Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
“I need to get a new gimmick.” Joyce DiDonato hobbled her way onto Milton Court’s stage last night, warning her audience to expect a seated performance owing to a sprained ankle. It was just six years ago she famously broke her leg during a performance of Rossini’s Il Barbiere at Covent Garden, but now, as then, she continued with no obvious dimming of intensity or focus.DiDonato was joined by composer Jake Heggie (turned pianist, here) and the Brentano Quartet for the first concert in this final leg of her Artist Residency at the Barbican. Today she’ll deliver a masterclass to Guildhall Read more ...
David Nice
A journey into dreams through songs from Dowland to The Kinks; a Swiss director who, Covent Garden’s Director of Opera Kasper Holten assures us, is “one of the most important European theatre artists”; a Norwegian chanteuse who, I assure you, is a performer of real originality. All that should add up to something just a little bit extraordinary, shouldn’t it? Sadly not. What I saw last night was the kind of thing I’d shrug off having chosen at random from offerings at the Edinburgh Fringe.Perhaps anticipation was misguided: buy into Christoph Marthaler’s reputation as “radical and renowned”, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Boasting one of the most appealingly eclectic casts in recent memory, The Salvation – from Dogme 95 director Kristian Levring – might have hoped to emulate the success of Sergio Leone's Italian-infused approach by bringing a Danish flavour to traditional western proceedings. But by relying too heavily on the tried and tested it fails to distinguish itself, meaning that the "smørrebrød" western seems unlikely to replace its spaghetti cousin in audience affections any time soon.Set in America in 1871, it begins promisingly with a soon-to-be-shattered softness as a nervous Dane, Jon ( Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“A place of ravishing beauty that would completely stop you in your tracks.” So said Christine Bleakley as she introduced the first episode of this six-part series, during which she travels along the Wild Atlantic Way on Ireland's west coast, from County Donegal in the north to County Cork in the south, 15,000 miles of rugged coastline formed over millions of years by the ravages of the Atlantic Ocean.The presenter was speaking about Malin Head, Ireland's most northerly point, but she could have been talking about almost any part of the island of Ireland. It's a tiny country but boy does it Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Iranian-born New York resident painter YZ Kami, now in his mid-fifties, continually plays with our hunger to look at “reality” while being seduced by abstraction and repetition. In 17 canvases, painted over the past two years, Kami explores two distinct and recognisable styles or idioms that however much in common they have with contemporary concerns he has made his own. The results are both powerful and pleasurable. He uses oil on linen when painting blurred portraits based on photographs or, presumably when the subject is named, based on a person known to the artist; acrylic on Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The Young Vic’s victory parade came as no surprise after a bumper year, but, in an impressive night for studio and publicly funded theatre, the egalitarian 2015 Oliviers also showered affection upon the Hampstead, Donmar, RSC, Chichester, Royal Court and Almeida. Many of their pioneering productions have already made it into the West End, proving – once and for all – that creative risk and profitmaking need not be mutually exclusive.Belgian director Ivo van Hove was rewarded for his revolutionary take on A View From the Bridge, as was visibly stunned leading actor Mark Strong, and the Young Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
The burden of responsibility weighs heavily on a young man struggling to deal with his mother’s alcoholism, in Gerard Barrett’s powerful and poignant second feature. Jack Reynor, who so impressed in Lenny Abrahamson’s What Richard Did, turns in a nuanced and moving performance as a son driven to desperate measures in order to survive. Barrett empathises how difficult it can be to get by when you don’t have a regular income, or indeed plentiful cash to throw at your problems.John (Reynor, pictured below) is at a crossroads in his life. Does he continue driving a taxi in the village where he Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Composer Tansy Davies and librettist Nick Drake’s opera Between Worlds cannot help but be a devastating tribute to the tragedy of 9/11. Yet the whole is peppered with problems that mean this result is achieved only intermittently. Davies – whose first opera this is – and the playwright Drake, with Deborah Warner directing, have picked a topic that would seem at first glance to demand the scale of a modern-day Götterdämmerung. The result they extrapolate is far from that – but when it does succeed, it is in ways that are not really about 9/11 at all.This is, essentially, the final section, in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At 86, Jo Baer is still painting vigorously. In the mid 1960s, she was an established New York Minimalist along with artists like Carl Andre and Sol Lewitt; but while they continued to explore abstraction, she changed tack – dramatically, or so it seemed. In the mid 1970s, she turned toward figuration declaring that the “naivety” of Minimalism (its refusal to engage with events in the real world) no longer made it relevant. Yet she still thinks of herself as an abstract painter and this survey, which spans 55 years, allows us to guage what she means by the claim.In the early days, her Read more ...
geoff brown
Considering the possibilities, we got off lightly when the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, always fearless in the face of the outrageous, performed Percy Grainger’s “music for an imaginary ballet”, The Warriors. The orchestra could have contained 30 pianists seated at 19 pianos, a prescription once followed when Grainger, the Australian wild boy of music, conducted it in concert in Chicago. In fact, we had just three of each.We could also have had the ballet staged. In which case, following Grainger’s imaginings, the already bursting Festival Hall stage would be wriggling with what Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
David Kauffman and Eric Caboor: Songs From Suicide BridgeThe tale of David Kauffman and Eric Caboor is not unusual. Two singer-songwriters form a duo, play some live shows to zero interest, record an album which goes nowhere after it’s privately pressed and then – nothing. Kauffman and Caboor though recorded a gem which, in terms of its haunting mood and quality of songwriting, belies its obscurity. Songs From Suicide Bridge, which was barely released in 1984, is as good as James Taylor at his most naked, and as evocative as Elliott Smith. The album sounds as if it could have been Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Drenge made themselves known to the world some 18 months ago, surfing on the back of their abrasive self-titled debut album and some unexpected PR assistance from West Midlands MP Tom Watson. Back then, the Loveless brothers were a loud and lairy duo that took rock music by the scruff of the neck and knocked seven bells out of it with their stripped-down sound. With the recent release of their second album, Undertow, however, there have been some changes. Most noticeably, their sound has got richer and considerably grungier, while a bass player has been added to the line-up. However, given Read more ...