Reviews
Marina Vaizey
London, 1905. For the Stephen siblings, setting up an independent household in Bloomsbury freed them – especially the sisters, Vanessa and Virginia – from Victorian familial conventions. It resulted in a heady mix of creative endeavour and endless conversation, especially about sex. As some wit commented, the Bloomsbury set was to be found living in squares, loving in triangles and talking in circles.Introducing this delicate dramatisation of a complex web of relationships among friends and family we first met the predictably outraged Aunt Mary (Eleanor Bron) who worried about the delicate Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Dziga Vertov’s narrativeless “city symphony” Man With a Movie Camera celebrates the modernity and energy of the post-Bolshevik Revolution metropolis – a composite of Kharkov, Kiev, Moscow and Odessa filmed over three years. Propaganda for the harnessing of machinery in the building of the Soviet Union’s future, it was much more besides – a masterpiece of avant-garde experimentalism and, fleetingly, an unexpected critique of the continuing class struggle.Inspired by Constructivism’s creed of art with a social purpose and its photo-montage techniques, Vertov’s poetic documentary was partially Read more ...
Matthew Wright
With its time and observatory, Greenwich is a fitting venue for record-breakers, and Sir Tom Jones, who sang at the Greenwich Music Time Festival last night, has some impressive vital statistics. The still-slim, still-dynamic figure in a black suit has sold 100 million records in a career of over 50 years, and on a good day, he can be Elvis Presley with a touch of Bryn Terfel.Last night’s show flagged a little towards the end, after a succession of slightly creaky R&B songs, though a couple of cobwebby numbers is an inevitable consequence of a 75-year-old plundering their full back Read more ...
David Nice
A packed Albert Hall told an instructive story: programme Holst’s The Planets at the Proms and you can dare to do anything in the first half. Besides, though it will be a red letter day when we don’t have to put “women” in front of “conductors”, the Marin Alsop Last Night effect may have kindled interest in Susanna Mälkki, top of a still too-small list from the two concerts I’ve heard her give with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Mälkki seems just as authoritative in mainstream romantic and 20th century scores as she is in thornier so-called contemporary music (she spent seven years with Ensemble Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Peter Perrett reappears for his third encore. This time his band doesn’t play with him. He attacks the guitar alone, “No Peace for the Wicked” and “It’s the Truth”, both songs from his days in The Only Ones, 35 years ago. His distinctive cracked voice is strong. In any case, the crowd assist him, even though these are not sing-along songs so much as perfectly constructed mini-melodramas of the heart. Clad in a black open-neck shirt and – rare for him – no shades, he’s not the pale wasted junkie princeling of myth. He’s clearly invigorated – fragile, for sure, but with drive and purpose about Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Poirot curls an eyebrow and Miss Marple twinkles, but there haven't been a lot of out-and-out laughs in Agatha Christie’s television career. Partners in Crime comes as a pleasurable surprise. It stars David Walliams and Jessica Raine as Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, a married couple on their uppers who take up detective work almost by accident.The Beresfords had a long career: Christie wrote the first novel to feature them in 1922 and the fourth in 1973. There were also some short stories collected as Partners in Crime, each a spoof of other crime writers including Chesterton, Conan Doyle, Read more ...
David Nice
From now until 12 September, when Wigmore darling Iestyn Davies returns to open the new season, the biggest names in instrumental music are to be heard in the biggest venue, the Albert Hall. With all eyes and ears turned by maximum publicity towards the Proms, folk may have forgotten that the Wigmore Hall concerts were ongoing until last night. The finale was unexpectedly spectacular: while Leif Ove Andsnes was offering pure spring-water Beethoven over in South Kensington, young Israeli pianist Matan Porat served a hard-hitting cocktail of a programme, beginning and ending with fireworks but Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
After four years, 55 cities in 22 countries and an award-winning recording, Leif Ove Andsnes’s Beethoven journey came to an end last night in an emotionally charged evening at the Royal Albert Hall. And in a delightful light-hearted moment after all the serious music making was done, Andsnes finished the concert vigorously playing the tambourine in an orchestral encore.The highlight of the evening was, perhaps unexpectedly, the Second Piano Concerto, which ended the first half. Much revised and meddled with by Beethoven over nearly 15 years, this is the sunniest of the concertos. It was Read more ...
David Nice
Stop miking Bryn Terfel. Stop over-miking musicals; the show voices in a hybrid cast don’t need much. Too much ruined English National Opera’s recent Sweeney Todd, and in this Proms adaptation of Grange Park Opera’s summer crowd-pleaser it sent the voices ricocheting around the Albert Hall, making mush of the words and stridency of the few belt-it-out moments. It also made it hard to assess what seemed like a resourceful staging of a baggy-monster musical with four or five great songs, no masterpiece of musical theatre (unlike My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof’s near-contemporary).The idea of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tennessee Ernie Ford: Portrait of an American SingerAlthough there are different American music charts, success in one category but not another is not a marginal accomplishment. A major star on the country chart can be as popular, heavy selling and as big a live draw as one on the mainstream chart – now known as The Hot 100. But crossing over is still the dream. Taylor Swift isn’t for the country charts alone. Back in the Nineties, nor was Alan Jackson. The daddy of them all though was Tennessee Ernie Ford (1919–1991). In 1955, his single “Sixteen Tons” figured as strongly on the pop Read more ...
Thomas Rees
When Afro-Cuban jazz pioneers Irakere first played Ronnie Scott’s, back in 1985, they sold out the venue for five weeks on the trot. Thirty years later, and 40 years since the pioneering Latin jazz outfit began, they’re back to celebrate the anniversary, playing two shows a night across six nights, with pianist and founder Chucho Valdes at the helm. I’d heard the stories and I was in the mood for a party – for the kind of gig that has you wishing you’d splashed out on one of the tables at the front where you're right in the middle of the action, with room to dance – and at times it was Read more ...
stephen.walsh
One hardly expects operas about historical figures to bother much with the actual facts of their lives. But Handel’s Xerxes must nevertheless rank as an extreme case. Instead of bridging the Hellespont and invading Greece with a million men – a campaign mentioned in passing as if it were some minor business trip – Xerxes spends his time philandering with his brother’s intended and generally creating emotional mayhem in the Persian court. Jenny Miller’s production transplants the action, somewhat irrelevantly, to a nightclub in, perhaps, Cairo or Palm Springs. But it hardly matters. It could Read more ...