Reviews
David Nice
On the panel to judge a competition between 14 Dutch school orchestras in Amsterdam's Concertgebouw last month, I couldn't resist using my speech to compare their state-school provenance with our own divisive musical education. I was thinking of two figures I'd been given – that when the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain started, only five per cent of its young musicians were from private and public schools, whereas now it was 85 per cent.Last week I learned the latter figure was wrong: current CEO and Artistic Director Sarah Alexander has got it down to 50/50, working on the notion Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Robin Williams’s final released film is built around one of his finest performances. Perhaps fittingly, it shows the quiet, melancholy side of a star who first dazzled and after a while exhausted with his manic flights and weakness for sentimentality. As Nolan, a bank employee suffocating in suburban limbo, he rarely raises his voice, remaining devastatingly true to a state of depressed repression.Nolan has worked in the same bank branch for 25 years, and has been with his wife Joy (Kathy Baker) since they met at a Godard film in 1977. Seemingly his only friend, sardonic college professor Read more ...
Alison Cole
This exquisite exhibition reminds one of the sheer pleasure of looking. It is small – just 22 works in all – but it presents UK audiences, for the first time in almost a generation, with an opportunity to explore the art of Dutch flower painting, spanning nearly 200 years. In our everyday lives we enjoy flowers for their prettiness, their freshness and graceful fragility, but here we can be exhilarated and enraptured by them as well.These works show how gorgeous and profound Dutch flower painting can be. For the great art historian Ernst Gombrich, each picture was a vanitas – a meditation on Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Traumatic obsession is hard to get right in film, to draw us as viewers into a situation far beyond our usual experience, make us believe in it, and fix us there. Sometimes it means pushing towards the frenetic energy of madness, which can bring a degree of moment-to-moment tension – no small dramatic advantage. Or there’s the opposite: when we’re invited deep into the withdrawal of catatonic grief, which can come with almost stuporous slowness and silences.The second is surely harder to engage with, and Belgian-born director Tom Geens faces up to the challenge head-on in his debut for the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Masaaki Suzuki’s reputation precedes him. His recordings of Bach’s choral works with Bach Collegium Japan, the group he founded in 1990, have been arguably the finest of recent decades. But visits to the West, and especially to London, are rare, so this evening’s concert offered a valuable opportunity to find out what the dynamics are within the ensemble, and how they achieve such impressive results on disc.Unlike many Bach interpreters, Suzuki is a real conductor. He doesn’t play violin or harpsichord when he leads, he actually conducts. He takes an interest in every detail of the music, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar & Walton Cello Concertos Steven Isserlis (cello), Philharmonia Orchestra/Paavo Järvi (Hyperion)Anyone fearing that their Elgarian mojo might be waning should immediately obtain the BFI’s new remastering of Ken Russell’s glorious early Sixties film about the composer. Russell cites Elgar’s Cello Concerto as the composer’s final great work, a last gasp before a long, slow decline. Which isn’t quite true; Elgar did continue to write music and was increasingly busy as a conductor. As with The Lark Ascending, it’s striking that such an introspective work should remain so obstinately Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Lucia di Lammermoor is an opera in which men spend an awful lot of time talking about women, and very little actually talking to them. (Which, if nothing else, ensures a rather more dramatic denouement than a frank conversation about everyone’s hopes and dreams would produce.) Enter director Katie Mitchell and her “strong feminist agenda”, determined to give Donizetti’s women back their voices, and with them the agency every plot twist in the opera conspires to deny. If the result is by no means a classic production, neither is it the all-out assault on tradition and decency the Royal Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The extraordinary workings of an unusual mind are reduced to TV-movie proportions in The Man Who Knew Infinity, the latest and least re-telling of the too-short life of the self-taught Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose tale has previously been told in novel form (David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk) and as an Olivier Award-winning play (A Disappearing Number). Now along comes American writer-director Matthew Brown with a tentative take on the intriguingly knotted story of the Madras-born Ramanujan (played this time out by Dev Patel) and the eventual acclaim and renown Read more ...
David Nice
Who wouldn't wish to have been a fly on the wall during those pre-recording days when composers and their friends played piano-duet arrangements of the great orchestral works? Any notion that we don't need such reductions anymore was swept aside by Antoine Françoise and Robin Green in the fourth concert of an untrumpeted but brilliantly conceived piano-duo series matching transcriptions of 20th-century Viennese masterworks with Mozart and/or Schubert and five world premieres. Such ambition was last night crowned by an hour-plus performance of Mahler's Sixth Symphony arranged by Zemlinsky, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It’s raining. Well, of course – it’s April in London. But it’s also pouring down on the Old Vic stage, hammering an already battered slate roof. When it lifts to reveal the semi-derelict attic, site of Harold Pinter’s groundbreaking 1960 play, the rain stays in your mind: an outside world that can be merciless towards the weak. And in Matthew Warchus’s revival, the trapped trio are very much victims – of one another, of society, and of their own failings.This is Pinter writ large and with great empathy, if not subtlety. Rob Howell’s beautifully detailed junkyard is a dilapidated period Read more ...
graeme.thomson
I interviewed Merle Haggard once and he’s a slippery old snake: dry, reserved and fiercely intelligent, with an ornery pride and an oft-used gift for riling people. I’m not sure we got to know him all that much better after Gandulf Hennig’s superb documentary Learning to Live with Myself, but it was a hell of a ride none the less. A man with hidden depths buried inside his hidden depths, Haggard said towards the end of the film that he had struggled his whole life to achieve his aim of being “self-contained, totally”. He wasn't about to go all therapy-speak on our asses now.Filmed over three Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Migration is the lead story of modern geopolitics. So it’s surprising – even baffling – that so few films tell the migrant’s tale. British and French films across the broadest spectrum have dramatised the quest of colonial incomers to assimilate – from Bend It Like Beckham all the way across to La Haine – but Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan goes right back to the source.It opens in the northern region of Sri Lanka where the Tamil Tigers have been defeated and refugees are clamouring to leave. The narrative alights on three of them as they make their way to Paris. The twist is that the man, woman Read more ...