Reviews
Messiah at the Foundling Hospital, BBC TwoSunday, 20 April 2014
The last time the BBC dramatised the creation of a great musical work, it didn’t quite hit the spot. Eroica starred Ian Hart as Beethoven glowering at the heart of a drama which had rather less of a narrative through-line than the symphony it... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: John TavenerSunday, 20 April 2014
John Tavener: The Protecting VeilIn its tribute to John Tavener which followed his death last November, theartsdesk acknowledged the difficulties his devotional music brought. David Nice asked “what was there here that I couldn’t get from a... Read more... |
The Love PunchSaturday, 19 April 2014
Even Emma Thompson's finely honed deadpan delivery can go only so far in The Love Punch, a caper movie (remember those?) that moves from the implausible to the preposterous before sputtering to a dead halt. A revenge comedy nominally steeped in a... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Britten, Poulenc, Peter WhelanSaturday, 19 April 2014
Britten to America – music for radio and theatre Hallé/Sir Mark Elder, Ex Cathedra/Jeffrey Skidmore Samuel West (narrator) (NMC)The official catalogue of Britten’s music currently runs to 1183 pieces – so, besides the 95 works with opus... Read more... |
Christy Moore, Royal Festival HallFriday, 18 April 2014
“You’re great listeners. You have surrendered your ears.” The reverent hush that descended for two hours on the Festival Hall is a new sort of sound at a Christy Moore concert. There was a time when such a gathering would bristle with fervour.... Read more... |
A View From the Bridge, Young VicFriday, 18 April 2014
What is it with the London theatre and this particular Arthur Miller play? In 1987, Michael Gambon reached a career-best peak playing the Italian-American longshoreman, Eddie Carbone, in a defining National Theatre revival of A View From the Bridge... Read more... |
Noir SyndromeFriday, 18 April 2014
Noir Syndrome is a procedural detective game. That's to say procedurally-generated rather than a police procedural - the game is designed to create a random mystery for you to solve with each new game, and puts you in the worn-out shoes of a down-at... Read more... |
Festival of the Spoken Nerd, UdderbellyFriday, 18 April 2014
Science has fallen in love with comedy – or maybe that should be the other way round. Whichever, geek is now chic, and being in possession of a brain is something to be laughed with, rather than at. All of which explains the popularity of Radio 4's... Read more... |
Magic MagicFriday, 18 April 2014
If Crystal Fairy is about "the birth of compassion in someone’s life”, as director Sebastián Silva explained when it premiered at Sundance last year, then Magic Magic (which he shot at the same time) can be seen as a companion piece of sorts. It’s... Read more... |
Relative Values, Harold Pinter TheatreFriday, 18 April 2014
Plotted on the Nunn Curve of Fatal Attraction to Flare Path, Sir Trevor’s latest West End outing – Noël Coward’s post-war comedy Relative Values – lands solidly in the upper-middle reaches. Why not the unqualified upper? The stock answer here would... Read more... |
Deutsche Börse Prize 2014, Photographers' GalleryThursday, 17 April 2014
Not so long ago, photographers were rejoicing in the freedom the digital revolution seemed to bring; unencumbered by the limitations of film, paper and darkroom practice, photography was suddenly liberated from the niggling pedantry of material... Read more... |
Uchida, LPO, Jurowski, RFHThursday, 17 April 2014
Vladimir Jurowski is a master of the through-composed programme. Yet at first this looked like a more standard format: explosive contemporary work (if 1966 can still be called “contemporary”) followed by popular concerto and symphony. On reflection... Read more... |
