Reviews
Hanna Weibye
Another year, another new full-length story ballet from one of the Royal Ballet's in-house choreographers. Time was – a long time, in fact, up to 2011 – when that would have sounded like science fiction, but no longer: Liam Scarlett, whose Frankenstein premiered last night at the Opera House, is treading a path worn smooth in the past five years by Christopher Wheeldon, Wayne McGregor and Carlos Acosta.All have played to type in some respects: Wheeldon with pretty, fantasy spectacles (The Winter's Tale, Alice), Acosta with hispanophone classics (Carmen, Don Quixote), and McGregor Read more ...
bella.todd
If Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes were (a lot) more like Ibsen, our national viewing habits would be in good hands. But then, as the hero of An Enemy of the People discovers, presuming to know what’s good for the public is a dangerous game. In his first full stage role in 12 years, the Earl of Grantham, AKA Hugh Bonneville, returns to his local Chichester Festival Theatre as a whistleblower who thinks he’s doing his town a favour. Come the fifth act of Ibsen’s political comedy, he’s been driven out of job, house and inheritance and is fighting off the mayor with an umbrella.This is a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Bold programming always deserves credit. Last night’s Royal Albert Hall audience enjoyed an unusually piquant blend, as grunge-rocker turned soloist Chris Cornell on his Higher Truth album tour was paired with upstart bluesman Fantastic Negrito, known to his mum as Xavier Dphepaulezz, a spicier and more political performer who has invested the growling spirituality of old-time blues with an edge of punky protest. Cornell is a grizzled old-timer, but he wears the years lightly. He spent the 1990s fronting grunge pioneers Soundgarden, followed by a solo career now five albums old. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut of Palestinian parents. She came to London to study at the Slade School in 1975 and got stuck here when civil war broke out in Lebanon, preventing her from returning home. In effect, she has been living in exile ever since and the sense of displacement and unease induced by being far from home permeates much of her work.The video, Measures of Distance, 1988 (pictured below right) is a moving reflection on the love she feels for her mother, far away in war-torn Beirut. The screen is covered in a veil of arabic writing (her mother’s letters) Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There are times when you sit in the cinema and wish that you didn’t speak English and could just enjoy what you’re seeing. Unfortunately Knight of Cups is one of those times. This is a stunningly beautiful film, the first of Terrence Malick’s films to be (mainly) set in Los Angeles, and it features amazing work by long-term collaborators cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and designer Jack Fisk. But its narrative voiceover and dialogue are excruciating, quasi-parodic and they drag down the stunning images irretrievably.This is a world of gorgeous women, glossy minimalist architecture, movie- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Denmark is casting a shadow in a way it has not done before. The international success of Copenhagen’s Lukas Graham is unprecedented. While Aqua, The Ravonettes, Efterklang and Trentemøller are amongst the great Danes who have made international waves musically, Graham has trumped them all to become a surprise world-wide bestseller with the single “7 Years”. Whether or not his brand of streamlined pop appeals – theartsdesk declared that “7 Years’” parent album has a “shiny plasticity that carries no real weight” – it has helped generate interest in the music of Graham’s home country which has Read more ...
David Nice
You rarely see a full production of Shakespeare's dream play so magical it brings tears to the eyes. But then you don't often get 42 players and 14 voices joining the cast to adorn the text with Mendelssohn's bewitching incidental music, plus the Overture composed 16 years earlier – certainly the most perfect masterpiece ever written by a 17-year-old. Add a fluent ensemble of actors, a sense of high style in costume design and, above a simple stage with audience on three sides and the orchestra on the fourth, a hammerbeam oak forest in the very hall where Twelfth Night had its first known Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's striking what a broken heart can do for a comic. Not least it can provide him with some new material, but also make him take a step back to reevaluate what he has. In Marcus Brigstocke's case it led him into a horrible depression but happily, via some other byways, to this new show, Why the Long Face?, which started life at the Edinburgh Fringe last year.It touches only tangentially on depression, but for longstanding Brigstocke fans the mention of it and the failed love affair (after Brigstocke's wife divorced him) explains this change of direction for a comic whose mainstay has been Read more ...
David Nice
It often sounds as though Richard Strauss makes the ascent of his Alpine Symphony in too many layers of clothes. Hopes were that Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra would give us a characteristically sinewy, more lightly-clad mountaineer. What we got was something different: a perfect blending of rich textures, an objectivity that left humans more or less out of the natural landcapes, and an often swift expedition that gave space to climaxes.This was the third performance I've heard in a row which shed minutes from the average length of the work in question without seeming Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Terracotta warriors, Bactrian two-humped camels, Heavenly Horses, Buddhist caves, sand dunes, the world’s first printed book, a silk factory and temples galore including one that was the great mosque in Xi’an, were but some of the ingredients in a breathless first hour in a trilogy of programmes about the world’s oldest trading routes. They were opened up by the explorer and trader Zhang Qian of the Western Han dynasty, about 2,300 years ago.The Han were experts in mobile warfare and were searching for Heavenly Horses, to use instead of their sturdy but small ponies, the better to subdue the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The figures are approximate, but the Yardbirds’ first studio album has been issued on CD at least 12 separate times. With The Move, their debut album and its follow-up Shazam have each had a comparatively paltry eight outings on CD. As for vinyl editions, setting aside the UK originals in mono and stereo and contemporaneous worldwide pressings, similar quantities of reissues of the three albums have hit shops from the mid-Seventies onwards. The Move have not been afforded au courant hipster vinyl editions, but a few versions of the Yardbirds’ set have been issued over the past six or so years Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
La Follia was, as every programme note inevitably reminds us, a pop song of its day. A strutting Spanish dance, it featured in the work of over 150 composers, so catchy was its signature chord progression. Still a classic of Baroque concert programmes, it’s a great way to take the temperature of any given performance. At its best, it can have even a sedate audience stamping and swaying, thrilled by those grinding syncopations and that heartbeat pulse. Last night at the Wigmore Hall, Christophe Rousset and a trio of musicians from Les Talens Lyriques got a polite round of applause.Perhaps it Read more ...