London
Tim Cumming
There have been Throbbing Gristle reunions at Tate Modern, and Psychic TV last played in London at the now-demolished Astoria in 2008 – the band in nurse’s uniforms, playing psych garage rock over projections of medical procedures and sex scenes – but it’s a long time since Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was in London.Combining a sort of spoken-word memoir with poetry and a closing Q&A upstairs at the October Gallery as part of its Burroughs centenary exhibition, Can You All Hear Me?, the first half was an hour’s impromptu talk about how Neil Megson became the pandrogyne figure there on the Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
At all of 22, the British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor has already become one of the best-loved solo pianists in the UK, with an international career that spans the globe. A remarkable child prodigy from Southend-on-Sea, he first shot to prominence when he won the piano section of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2004, aged only 11, amazing audiences with the maturity and sensitivity of his musicianship.Now, having completed his studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London, he can boast a recording contract with Decca and a track record that includes – among many Read more ...
Sean Foley
The (pronoun) Walworth (area in South London, near the Elephant and Castle) Farce (a comedy that aims at entertaining the audience through situations that are highly exaggerated, extravagant, and improbable: often incomprehensible plot-wise, they are also characterised by physical comedy, the use of deliberate absurdity, and stylised performances).When Enda Walsh asked me out for a coffee in London last summer, little did I know that 18 months later I would be in Dublin coaxing pratfalls from all manner of Gleesons while having in-depth discussions about dysfunctional families... Or should Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If the idea of the BBC putting together a “Super Rich” season came as a surprise in itself, the fact that wealthy Russians would be appearing in it can’t have shocked anyone, and Rich, Russian and Living in London duly got last night’s opening slot. Apparently “Moscow-on-the-Thames”, or “Londongrad” if you prefer it, has a lasting fascination with television producers that so far continues proportionate with the willingness of its subjects to open up their lives to outside scrutiny.We can only wonder at their motivations for doing so, whether they think it’s the televisual equivalent of a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The octogenarian Frederick Wiseman is a cult documentary film maker, with his own idiosyncratic and recognisable idiom. He has both vast experience and extraordinary independence. Characteristically, he makes long, prize-winning, fly-on-the-wall inside-the-institution films: reportorial, non-judgemental, loosely narrative, and wide in subject – from a hospital for the criminally insane, to a high school, the largest university in California (Berkeley), or the Paris Opera Ballet.The newest, aired (and winning prizes) at international festivals, is an extraordinary view of the National Gallery Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Christmas scoop was the first appearance of the authorial voice, Vanessa Redgrave, playing Jennifer Worth, writing Christmas cards, looking at the photographs of herself with her two midwife friends and plunging us into memory from 2005 to 1959. She tells her husband Philip (Ronald Pickup) with tender affection how different it was, but "once a nurse, always a nurse," he responds. Bookending this episode were her words as she and Philip finished Christmas preparations, that if we are lucky we find love, and even its meaning. Philip then persuades Jennifer to write her memoirs, and the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Unusually, English National Ballet’s Nutcracker finds itself in an empty field this year. Three Decembers ago, the second time out for Wayne Eagling’s production, it had to contend with Matthew Bourne’s version and the Royal Ballet’s, not to mention the fallout from a BBC fly-on-the-wall series that had brutally exposed its difficult conception.Every year since, improvements have been made – some subtle, some significant, all necessary, because having a Nutcracker that broadly satisfies audience expectation is crucial for this company, and not just in terms of box-office Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The magnificent Christ Church Spitalfields is a masterpiece of the British baroque and very much an ideal venue for this Spitalfields Winter Festival visit by French period instrument group Le Concert Spirituel. Travelling as a chamber ten-piece without conductor Hervé Niquet, the group performed a selection of early 18th-century works from across Europe, bringing in Muffat, Purcell, Biber, Zelenka, Charpentier, Corelli and Bach.As cellist Tormod Dalen explained in a short address to the audience, the instruments were faithful to the period, bearing mostly naked gut strings, but with the odd Read more ...
geoff brown
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Greed Tuesday: they all vanished from memory once the first notes of Siglo de Oro’s Christmas-themed concert started. This young British choir, now six years old, began with what’s already become a modern classic, Jan Sandström’s magical setting of Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, where the first staggered entries open like a fan and we drift thereafter in slow-motion bliss. Not for the first time, not for the last, I gave thanks to Spitalfields Music’s Winter Festival for offering balm in a whirling world. In terms of packaging, Patrick Allies’ choir, formed when Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Saxon Court joins the growing list of new plays tackling the economic collapse, and while lacking the creative innovation of work like Clare Duffy’s Money: The Game Show at the Bush or Anders Lustgarten’s If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep at the Royal Court, Daniel Andersen’s salty, astute debut proves a solid addition to the canon.It’s Christmas 2011 and the employees of recruitment-to-recruitment company Saxon Court are itching to trade work for partying. Boss Donna (Debra Baker) struggles to get into the party spirit: her co-founder is in hospital and a drop in Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results, but crashing and burning just as often. Everyone else, like me, or in Kiefer’s case his long-suffering assistant Tony, not to mention poor old Alan Yentob, has to trot along behind, barely able to keep up with the barrage of ideas, questions and orders, let alone judge whether any of it is any good.Early on, Yentob was struggling to keep abreast of Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Arcadi Volodos is a relatively rare visitor to London these days. Although the Russian pianist, 42, rose early to fame, his development has perhaps taken him in a direction that startles those who were initially seduced by the astounding virtuoso transcriptions – many of them his own – in which he initially established his reputation.Anyone hoping for a taste of those at his Royal Festival Hall recital last night had to wait until his third encore. This programme had a very different focus, one that could scarcely have been more intimate and pure-hearted: an early Schubert sonata, Brahms’s Read more ...