Reviews
Peter Culshaw
As a generalist (or dilettante) who writes about world, jazz, pop and classical music, I have no doubt that 10 years ago Andreas Scholl was one of the great voices of the planet alongside names like Abida Parveen from Pakistan and Caetano Veloso from Brazil, a vocal Sun King. From an early age he had had success upon success, audiences gave him huge standing ovations, women swooned over him (OK – slightly older women like my mum, who followed him around Europe).And all this singing in a countertenor, castrato, feminine high register. In pop music, of course, this was par for the course; you Read more ...
graham.rickson
Roxanna Panufnik: Tallinn Mass - Dance of Life Patricia Rozario, Jaak Johanson, Tallinn Chamber Orchestra/Mihhail Gerts (Warner)Roxanna Panufnik's Tallinn Mass is an occasional piece, written to celebrate the city's spell as European Capital of Culture in 2011. Panufnik was asked to combine a conventional Latin mass setting with contemporary poems by a pair of leading Estonian poets, their texts inspired by a 15th century painting entitled Dance of Death on display in a Tallinn church. Britten's War Requiem must have been a model, though Panufnik's work is a breezier, less oppressive Read more ...
edward.seckerson
There were, it seemed, enough trumpets to serve Gabriel throughout eternity - and, as fanfares go, this one was stretching a point and then some. LSO On Track had commissioned it from Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and, true to the spirit of this enterprise seeking to field young musicians of mixed abilities alongside players from the London Symphony Orchestra, Fanfare: Her Majesty’s Welcome commandeered its battalions of extra wind from the nearby Guildhall School and gave “Her Majesty”, and us, an earful - the kind of public racket that would easily be heard all the way over in Buckingham Palace Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Two years, nearly to the day, since its first London outing, Ivan Putrov’s all-male ballet showcase, Men in Motion, is back in town. Does the damning of that 2012 première as too slight still sting Putrov? Men in Motion III seems designed to forestall any such criticism, with an ambitious programme spanning two hours, 11 dancers, and 14 pieces from the last 100 years of choreography.How to sum up this sort of sprawling mixed bill? I’d love to make one of those imaginary Tube maps that are all the rage nowadays. There would be a line for Hot Germans, and another for Nijinsky Classics ( Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Young Irish actress and comic Aisling Bea made a tremendous debut with C'est la Bea at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, where she was deservedly nominated for best newcomer in the Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Awards. Now she is performing a short run at the Soho Theatre and, on second view, it's still a joyously funny show.You may know Bea from various acting roles (The Town, Dead Boss) but you will surely be seeing her on your screens a lot more from now on, as she's an accomplished actress (a Rada graduate), here using a range of accents and even throwing in an impersonation of Sir David Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Handel’s “little opera”, as he called Acis and Galatea when he was composing it in 1718, probably survived while his true, full-length operas vanished from sight precisely because it was little, compact and manageable, like Purcell’s Dido or Pergolesi’s Serva padrona. But little isn’t the same as easy; and these days a production like the one with which Mid Wales Opera is celebrating its 25th anniversary can find itself asking more questions than it can readily answerOn the face of it it’s an utterly competent, workable, musicianly show, perfectly adapted to the touring that is MWO’s chief Read more ...
Simon Munk
You are staring at your computer screen; you are literally you. And now, through the wonder of modern technology, you can jump into the mind of, and take over, the security head of a near-future corporation's flying fortress. You control his speech, movements, decisions. That's how Consortium starts.You jump into Bishop 6's head just as he wakes up for his first shift on the Zenlil plane/fortress of the global Consortium security force. The game uses Bishop 6's status as new kid, and your status as new kid inside Bishop 6, to toy with you throughout.Other staff onboard regularly ask you Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The programme blurb says: “Dan Snow looks back at 90 years of the Winter Olympics and shows how the political upheaval of the 20th and 21st centuries has impacted on the Games". Instead we got a mish-mash of archive clips, a potted history of the Games, a nod to some of the politics surrounding them, and a tale of how one chap's derring-do impacted on them.The programme went all over the place – as did Snow, who travelled to several countries, most of them unnecessarily, to tell his story. The rugged historian, an amenable presenter, was, as ever, keen to show his action-man credentials by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The annual reappearance of The Good Wife is always a cause for celebration. Why they persistently park it in the twilight zone of More4 remains one of the enduring mysteries of our era, since it's one of the best shows on TV, but the only question that need concern us is: will season five be as good as the ones that came before? On the evidence of this opener, yes indeed, so much so that American critics have been hailing it as the best ever,Change is in the air at Chicago's upmarket law firm Lockhart Gardner. Not only does Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) have to be mindful of her new Read more ...
David Benedict
“Mind that door.” With the hurricane howling outside it’s no wonder the locals gathered in Auntie’s pub are yelling... but there is no door. Instead, a stage-wide sheet of corrugated iron rears up to let in Stuart Skelton’s storm-tossed Peter Grimes. Enlarging naturalistic, close-up detail into full-blooded, expressionist drama is typical of this frankly electrifying revival of David Alden’s revelatory production of Britten’s masterpiece. The fusion of sound and stage action in the very first moment makes it immediately clear that this production is operatic in the best sense. With the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At first the machines are in control. A crane drags the inert body of a woman across the floor, lifts her up and leaves her dangling from the waist. A man follows, dragged by one foot and suspended upside down. The two bodies rise and fall or swing round in a duet horribly reminiscent of carcasses hanging in an abattoir.French choreographer, Boris Charmatz is obviously not out to please us with a light hearted evening of frivolity. The mood lightens a bit, though, when the crane lowers its cargo onto a giant conveyor belt that gives the dancers a bumpy ride as it bounces up and down with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Lance Armstrong is a Hollywood villain who just happens to be real. He bullies, lies, manipulates, cheats and destroys lives until righteous crusaders hunt him down and drive a stake through his heart. And that, more or less, will be the plot of the movie Stephen Frears is working on now. Popcorn munchers demand nothing less than a comeuppance for the bad guy. To cite Oscar Wilde, the good end happily, the bad unhappily: that’s what fiction means. It’s not quite what happens in The Armstrong Lie.Alex Gibney, who has made uncompromising films about Enron and WikiLeaks, was the ideal director Read more ...