Reviews
Thomas H. Green
“The Sun comes up, another day begins/And I don’t even worry ‘bout the state I’m in.” One of the great opening lines in rock and a motto to live by. The Jesus & Mary Chain lay into their second single, "Never Understand", with deadpan gusto, their soundman pushing the decibels up. Murky silhouettes amid dry ice under an array of strobing lights, they hammer it home. Jim Reid is at the microphone, clad in a box jacket and jeans, looking much as he ever did but with cropped monkish hair. His brother William, belly pushing at his “1972” tee-shirt, his trademark flourish of once-black hair Read more ...
Matt Wolf
I hope someone by now has told Neil Patrick Harris how to pronounce David Oyelowo’s surname, but if anyone wants to see how not to host an Oscars, Harris’s stewardship of the 87th annual Academy Awards can provide that service in spades.Sure, there were a few surprises in the final stretch of this year’s ceremony, including the triumphant 11th-hour trifecta achieved by Birdman, which swept best picture, director, and original screenplay, all at the expense of its closest rival, Boyhood. Indeed, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s extravagant fantasia was stopped in its tracks in the last half-hour Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Even by trumpeters’ standards, Håkan Hardenberger is a flamboyant figure. He sports a sharp, tailored suit and a wing-collared shirt, and his stage presence is all swagger and pomp. HK Gruber has captured his spirit perfectly in his jazzy, experimental trumpet concerto Aerial, which has become the trumpeter’s calling card. That proved the highlight of the evening here, though, as it was followed by a lacklustre Mahler Five, a rare disappointment from the usually reliable conductor Andris Nelsons.The Gruber concerto is in two movements – one slow, one fast – but even in the slow movement there Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Pennsylvanian singer-songwriter Natalie Mering, aka Weyes Blood, performed her intoxicating brew of Gothic folk-tronica in Shoreditch last night, as part of a short UK tour playing the songs of her second album, The Innocents. Allusive, multi-layered (both in terms of tracks and themes), generically ambiguous and wryly humorous, she wasn’t perhaps an obvious choice for a lagered-up Saturday night crowd wanting boogie beats. Though her songs are almost impossible to dance to, she held the rapt attention of the room. Her voice is rich and deep, almost a baritone, though it never loses an Read more ...
stephen.walsh
After 16 years one might expect a revival of a repertory opera like Hansel and Gretel to come up with a dusty look and frayed edges. But Benjamin Davis has done a brilliant job pumping the life back into Richard Jones’s memorable but intricate 1998 staging of Humperdinck’s pocket Wagnerian masterpiece.For Jones, Hansel was less about fairies and witches, more about food; and in Davis’s revival they seem to be filling their faces, or imagining they are, even more of the time, from Hansel’s serial sampling of the cream at the start to the children’s serving up of the roasted witch at the end. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Zakary Thaks: It’s the End – The Definitive CollectionGalloping with the urgency of a sweat-flecked horse running a steeplechase, the choppy guitar riff takes early Kinks raunch and filters it through a testosterone-driven sensibility that won’t let up. The drums are unremitting. Then, a solo guitar peels off a berserk fistful of notes which Dave Davies would have been proud of. A key change raises the intensity level even higher. And then, at just over two minutes, the relentless performance grinds to a halt. Sixties garage rock at its finest, “Bad Girl” is 126 seconds of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Hostages certainly whips along. We’re straight into conflict from the very start of the first episode, except it soon transpires that the real action will be taking place elsewhere. And it’ll be tighter, more excruciating than the bash-down-the-door atmosphere of the opening scene, which serves to introduce us to Adam Rubin (Jonah Lotan), a top operator in Israeli counter-terrorism who’s on his last day of service and concluding his final mission successfully. We’ll be seeing more of Rubin later, or at least realising it’s him when he takes off his balaclava, having changed role from siege- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Farinelli and The King is pretty much a perfect piece of theatre. More importantly, though, it’s perfectly timed. In a month when English National Opera’s troubles have made the front page, when op-eds are all about why Simon Rattle’s dreams of a new concert hall for London are fruitless, this paean to music – to its serious, healing, transformative power – is not only resonant, but necessary.This is Claire van Kampen’s first play, but far from her first encounter with the Globe. A former Associate Artistic Director of the company, van Kampen (who also happens to be Mrs Mark Rylance) has Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Well, the vocals were certainly formidable...but what else would you expect? As a teenager George Ezra says he would listen for hours to his dad’s Leadbelly albums, whilst gazing at sleeve notes that read: “This voice is so big you may need to turn your record player down.” That was Ezra’s inspiration. Last night his own voice was sufficient to fill Brixton Academy.The 21-year-old arrived on stage in a blaze of spotlights looking tall and preppy. He walked to a spot just left of centre and launched into the jaunty “Cassy O’”. The young and thirsty crowd – the room had more than something of Read more ...
peter.quinn
Aged 91, and as frisky as a newborn puppy, the US singer, pianist and songwriter Bob Dorough is a sui generis stylist whose smart lyrics – delivered in an understated southern brogue – and nimble pianism which nods to both bebop and swing masters, combine to produce something quite unlike anything else in jazz. But what really lit up the Pizza Express Jazz Club was the joie de vivre of Dorough's performance, his humour and love of the ludic.The gig saw him reunited with the London-based musicians who facilitated and played on his terrific 2006 album for the Candid label, Small Day Tomorrow: Read more ...
graham.rickson
Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610 The Sixteen/Harry Christophers (Coro)The first few minutes of Monteverdi's Vespers are a knockout. Rarely has one sustained chord been so fruitfully deployed, and the big plagal cadence at the end is wonderful. Heard live, in a big, reverberant space, the Deus in adiutorium is invariably thrilling, no matter how much detail gets lost. David Nice reviewed a recent live performance by Harry Christophers and The Sixteen in Winchester Cathedral, but their second recording was taped in the more congenial surroundings of St Augustine's, Kilburn, and acoustically it Read more ...
Graham Fuller
At last, it’s here – the female-friendly BDSM movie that no grownups should restrain themselves from seeing. The one with the designer clothes and kinky accoutrements. The one with the “special” room for thrilling punishments. The one unafflicted by Christian Grey and his assorted neuroses.Aside from the brown and orange fritillary of its title and various unnamed butterflies and moths, there are no males at all in The Duke of Burgundy, writer-director Peter Strickland’s drily witty homage to the stylistically ambitious 1970s Euro-erotica of directors like Jesús Franco and Jean Rollin. Read more ...