London
Demetrios Matheou
With the Black Lives Matter movement spurred this year by another wave of police brutality against African Americans, Steve McQueen’s blisteringly powerful, viscerally topical drama reminds us of the UK’s own torrid record in that regard, by returning to a true story that is, thankfully, as inspiring as it is appalling.Mangrove is the first of five films the director has made under the banner Small Axe, each telling a different story involving London's West Indian community, between the late Sixties and the mid-Eighties. This concerns the seminal trial of the Mangrove Nine Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Pre-release excitement about the fourth coming of The Crown (Netflix) has centred on Emma Corrin’s portrayal of Princess Diana, still big box-office 23 years after her death. There’s no denying that Corrin has risen heroically to the challenge of playing a character who has assumed mythic proportions, skilfully evoking Diana’s way of speaking as well as catching her coy, doe-eyed expressions and physical gestures. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Earl Spencer has chosen the run-up to Diana’s new TV incarnation in which to launch his assault on the BBC regarding Martin Bashir’s notorious 1995 Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Following the break-up of The Jam in 1982, Mick Talbot (b 1958) was chosen by Paul Weller as his sparring partner in a new band, The Style Council. Talbot, a keyboard player from south London, had flourished amid the late-Seventies Mod revival, initially in the Merton Parkas, with his brother Danny, but also in The Chords, and even appearing on a couple of The Jam’s records.Weller’s plan was to escape the lad-friendly guitar sound of The Jam. With The Style Council, he and Talbot explored soul, funk, jazz, R&B, easy listening, and more, resulting in a golden run of Top 20 hits that lasted Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Back to Georgian brothels, now – at least, for those of us who don’t have a Hulu subscription. The BBC’s airing of the second series of Harlots over the summer felt strangely timely. Barely an episode in and an angry crowd was hammering at the local judge’s door, demanding justice after the needless death of one of the city’s poorest residents. The third series, showing weekly on Wednesdays on BBC Two and available in its entirety on iPlayer, is less easily related to 2020, but it’s still a rollicking ride. Harlots, created by Moira Buffini and Alison Newman, is billed as a bodice- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
You can’t ever go all the way home again, and for years Dizzee Rascal didn’t want to. His Mercury-winning debut Boy In Da Corner (2003) electrified with the shock of the new, its eccentric, genre-mashing sound topping juddering jungle bass with a voice which seemed barely to have broken, and jaggedly emotional raps describing dull, violence-haunted days in Bow, East London. When I interviewed him then, aged 18, he saw straight through the keeping-it-real shackles awaiting him. “The ones who go, ‘I’m not leaving the ghetto’, really it’s because they know they’re never going to get a chance to Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
To plan a programme around The Tempest, its symbolism and the idea of evanescence, the fragility of the human condition, is one thing. To pull it off convincingly is quite another. The young Russian pianist Pavel Kolesnikov not only did so in his Wigmore Hall recital on Monday night, but offered an evening so profoundly touching that it seemed at times to inhabit Prospero’s magic island, plus some. Music, as many have commented over the centuries, lives in the spaces between the notes; and here, however many (Liszt) or few (Schubert) were available to play, Kolesnikov carried its Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Bidding farewell to the Royal Festival Hall, Tasmin Little was at the very peak of her powers. It’s almost unthinkable that we will never see her play here again. Many have hoped that she’d be one of those musicians who announce their retirement only to be back for one last time…and another… but Little is a genuine soul who has always said what she means and meant what she says. And she says that that really is that. This unique evening featured one violinist, two gowns, four pianists, four piano stools and plenty of disinfectant. Since its first planned date was cancelled during Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
During the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in London earlier this year, a black man named Patrick Hutchinson hoisted over his shoulder an injured white man from the counter-protest of the English Defence League and carried him to safety. The photographs made headlines. The incident took place just outside the artists’ entrance of the Royal Festival Hall. As part of the Black Legacies series for Black History Month, the Chineke! Orchestra - inside the hall, if without an audience beyond a select few - paid tribute to Hutchinson’s selflessness with the world premiere of a new work, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Ronnie Scott was a remarkable man: “Jazz Musician, Club Proprietor, Raconteur and Wit, he was the leader of our generation,” reads the memorial to him at Golders Green Crematorium. Oliver Murray’s documentary film Ronnie’s is an affectionate and portrait of him and of the jazz club he founded.It was Ronnie Scott’s trips to New York as a member of the dance bands on the transatlantic liners (the musicians known as “Geraldo’s Navy”) that crystallised the idea in his mind to start a club run by the instrumentalists themselves, to play the bebop music they had heard on 52nd Street. An ill-starred Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
What do you want to do on your 80th birthday? Well, playing two of your favourite pieces of music at the Wigmore Hall is not a bad option. To celebrate his big day, Stephen Kovacevich returned to the scene of many of his triumphs since 1961, chose the Bach Partita No. 4 and Schubert’s final piano sonata, D960 in B flat major, and enjoyed a rapturous welcome from a distanced audience overjoyed to be sharing the occasion with him.Kovacevich has always been a one-off: a free spirit with attitude yet no aggression, and a giant heart without a vestige of sentimentality. He builds music in Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Rarely have I seen so many smiles on stage as at Kings Place on Saturday. The combination of the delight of the performers being back in their natural environment with the genial and generous-spirited music they were playing brought out the best in everyone. From Mozart to Schubert via the up-and-coming Perivolaris this programme offered a bit of everything and I walked away with a smile on my face too.Aurora Orchestra’s five year long project to programme all the Mozart piano concertos was to have reached its final stages with the final three concertos, big boned and magisterial. These have Read more ...
graham.rickson
Released in 1956, J. Lee Thompson’s Yield to the Night is remembered by many for what it isn’t, namely a fictional retelling of the events leading to Ruth Ellis’s execution in 1955. Mike Newell’s Dance with a Stranger told that story in 1985 with Miranda Richardson in the lead role. Thompson’s star, Diana Dors, stated that the film "wasn’t about Ruth Ellis at all. Everybody thinks it was but the script was written two years before she committed the murder.” The screenplay was co-written by Thompson’s wife Joan Henry, a former debutante who had spent eight months in Holloway Prison for fraud. Read more ...