Reviews
Marina Vaizey
This was one of the most disturbing, terrifying and informative programmes imaginable, made more so by Dan Cruickshank’s calm demeanour as he interrogated everyone from scholars to fanatics about the actions and rationale of the Islamic State (IS) during the past two years in Iraq and Syria. These conversations were set against his own visits to the Middle East and terrifying videos of IS hammering to smithereens the contents of museums and bulldozing world-famous archaeological sites.When Cruickshank visited Iraq's ancient sites in 2002, he feared the destruction Western bombs might bring; Read more ...
David Nice
There are two operatic types who should leave Rossini’s epic swansong for the stage well alone. One would usually be a conductor who ignores many of the notes written by a master at the height of his powers, since even the least dramatic numbers have musical idiosyncrasy in them. Antonio Pappano still omits, among other things, Rossini’s superb Mozartian canon-trio for women's voices and wind ensemble; but what he does conduct is so focused and shapely that he must be forgiven. Not so his director, Damiano Michieletto, who not only jettisons a choreographer for the essential swathes of ballet Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Freedom Festival, a new event curated by vibes player and electronicist Orphy Robinson and vocalist Cleveland Watkiss, is all about bringing improvised music out of the shadows and into the limelight. All the same, it felt strange going to the Vortex in broad daylight. Gigs here don’t usually get started much before 9 pm (I’d always assumed that improvising musicians only came out at night), and darkness seems to lend itself to the free jazz atmosphere.After appearances from Tony Kofi’s Sphinx Trio and Byron Wallen on the first day, it was down to the Freeform Improv Strings to start the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rumour has it that there's a proposal floating around Hollywood to remake Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, his enthralling 1973 masterpiece of love, grief and death foretold. Anyone foolish enough to contemplate such a move should be made to watch this skilful and absorbing film about Roeg's career and work. It was a vivid illustration of how a singular artist pursuing a distinctive vision goes about his business, as opposed to being a mere component in a commercial clone-factory increasingly bereft of original ideas. On the other hand, what it didn't show us was Roeg's debilitating struggle Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Antonio Pappano, artistic director and chief conductor of the Royal Opera House, is a polymath, for he is also a brilliant and persuasive narrator of the history of music. Here he embarked on a four part history of the operatic voice, starting at the very top – or how to reach those high Cs, the Everest for the soprano.Often speaking beside a grand piano, on the grand and empty stage of the ROH, and thus subliminally reminding us that he first worked as a repetiteur before becoming one of the world’s leading conductors, he creatively interweaved vintage film of legendary Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While most contemporary entertainers rely on a little of the old smoke and mirrors, no pop culture phenomenon requires the same suspension of disbelief as the 21st-century pop concert. When you pay your money, it is with the understanding that, while everything you see may be staged, the sentiment is real. And, since most of us cannot afford to see the same artist twice on the same tour, the bargain holds.Taylor Swift, perhaps more so than any other contemporary pop artist, thrives on her genuineness: her confessional songwriting, her interactions with fans on social media, the way she Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Dust on the Nettles – A Journey Through the British Underground Folk Scene 1967–72It’s one of the most significant musical rediscoveries of recent years and, on its own, makes Dust on the Nettles indispensible. “The Seagulls Scream” by Christine Quayle is track 10 on the first disc of this box set of psychedelically inclined British folk or folk-inspired music. Quayle intones desolately of “a human in bed [who] is singing his prayers in his head, his mind is dead.” Eleswhere in the disconsolate lyric, a child asks his mother for love but “beneath his skin, his body is Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This was one of the most crazily ambitious music projects of the year so far. Co-curators Sam Mills and Susheela Raman, with generous sponsorship, assembled their favourite musicians in different styles from Greece, Lebanon, Ethiopia and Russia under the title of Sacred Imaginations: New and Ancient Music From the Near East. What could have been a spiritual dog’s breakfast was, even if the sense was the wheels might come off at any moment, a thrilling musical journey and a triumph.The two singing revelations of the first half were the Russian five piece choir the Doros Male Vocal Ensemble, Read more ...
David Nice
Kafka and Jones, the names above this little shop of horrors, would be a marriage made in off-kilter theatreland had the Czech genius written any plays. He didn’t, so Nick Gill has made a well-shaped drama out of the assembled fragments of which The Trial consists. It offers an exhaustive role for Rory Kinnear, never offstage for the unbroken two-hour duration, and lets director Richard Jones revert from the warm humanity he’s most recently been unable to resist in Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg and Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West back to his favoured world of discomfort and Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The 1965 film The Heroes of Telemark, documenting the Allies' mission to stop the Nazis from going nuclear, is to historical accuracy what David Starkey is to tact. Or common decency. The Saboteurs however, a Norwegian/Danish/British TV co-production, seems to be keener to explore the truth behind the mission. Or at least as much of it as is known.After the first episode’s slow, measured pace, we began the second in a secret military base in Scotland with a stronger sense of urgency. If we had any doubts as to just how urgent things were, these were soon quashed as the entire plan was Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
The Watts Gallery in rural Surrey is a very genteel setting for a show by a figure who for most of his life was denied polite society. Richard Dadd spent 42 years in mental hospitals, first at Bethlem, then Broadmoor. As one can infer, he was criminally insane, and despite a disarming interest in fairies, his life and work cannot be spun into a happy-ever-after narrative.It's the fairies not the diagnosis that won him acclaim, inspiring his two greatest works: The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, 1855-64 (main picture) and Contradiction. Oberon and Titania,1854-58 (pictured below) are both Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If Peter Bogdanovich – remember him? – weren't there in the credits, Woody Allen would seem the unmistakable director of She's Funny That Way, the way too intermittently funny trifle that calls to mind such far superior Allen paeans to the New York stage as Bullets Over Broadway and finds leading man Owen Wilson adopting Allen's mannerisms throughout (as well Wilson might, having led the cast of Midnight in Paris). Playing a Broadway director who can't keep his trouser belts buckled, a stammering Wilson is the supposed comic pivot of a slow-aborning film from the once-great Read more ...