Reviews
Guy Oddy
I’ve been a regular attender of the Supersonic Festival for about 15 years and much has changed in that time. When I first rocked up to see Swans, Stinky Wizzleteat, PCM and other sonic treats, the event was a bit of a white boys’ club, both in terms of the artists and the audience, despite being put together and curated by a couple of women.Since then, there has been a major effort to decolonise the line-up and bring in many more explicitly non-Western, female and LGBT+ artists, adding new sounds and textures, while remaining resolutely outside the mainstream. So, it was surprising to Read more ...
David Nice
Is it because the British are wary of national sentiment from a genius that this performance of Má vlast (My Homeland) is the only major London offering in Smetana’s 200th anniversary year? Supple movement, emotional range and unerring climaxes from Kirill Petrenko and his Berlin Phllharmonic might encourage more interest in great operas Libuše and Dalibor (which Jakub Hrůša hopes for in his Royal Opera tenure).Not, alas, in 2024. But let’s celebrate what we did have, a demonstration of why this might be thought of as the world’s greatest orchestra, and why comparisons between Petrenko K and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I live in Brixton, south London; in my street, for many years, a pair of trainers were up in the sky, hanging over the telephone wires. They were there for years, getting more and more soggy, more and more decayed. Urban myth called them a tribute to a dead gangster.There are similar urban legends aplenty in Tife Kusoro’s 75-minute new play, G, which won the George Devine Award last year, and now gets its premiere in the upstairs studio at the Royal Court. Its bare traverse staging features a pair of luminous white trainers hanging above the action. But, unlike the ones in my street, these Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In their lyrical, often intensely moving afternoon concert at the Proms, Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos demonstrated such seamless communication that at points it was tempting to imagine that even their heartbeats were in sync. It’s an obvious statement to say that brilliant music making is as much about listening as playing, yet these three musicians took it to another level, deftly negotiating the Brahms and Beethoven with the elegance of bats finding their way by echolocation.No surprise, perhaps, given that Ma and Ax have known each other since they were teenagers at the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When the first solo album by Tangerines Dream’s Peter Baumann was released in the US in 1977, its promotion was striking. Press advertising (pictured below left) said “he possesses the infinite vision that has made his group one of the most important contributors to mystagogic lore.”Baumann had joined Tangerine Dream — "his group" — in 1971, and left in late 1977. The album in question, Romance ’76, was recorded in Berlin and Munich in July and August 1976 and first issued in the UK by Virgin Records in February 1977.Discussing the album with NME’s Miles before its release, there Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Paradise Is Burning is one of those films that appears to be designed to convince the outside world that Sweden isn’t all IKEA interiors and ABBA sing-alongs. There are blissful long summer days spent in pine forests and plenty of lithe-limbed girls, but the focus here is on a social underclass that Ingmar Bergman rarely filmed.Set in a suburban town near Gothenberg, the movie is the story of three sisters with an absentee mother. Laura (Bianca Delbravo), the oldest at 16, knows that the local authorities will take 12-year-old Mira (Dilvin Asaad) and six-year-old Steffi (Safira Mossberg) into Read more ...
David Nice
If you ever doubted that Bizet’s Carmen, 150 years young next year, is one of the greatest operas of all time, this performance would have changed your mind. Among the four principals only Rihab Chaieb’s utterly convincing, consistent protagonist was the same as on first night 22 performances ago, and as ringleader we had the vivacious conductor of the second run, Anja Bihlmaier.It was Glyndebourne music director Robin Ticciati who launched the latest Glyndebourne Carmen, and Bihlmaier seemed to share much of his fast-moving panache. But she also had her own way with some of the surprising Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Every actor has their own take on what acting means to them, which will include the chance to occupy personalities more interesting than their own, or to shed their inhibitions, or simply the pleasure of ‘play’. A character in Sing Sing, an inmate who has joined the high security prison’s acting group, puts it more profoundly: “We’re here to become human again,” he cries, “to put on nice clothes and dance around and enjoy the things that [are] not in our reality.” This stirringly atypical addition to the prison genre is largely about the power of art to change lives, in this Read more ...
James Saynor
We root for the rootless Outsider in classical western cinema because the places the Outsider fetches up in are scary dumps of the first order – maybe a medieval grub-hole, a Wild West deadfall or some cantina full of aliens that Harrison Ford drops in on.But the dusty badlands where the Eastwoodian protagonist touches down in Black Dog is in the north-west of China in 2008, and this is a Chinese film from director Guan Hu, maker of patriotic action movies like The Eight Hundred (2020). So how far will his new film go in showing a backwater of his modernising country as a bad-ass dead zone? Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After the client has settled on the analyst’s couch, the lights are dimmed. Music sets the mood. A wordless vocal is accompanied by chimes. Cool saxophone breezes in. Sparse piano lines ripple like heat haze. Drums are understated, yet oddly insistent. The atmosphere is mysterious. Increasingly enflamed.Then, a voice begins speaking. It seems incorporeal; neither that of the analyst or the person seeking understanding. There is mention of mood swings which cannot be controlled, of an ancient love coloured by the sands of time. Gradually, as one track bleeds into the next, the speaker Read more ...
David Nice
Namedrop first: it was Charles Mackerras who introduced me to the music of Vítězslava Kaprálová, lending me a CD with her Military Sinfonietta leading the way. It piqued interest, but more as a sense of promise cut short: this abundantly gifted young woman, first female conductor of the Czech Philiharmonic at the age of 22 when she premiered the work, died three years later before fulfilling her genius.Last night’s performance of what might be more accurately called Semi-military Kaleidoscope, though it couldn’t have been finer than in the supple hands of Jakub Hrůša in his second Prom with Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The signs in the Peacock’s foyer warn that this show features "very loud music”. Exactly what Janis Joplin fans want to hear. This is an evening for them, more a concert than a piece of musical theatre.As a gig-musical, it is a five-star belter, with more talent onstage than is decent. Not just the singer who plays Janis, Mary Bridget Davies (Sharon Sexton will cover at some performances) but a trio of backing singers, dubbed the Joplinaires, who are the spit of singers from the glory days of this tribe in every move, sway and sashay. They are also called upon to pay tribute to the musical Read more ...