Anyone who’d booked to hear soprano Sally Matthews or to witness the rapid progress of conductor Daniele Rustioni – the initial draw for me – could not have been disappointed in their late-stage replacements. Elizabeth Watts is as much of a national treasure among singers as Matthews, and Jader Bignamini, music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, negotiated his first Barbican concert with absolute mastery.The short curtain-raiser, Camille Pépin’s Les eaux célestes, immediately gave us a BBC Symphony Orchestra on top form, but there was nothing very freshwater here: pretty textures, Read more ...

Ludicrous plotting and a tangled skein of coincidences hold no terrors for the makers of this frequently baffling French drama. Nonetheless, its story of a bizarre cult, a rapacious medical corporation and a trail of dead bodies stretching back through 30 years of history does somehow keep you coming back for more, if only to wonder how much more berserk proceedings can become.The opening scene is set in 1994, where a group of police in combat gear jump out of inflatable dinghies and advance towards a house, from which a man resembling a mashup of Charles Manson and Jesus Christ emerges, Read more ...

Antonio Pappano fervently believes that talking about music is a vital part of his communicative art, and nobody does it better. Given that the London Symphony Orchestra's enterprising Half Six Fix format is scheduled for an hour each time, and that Ravel’s complete Daphnis et Chloé lasts almost that long, there wasn’t going to be much room for pre-performance demonstration yesterday evenng, but what we got still hit the mark.Pappano asked his LSO players to float away with the opening of “Daybreak”, start of the more often heard Second Suite but occurring some 40 minutes into the full ballet Read more ...

The latest blockbuster of 2024 is this disappointing fifth entry in the so-called MonsterVerse franchise, owned by Legendary Pictures. About half of the film contain actors, while half of it is computer-generated – the likely brief future of cinema before AI takes over completely. In the battle for credibility between monsters and actors, the actors here come off decidedly worse.From what I can make out, in reality, the Earth’s large creatures are generally the kind and peaceable ones – whales, elephants, the Jolly Green Giant etc – while the little ’uns like us cause all the trouble. Of Read more ...

A young woman (Laure Calamy; Call my Agent!; Full Time; Her Way) is trying to pluck up the courage to call her father, who she’s tracked down and has never met. Her voice trembles, she can barely speak, she has to hang up. But finally she manages it. This is Stéphane, she murmurs. May I speak to Serge?Written and directed by Sébastien Marnier (Faultless; School’s Out), this thriller has an excellent cast and looks wonderful, although the plot-line is somewhat preposterous and soap-opera-esque. Nevertheless, it’s stylish and gripping, and it’s not until half-way through that we realise that Read more ...

A single pair of swans glided serenely under the bridges of the river Ill as I walked to the premiere of the Opéra National du Rhin’s new production of Lohengrin in Strasbourg on Sunday.It felt like an auspicious omen for Michael Spyres’s first full performance of a major Wagnerian role. Spyres’s initiation comes after the Missouri-born singer’s acclaimed flights across huge tracts of the Baroque, classical and Romantic repertoire – a journey taken on the mighty but sensitive wings of his category-busting, three-octave-wide “baritenor” voice.The packed house in the 1820s theatre (many of them Read more ...

It must be kind of unreal living in the Stereolab universe.A band of geeky introverts, beloved of the type of hairclip-and-satchel indie ultras a friend of mine used to call “the Scooby Gang” for their tendency to resemble Shaggy and Velma, over the past three decades they also became cool enough in fashion and celebrity circles to get multiple mentions in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, and etched into the very fabric of hip hop via fans like The Neptunes, J Dilla, Timbaland and Tyler, The Creator. Laetitia Sadier, one of the two sole continuous members of Stereolab along with Tim Read more ...

To judge by the post-interval empty seats near me, some of the Cadogan Hall audience had turned up last night solely to hear Nikolai Lugansky play Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. Well, the more fool them. For sure they would have enjoyed their not so-brief encounter with a truly distinguished Russian pianist – noble standard-bearer for a grand tradition – who gave a finely-polished, well-shaped rendition of this beloved old story (on the eve of Valentine’s Day, too). However, any early quitters would have missed the generous panoply of French orchestral showpieces gift-wrapped for us by Read more ...

Awarded the best director prize at Cannes last year, Anh Hung Tran has served up cinema’s latest hymn to gastronomy, The Taste of Things. Tasting (and smelling) what’s on the screen is obviously impossible, but even so Tran provides as total a sensory experience as a film can of the religion of haute cuisine and its acolytes. The piece is delicately beautiful on many levels. Visually, it's a panorama of late 19th century genteel country living, in a house with a vast kitchen garden where people uproot celeriac plants and stick them in wooden trugs, lunch al fresco at a madly long table Read more ...

Tatty Macleod, whose debut show is about the differences between the French and the English, has a confession to make: she's not French. She not even half English/half French, despite having lived her life between the two countries. But she's definitely bilingual and, as befits having a foot in both cultures, is well placed to compare her dual countrymen and women.It's a very good premise for Fugue, even if for most of the show Macleod – who first came to prominance on social media – doesn't detain us with anything much deeper than “the English are like this, the French are like that”.But she Read more ...

The original title of this French crime drama was Pax Massilia, a reference to the classical roots of its setting in what is now known as Marseille. Dating back to the 6th Century BC, it’s supposedly the oldest city in France. An atmospheric mix of architectural styles, dramatic views, a Mediterranean climate and multiple ethnicities, it makes the perfect stage for this fast-paced and sometimes horrifically violent thriller.It’s directed by Olivier Marchal, an ex-cop whose CV includes Braquo and 36 Quai des Orfèvres. And while the eternal struggle between police and thieves is hardly the most Read more ...

FRIDAYRennes Airport Parc Expo is about three miles west of the city. It’s vast, consisting of 110,000 metres of cavernous warehouse-like hangars, and has hosted everything from Holiday on Ice to France’s hugest annual agricultural conference. Every December it welcomes Trans Musicales, the 44-year-old French music festival, with performances from around 9.00 PM until dawn.The first act I catch, Twende Pamoja (pictured left), typifies the festival’s laudable attitude to curation. They are a little-known electro-hop hop act whose members are of French, Nigerian, Ugandan and Tanzanian origin, Read more ...