Reviews
theartsdesk
In a gallery darkened to evoke the seabed that was its resting place for over a thousand years, the colossal figure of Hapy, the Egyptian god of the Nile flood, greets visitors just as it met sailors entering the busy trading port of Thonis-Heracleion some 2,000 years ago. One of the largest objects ever loaned to the British Museum, Hapy symbolises the prosperity bestowed upon Egypt by the river Nile, but whose waters ultimately brought about the destruction of the ancient cities of Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion, which subsided into the sea in the 8th century AD.They were known about through Read more ...
David Nice
"Unjustly neglected masterpiece" is a cliché of musical criticism, and usually an exaggeration. Romanian master Enescu's vast journey through aspects of the Oedipus myth seemed like an unacknowledged great among 20th century operas through the medium of the starrily-cast EMI recording with José van Dam as the noblest Greek of all; after Martinu's Julietta and Szymanowski's King Roger, here was the last titan to be properly served by a top UK production. Following two acts of La Fura dels Baus's monumental if sometimes skewed take last night, doubts had set in, but by the end, it did indeed Read more ...
aleks.sierz
As I sit down to write this, a crow is cawing outside my window while night falls; for an awkard moment I think it might be a raven, and this reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe. Is the black bird saying “Nevermore”? And why should that worry me? Well, I’ve just seen Stef Smith’s resonant and disturbing new play, Human Animals, and it’s made me particularly sensitive to all of the creatures with which we share our urban spaces. And of all the possibilities that this co-existence might spawn.The play begins with some observations of small changes, nothing to get anxious about. One young couple, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Of all the nostalgia-fests, of all the retro events, those that involve rave culture have the wildest sense of glee. The atmosphere in the Dome tonight, before a note has even been played – just as when The Prodigy hit this city last year – dials the anticipation levels up to delirious. The crowd is mostly fortysomething and fiftysomething, but many are already dancing as the hall fills, while Peter Hook, ex of New Order, spins quarter century-old dance tunes that once graced the speakers of the long-closed, now-mythical Mancunian club mecca, The Haçienda.From the grins, ecstatic gurns and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A quick plot summary might be required here, because how this programme of Schubert, Pergolesi and Webern came into being was far from obvious. Two young soloists, one a violinist in her late twenties, one a singer in her early thirties, both born in Swabia (part of Bavaria), share the same agent and wanted to do a project together. So they are currently on an eight-date concert tour of five European countries. Their company for this journey is a team including some of the elite and most experienced European players of chamber music. And the consequences were...Well, the first, the most Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
There are moments of real atmospheric oppression in this politically themed gun game. When you and your ragtag bunch of freedom fighter recruits are crouched behind a burnt-out car, dodging green scanning lasers streaking through the night sky from a monolithic airship as drones whizz past on a search and destroy mission, you can feel what the developers are trying to achieve. You’re the hunted on home ground. The odds are stacked against you, there’s an urgent insurgency and you’re the main militiaman. Heavy stuff.Homefront: The Revolution channels 80s movie Red Dawn with touches of Read more ...
David Nice
"We're off to Glyndebourne, to see a ra-ther bor-ing op-ra by Rosseeeni," quoth songwriting wags Kit and the Widow. So here it was at the Sussex house after a 34-year absence, the most famous of all his operas which includes the overture’s oboe tune to which those words were set, and it wasn't possible that The Barber of Seville, pure champagne, could ever be boring. Or was it? Never underestimate the power of vaguely-conceived direction to rob musical wit and precision of their proper glory.Cast and conductor have been near-perfectly chosen. Enrique Mazzola is a crisp and elegant master of Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Victorians liked their oratorios long and loud (most of the time), and when Dvořák wrote St Ludmila for the Leeds Festival of 1886 he got the style exactly right. Sir Mark Elder brought his and the Hallé’s celebration of Dvořák to a thunderous close with a performance which deftly abbreviated the score and also unveiled a new English version derived from a working translation of the Czech text by David Pountney.The story is about the conversion of the Bohemian Princess Ludmila to Christianity and her role in the subsequent conversion of Prince Bořivoj and, naturally, the whole nation. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having enjoyed so many Scandinavian dramas created in their own homelands, it feels like taking a step backwards to return (for its final series) to Kenneth Branagh's Anglo-Wallander. Far worse was that this first of a three-part series, The White Lioness, was dull, undramatic and utterly implausible.Henning Mankell's original novel from which this was derived journeyed between Sweden and South Africa in 1992, and involved an elaborate international plot to assassinate Nelson Mandela during the last days of apartheid. A dark and ugly subject rooted in South Africa's existential political and Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Sakari Oramo devised a bold programme for the final concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra season: a new work from a young British composer, a popular but knotty violin concerto and an obscure pacifist oratorio. There were few obvious connections between the works, but all proved satisfying, not least for the excellent playing of the orchestra itself.Joseph Phibbs has had a presence on the London orchestral scene for over a decade, going back to his Last Night of the Proms commission in 2003. His previous London orchestral premiere, Rivers to the Sea, was given by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Benedict Cumberbatch, it turns out, was born to play the blasted, blighted Richard III, as one might expect from an actor whose long-term apprenticeship to both classical theatre and television converged to bring the BBC's Hollow Crown series to a surpassingly bleak if potent finish.Those who associate Shakespeare's "bottled spider" with various excuses through the years for overindulgence and/or camp got instead a portrait of gathering psychosis that was considerably more biting and bitter than has generally been true of this play of late. Along the way, its visual command confirmed director Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A celebration of the power of words and music (leaving aside, briefly, that more troubling business about the Fatherland), Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a natural opener for the summer opera season. Art triumphs over all, but in David McVicar’s production it’s a triumph of peculiarly human complication – a victory that leaves a hero in tears, that crowns some of opera’s most reactionary stick-in-the-muds with laurels, and leaves us asking: did Eva really pick the right man?It has been well over a year since Richard Jones’s Mastersingers came to English National Opera, but it’s Read more ...