Reviews
Holly O'Mahony
If an authority figure ordered you to inflict pain on another person, to what extent would you comply? That is the subject of Experimenter, which focuses on Stanley Milgram's controversial obedience experiment. Unable to secure a theatrical run in the UK, writer-director Michael Almereyda’s urgent biographical drama, which had its premiere at Sundance last year, is now available on DVD and for digital download. The movie’s unsettling depiction of our capacity for cruelty makes it essential viewing.Yale social psychologist Milgram devised the experiment following the 1961 trial of Adolf Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The annual Bach Choir St Matthew Passion is a satisfying mix of new and old. The tradition dates back to 1930, and, as was the fashion then, the choir employed is huge. Applause is kept to a minimum, another nod to tradition, as is the translation of the text into English.But the choir has not been deaf to more recent developments, or to the rise of period performance practice. They now sing with period instrument ensemble Florilegium, and the choir’s musical director, David Hill, led an account that draws on recent trends, not least in the fleet tempos and elegantly shaped phrases, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s a fair bet that when Lewis Hamilton and his Formula One colleagues are driving to practice sessions they don’t have to queue for 90 minutes at a military checkpoint. This was just one illuminating vignette of the daily grind shown in Amber Fares’ interesting documentary about a group of Palestinian female car-racers, the first all-women team in the Arab world.This incident happened to team captain Maysoon, who marshals Marah, Noor, Mona and Betty, four very likeable women who love racing cars. Fares tells their stories through interviews with the women and their families, interspersed Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Sleeper cells get a bad press. The undercover units that seamlessly weave themselves into the fabric of society are normally associated with espionage and terrorism. But what if the sleepers were actually guardians of all that we hold dear? What if they represented the very last defence when order dissolves into chaos and anarchy replaces law?This is the central question at the base of a towering Tom Clancy premise. It’s an ambitious end-of-days narrative about a global pandemic that has brought about the collapse of civilised society, resulting in deep cover agents being activated as a last Read more ...
David Nice
Cherrypicking from 17 concerts to come up with the one by last year's Leeds International Piano Competition winner may seem a bit unfair to the French Institute's ever more ambitious annual It's All About Piano! Festival. It was hard, for instance, to miss out on the youth element, the Satie bookending the weekend's events, or for that matter the absolute star of the festival two years ago, David Kadouch, who then gave one of the best, and most intriguingly programmed, recitals I've ever heard and teamed up for a Saturday night duo recital with Adam Laloum. Let's just say that the alternative Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A good half of the portraits in Russia and the Arts are of figures without whom any conception of 19th century European culture would be incomplete. A felicitous subtitle, “The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky”, provides a natural, even easy point of orientation for those approaching Russian culture, and with it the country’s history and character, without particular advance knowledge.Much is new here, not least the artists themselves, none of whose names are anywhere near as well-known as their subjects. The wider intellectual world they inhabited may seem remote, with its conflicts between Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Some of us have waited years for this. The opportunity to see Schumann’s largest, most ambitious work was not to be missed. For this most literary of composers, setting the Alpha and Omega of German poetry was a labour of love, which he undertook in reverse, but with progressively less reliable inspiration. From the grandiose bluster of the overture, composed last, you would be hard pressed to anticipate the sublime heights of the third part, composed by Schumann in a wake of elation shortly after completing The Paradise and the Peri.Hardly more than a year ago the London Symphony Orchestra Read more ...
David Kettle
When a film’s two leads start debating George Bernard Shaw in the middle of a fight to the death, you know you’re in trouble. In fact, Shakespeare, Byron, Melville, Rimbaud and plenty more all get namechecked in William Monahan’s pretentious doppelgänger thriller. With a bit more flair and wit, and a little less sententious self-importance, Mojave could have ended up as an outrageously entertaining parody. Instead, it just feels self-obsessed and disappointingly mundane.It doesn’t help that the two leads in question are so thoroughly unsympathetic. Garrett Hedlund (pictured below) plays Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You learn a lot about an opera in concert. Free from directorial and design intervention, the music can and must do it all. What is good is amplified, and what’s weak exposed. When that score is as psychologically rich and texturally varied as George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, the clarity of a concert performance can actually feel like a gain rather than a loss.Which isn’t to belittle either Katie Mitchell’s original staging for the Aix Festival, or the work at the Barbican last night of director Benjamin Davis, who creates an allusive semi-staging within the significant restrictions of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although The Kinks’ world was turned upside down from the moment “You Really Got Me” hit the charts in August 1964, the band’s main songwriter Ray Davies still had songs to spare. Some of his compositions ended up with singers like Dave Berry, Leapy Lee and Mo & Steve. Ray’s brother Dave even found that one of his songs was recorded by Shel Naylor. This extra-mural world fascinates Kinks fans.Even more enticing are the recordings by other artists to which The Kinks actually contributed. Leapy Lee’s 1966 single “King of the Whole Wide World” featured Dave, Pete Quaife and maybe Mick Avory Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Once you’ve seen him, you can’t forget him. Taken in 1951, Paul Strand’s black and white portrait of a French teenager sears itself onto your retina. He stares unflinchingly back, and looking into his eyes, you feel almost scalded by his exceptional beauty and the piercing intensity of his gaze. With his chiselled features, Roman nose, curled lips and leonine shock of hair, he could be a classical Greek sculpture; and as though to affirm this association, his skin has the sheen of burnished bronze. The textures and patterns are all-important; his denim boiler suit and knitted woollen Read more ...
graham.rickson
Copland: Orchestral Works 1 BBC Philharmonic/John Wilson (Chandos)There are sensational things in the first volume of John Wilson’s projected Copland series, but his disc suffers from being released too soon after Andrew Litton’s thrilling Colorado Symphony anthology. Litton scores by allowing us to hear Billy the Kid and Rodeo in their uncut original versions, and his orchestra play with a muscular grace that’s matched by BIS’s widescreen sound. Wilson’s hard-working BBC Philharmonic are more than capable, but many of Copland’s brasher moments are too restrained. El Salón México is a case in Read more ...