Reviews
Kieron Tyler
It’s one of the greatest rock songs of the Seventies. The production is dense and the churning guitars are thick with tension. Beginning with a minor-key riff suggesting a familiarity with The Stooges’ “No Fun”, the whole band lock into a groove which isn’t strayed from. The tempo does not shift. Rhythmically, this forward motion has the power of a tank stuck in third gear. The voice suggests John Lennon at his most raw. Two squalling guitar breaks set the Jimi Hendrix of “Third Stone from the Sun” in a hard rock context. Produced by former Hendrix co-manager Chas Chandler, it could be Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
It was rather like a trip home to see long-lost relatives. Ton Koopman took to the stage at the Liverpool Philharmonic with a broad smile. That smile both greeted the audience and, from what the audience could see, told the orchestra that they were on form. Or, on the other hand, it might have been encouraging them to try harder.The latter was hardly necessary. There have been times when the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra reduced its ranks to become a Baroque ensemble and, in so doing, failed to realise that it needed to leave behind the 19th century bluster and become that bit more Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A full house for a premiere performance: Wynton Marsalis bucks the trend in contemporary music. He’s an established name, more for his jazz than his classical work. But in recent years he has produced a substantial body of orchestral music, so the flocking crowds know what to expect. His new Violin Concerto continues the trend. Popular American idioms – mainly jazz and blues – are integrated into a classically oriented orchestral style with an impressive craftsmanship that hides all the joins. Despite the generally conservative style, it is an ambitious work, its sheer length tending towards Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Every object tells a story, nowhere more so than in a museum. The Victoria & Albert has been busy retelling as many stories as it can by rearranging, refurbishing, adding and subtracting from the millions of objects it has at its disposal to display, study and conserve.The simply named FuturePlan, which started in 2001 and has several more years to run, has been redoing, reviewing and renewing the entire museum, examining one by one the extraordinary holdings of the V&A, sometimes across cultures, sometimes with a horizontal chronology across categories, and sometimes from beginning Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Saoirse Ronan, emerging decorously into womanliness in Brooklyn, deserves a stack of awards nominations for her portrayal of a brave young woman torn between her old life in Ireland and her new existence in 1952 New York's most vibrant borough. Restraining her character’s flickers of doubt, culpability, satisfaction, and pleasure, Ronan shows how the maturation of Eilis Lacey – from seasick voyager and homesick immigrant to serene resident – is attributable to her hard-won stoicism and quiet determination.Ronan’s performance is not enough to make John Crowley’s movie great. Short on conflict Read more ...
Richard Bratby
If Omer Meir Wellber is making a bid for Andris Nelsons’s old music directorship in Birmingham, he could hardly have signalled his intentions more audaciously. This concert began with Wagner’s Lohengrin Prelude and ended with Brahms’s First Symphony – basically a surgical strike into the heartlands of Nelsons’s repertoire. And as soloist, he had the Latvian violinist Baiba Skride – an artist who was introduced to Birmingham by Nelsons and who appeared with the CBSO on disc and in concert throughout Nelsons’s tenure.Skride was there to play Schumann’s late Violin Concerto, and she found an Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This new family musical, based on the popular 2003 Will Ferrell film, has rightly been censured for its extortionate seating prices, hosting the West End’s most expensive top-end tickets at £267.50 a pop – and that’s without the drinks, ice cream and £10 souvenir programme. So, is it worth it?In a word – no. This is a regifted hodgepodge, with Thomas Meehan and Bob Martin’s book brazenly name-checking its sources: Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Carol, White Christmas. There’s the workaholic who neglects his family and rejects Christmas celebration (Scrooge meets Hook, Mary Poppins et al Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Chairs, chairs, chairs, as far as the eye can see. Plywood or plastic shells, some decorated with hilarious drawings of jolly nudes by Saul Steinberg (main picture), others in all the colours you can imagine – stacks, in rows, alluring and all so familiar. As it is an exhibition, there is an air of reverence – heaven forbid that you actually have a chair to sit on! - but these chairs have been design icons for well over half a century. Here they are the stars of “The World of Charles and Ray Eames”, an anthology of projects and successes, shown not only in actual produced objects but drawings Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Critic and popular historian Dominic Sandbook understands the power of the soundbite, so he supplied one of his own to sum up his new series: "We do still make one thing better than anybody else – we make stories."This is a companion piece to Sandbrook's new book, The Great British Dream Factory, in which he upset a few readers by daring to criticise John Lennon. The thesis remains the same, however – Britain has been in decline since 1945, with the Empire gone along with our manufacturing base, but has compensated by applying the energy and ingenuity that made the Victorians great to Read more ...
Tim Cumming
When it comes world music there are few countries bigger than Mali in terms of impact and popularity. (Cuba probably ranks a close second.) It’s from Mali that Songhoy Blues hail, one of the few major new successes in world music to emerge in the past few years. In many ways, it is a dwindling genre, where the chances of “discovering” a little-known great like Ali Farka Touré or Cesaria Evora are getting close to zero – most people, like everywhere else, don’t listen to that old stuff anymore: by and large it’s hip-hop, R&B and digital beats. The fresh and the fine-ground does still Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman used her camera to record, with a sympathetic eye, the world around her – both in the immediate surroundings of her Paris flat and in the wider world. The news that she died last month, apparently by her own hand, sadly makes this retrospective of the installations she began creating in 1995 all the more timely.Akerman (pictured below right) is best known for films such as Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce and 1080 Bruxelles (pictured below full column), a three-hour feature made in 1975 when she was just 24 that has since been showered with accolades Read more ...
David Nice
Scintillating gems scattered rather thinly through long-winded operas: that superficial impression of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s often delectable music isn’t going to be changed greatly by seeing his first success of 1903, Le donne curiose (“Nosy Women”, perhaps, or, if you want a better English title “The Merry Men of Venice”). It takes an enormous amount of charm to make you want to stay with this inconsequential adaptation of Goldoni – no proto-Feydeau when it comes to comic plotting – and fortunately this Guildhall team have it in spades.Perhaps a music college’s first duty to budding opera Read more ...