kansas, and one of her all-time favourite songs is "Over the Rainbow": remember Dorothy was a Kansas girl too.)Melvyn Bragg’s empathetic interview, conducted in the Crush Bar of the Royal Opera House, was a real treat. Question and answer was interspersed with clips of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Shamed and reviled, Richard Nixon had the misfortune (albeit self-authored) to be the star of one of the murkiest chapters in American Presidential history. It's not much compensation for him now, but he has become something of a goldmine for film-makers.Anthony Hopkins went to town on him in Nixon. Zack Snyder brought us a grotesque, parallel-universe Nixon in Watchmen. Frank Langella revelled in the wily, devious President in Frost / Nixon. Now here's Kevin Spacey with what could be the best Nixon yet, in Liza Johnson's delicious fantasy-satire about the day when the President met the King. Read more ...
Miriam Gillinson
There's a one-man play inside every politician – and a one-woman play behind each male leader. Linda Griffiths's and Paul Thompson's solo show, Maggie and Pierre, explores Maggie Trudeau's struggle with bipolar disorder and her temptestuous relationship with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (father of current PM Justin Trudeau). Written in 1979 but only now receiving its European premiere, this is an ambitious attempt to explore the personal fissures that politics creates.The play races through Maggie and Pierre's whirlwind relationship, which begins following a chance encounter on a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Have psychologists analysed whether subtitles increase our enjoyment of TV drama, perhaps lending it an extra tincture of the exotic? They do no harm at all to this new Polish drama about border guards protecting the frontier between Poland and Ukraine. In Referendum week, it's a hot topic (these Polish guards, with an Alsatian tracker dog called Osama, don't favour a Merkel-esque open-door policy to refugees trying to slip through the forest). This opening episode offered plenty to whet your appetite while resisting the temptation to get too complicated or cram in too much plot. The Read more ...
Robert Beale
’Tis the season for big children’s choirs to show off their end-of-season projects, and the Hallé Children’s Choir and Orchestra had something exceptional to present under Sir Mark Elder’s baton on Sunday afternoon: the world premiere of Jonathan Dove’s A Brief History of Creation.Commissioned by the Hallé for the children’s choir, it formed the second part of a concert that began with the First Suite from Bizet’s L’Arlesienne music and Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. There’s little doubt that Dove's new work will be a piece other accomplished children’s choirs allied Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In the town of Nizhny Novgorod where Maxim Gorky was born, it was said that “the houses are made of stone, the people of iron”. Vassa Zheleznova, the titular matriarch of this rarely performed play, is one such person. She is a businesswoman of steely will and juggernaut energy whose tragedy is to see her family destroyed by the same bourgeois values that she has fought so fiercely to preserve.At least, that’s how the playwright conceived it when he revised his 1909 text, under Stalinist pressure, in 1935. But now Emily Juniper has come up with a new version for theatre company The Faction Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Susan Sarandon's natural radiance papers over a considerable number of cracks in The Meddler, writer-director Lorene Scafaria's loving, largely autobiographical tribute to the kind of mum you might want on occasion to throttle but in the end adore beyond all words.Her grin as wide as the distance between the American coasts that she has traveled in order to start life anew, Sarandon has been given – and runs with – one of the most generous-hearted screen heroines in years.So what if some of the film's rhythms are off and Scafaria's screen alter ego – Rose Byrne (pictured below, with Sarandon Read more ...
David Nice
"He is one of the few pianists who will not make them sound like angry birds," said young pianist-animateur Víkingur Ólafsson in Reykjavík when I told him that in little over 24 hours' time I'd be hearing Pierre-Laurent Aimard work his way through Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux at dawn, in the afternoon and evening and close to midnight at the Aldeburgh Festival. Of course there are a few ferocious birdcalls in the craggier of Messiaen's landscapes, but Vikingur was right: a more lucid, rhythmically alert and, where necessary, hypnotically even performance of this music you will never hear. Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Who do you trust? The EU Referendum campaign has exposed a mounting suspicion of the establishment, from financial institutions to press and politicians, and our sense of nationhood has never been murkier. But if we cease to believe in anything, how does that affect our sense of self?Mike Bartlett’s latest takes Edward Snowden as a jumping-off point for this existential exploration. American leaker Andrew (Jack Farthing, pictured below with Caoilfhionn Dunne) is holed up in a Russian hotel room, awaiting contact from a man holed up in an embassy – a fellow member of the “everyone Read more ...
joe.muggs
A few beers down, in the middle of a crowd listening to music you love, you tend not to think of the latest news story as your highest priority. But Britain's relationship to Europe weighs heavy on the mind these days, and when the news of the violent attack on Jo Cox started filtering through as we danced under the Catalan sun on Thursday afternoon, it threw the nature of Sónar festival into relief.Unlike a lot of international music events, which can often be little more than monocultural awaydays for Brits and/or Germans seeking hedonism in the sun, Sónar is both proudly reflective of its Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A couple of hours of certainty really were very welcome during referendum week, and Murray Perahia did indeed bring clarity, poise, and an unquestioned masterpiece – Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata – to a full Barbican Hall last night. And not a single note of music written after 1893.The finest moments of truth and revelation in this recital with a first half of Haydn, Mozart and Brahms, and then the Hammerklavier in the second, were the slow movements. There was a serene beauty about the A major Andante cantabile con espressione of Mozart’s A minor Piano Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
The original Heroes of Loot put you in control of a Warrior, Valkyrie, Wizard or Elf who wanted nothing more than to stripmine their local dungeon of anything shiny and valuable that the owners had failed to nail down. The sequel, a fast-paced, fun take on the dungeon crawler that jettisons any semblance of planning and strategy in favour of frantic monster slaughter, is more of the same. However, this time you get to perform your frantic felony in a pair – although not, as it turns out, in a multiplayer game.Instead, you choose two heroes from the aforementioned quartet and Read more ...