London
Thomas Rees
Wayne Shorter and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra – that sounds like a dream pairing. Shorter, now 82, is one of the true greats, a saxophonist and composer with an enchanting and unpredictable approach that makes him instantly recognisable. He had a defining influence on Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet and on Weather Report and, for many, his current quartet represent the pinnacle of modern small group performance. Under the leadership of Wynton Marsalis, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra have come to represent the pinnacle of repertoire big band playing, so this collaborative Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Described by Courtney Pine as "the most exciting jazz band to come out of the UK" and hailed in the press as the new young lions, Empirical broke cover in 2007, topping album of the year charts with their self-titled debut and picking up wins at the prestigious EBU/European Jazz Competition and the Peter Whittingham Jazz Award all within a few months.Originally a five-piece, with Kit Downes on piano and Jay Phelps on trumpet, they settled on their current line-up of bassist Tom Farmer, drummer Shane Forbes, altoist Nathaniel Facey and vibes-player Lewis Wright (a new recruit) in 2008. A trio Read more ...
aleks.sierz
As a subject for drama, theatre history is always popular in the West End. Between Mr Foote’s Other Leg, which has recently closed at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, and Mrs Henderson Presents, which opens soon at the Noël Coward Theatre, comes Nell Gwynn, a West End transfer of the popular show from Shakespeare’s Globe, with Gemma Arterton as the eponymous heroine. But is this rowdy Restoration romp deserving of the lavish praise it has already garnered?The story of Nell, which begins in the 1660s once the anti-theatrical Puritans have been sent packing, is well known. Her rise from orange- Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
"It’s all very well, but you can’t call it a symphony". So said William Walton of Mahler’s Third, all six movements and a hundred minutes of it. Jakub Hrůša conducted the Philharmonia last night on fine if hardly infallible form in a performance notable for its restraint in a work remarkable for the excess which raised Walton’s eyebrow.There is a Czech tradition of Mahler which means something in the Third most of all his symphonies. Not for Kubelík, Neumann or Běhlohlávek the heaped-up schmaltz or knife-edge Modernism of Mahler from further West. Hrůša is eminently worthy of that tradition. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the latter half of the 1980s, Wendy James’s band Transvision Vamp created quite a stir. Their music, including a chart-topping second album, was fizzing, bright-coloured, punky power pop and James was a pouting, hissy-fit of a frontwoman, emanating urgent wannabe-famous sexuality. She disappeared from view in the Nineties, turning up again in the new millennium, first with a band, Racine, and then solo.The second and final Racine album and James’s 2010 solo effort, I Came Here to Blow Minds, boast an unexpectedly effective gnarled, druggy punk. These were followed by a 2012 double A-side Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You might think that the combination of a play about one of the funniest comics of the second half of the 20th century, written by his biographer and directed by a member of Monty Python would be a winning one. But sadly Robert Ross's Jeepers Creepers: Through the Eyes of Marty Feldman is anything but.For younger comedy fans, Feldman might be merely a footnote in history, but his CV was extraordinary. He was a writer, performer and director, his writing credits include Educating Archie, Round the Horne, At Last the 1948 Show and The Frost Report (where he co-wrote the "Class" Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
In recent performances of the First Symphony under Markus Stenz and the Seventh under Jaap van Zweden, the LPO have burnished their credentials as London’s best Beethoven orchestra. With the low-key oversight of Vladimir Jurowski, they took the Sixth to another level, perhaps the level at which the twentysomething tyro Berlioz heard the symphony and said, "I must write that for myself". And with the Symphonie fantastique, he did.So much was unremarkably right. The speeds, just a notch under the composer’s metronome marks, proceeding at a gentle canter with the steadiest of pulses that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Seventh series (★★★★) of the superior legal drama (still perversely tucked away on the obscurantist More4), and Alicia Florrick is having to get back to legal basics. Having been blown up by a political landmine in series six, as she made an ill-fated attempt to become State's Attorney, she's now trying to start her own law firm from home and scuffling for work.Thus she found herself on the cab-rank of hard-bitten bar attorneys down at the bond court, waiting to be lobbed a sheaf of the day's drink-and-drugs cases by the abrasive Judge Schakowsky (Christopher McDonald). Some comic value was Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony, premiered in 1909, is from perhaps the last era in which pieces readily found favour with both critics and audiences alike. It launched Vaughan Williams’s reputation as a major national figure at the age of 38, and has become a favourite of choral societies ever since. But looking beyond its status as a choral warhorse, how does it hold up more than a century after it was written?At the time it was both following a fashion and striking out in a new direction. The first decade of the 20th century saw a number of major works on the theme of the sea, including Read more ...
Russ Coffey
There's something comforting about Turin Brakes and their psychedelic take on Seventies folk-rock. Partly it's their melodies. But there's also an inherent honesty in the duo's tight harmonies and dreamy rhythms. Indeed, once upon a time Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian seemed the future of British acoustic rock. Instead we got the likes of James Morrison and Mumford and Sons. Still, Turin Brakes never went away, and Lost Property, their seventh studio album, is their best for quite a while.The record kicks off with "96" and "Keep Me Around", both of which are marked by an infectiousness Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A year ago, Channel 4 aired Jamie Roberts's documentary Angry, White and Proud, the result of a year Roberts spent getting to know members of far-right splinter groups. Now here's the follow-up, this time the result of two years' research into Islamic extremism in Britain.Amid the mountain of hair-raising material he came away with was the revelation he kept until last (except it had already been trailed fairly heavily, but never mind). This was that the man he'd come to know as Abu Rumaysah, who lived in Walthamstow and used to make a living by renting out bouncy castles for children's Read more ...
theartsdesk
David Nice writes: 2016 began by ringing in the new with concerts by the ever-astonishing National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, and continued by ringing out the old-new with funeral bells on the news of Pierre Boulez’s death at the age of 90. Tributes began pouring in from all quarters, including a very pithy one from an old university friend, whom I remember in the early 1980s playing a very young Simon Rattle’s 1977 recording of The Rite of Spring with the NYO and regaling us with stories of how Boulez turned that interpretation on its head within weeks.Other memorials revealed that Read more ...