Reviews
Luke Haines, BorderlineWednesday, 31 July 2013
This one-off appearance in a dingy, basement venue seems to be the entirety of Luke Haines’s promotional effort for his new album, Rock and Roll Animals. A few years have passed since he approached mainstream success as front man of The Auteurs and... Read more... |
The HeatWednesday, 31 July 2013
The basic set-up for The Heat is familiar – two mismatched cops are thrown together on a case and have to find a way of working together despite their differences in social background and methods – only in this case the officers are female. Add to... Read more... |
Prom 21: Hope, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, SøndergårdTuesday, 30 July 2013
The “Turning Point” in Colin Matthews’ so-named orchestral piece is a change of attitude, a sudden seriousness of purpose, a great effort of will to stop moving and take stock of where it - whatever it is - is going. That Matthews did actually stop... Read more... |
Swan Lake, Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Opera HouseTuesday, 30 July 2013
Everyone must be wishing the Bolshoi Ballet a swift return to company health after the tragic events of this year, as well as a return to physical health by their horribly injured artistic director - in the circumstances it’s heroic that they have... Read more... |
WOMAD 2013, Charlton Park - Days Three and FourTuesday, 30 July 2013
Arriving early on Saturday, the first music I was exposed to in the tranquil arboretum area of the Radio 3 Stage was the mesmeric and gorgeous sounds of Leicester sitarist Roopa Panesar floating from the stage, with dreamy oboe-like shenhai adding... Read more... |
Caligula with Mary Beard, BBC TwoTuesday, 30 July 2013
Loving the title. Caligula with Mary Beard. Professor Beard has been mentioned adjacently to some rum types of late. Internet trolls. AA Gill. They pale into nothingness, do they not, next to the emperor who mistook his horse for a consul. And his... Read more... |
Paradise: HopeTuesday, 30 July 2013
Ulrich Seidl claims there’s a simple reason he goes easier on young teenager Melanie’s stumble through 21st-century sexual desire and disaster than he did with her mum and aunt in Paradise: Love and Paradise: Faith. Going further with her requited... Read more... |
Prom 20: Götterdämmerung, Staatskapelle Berlin, BarenboimMonday, 29 July 2013
And so Wotan’s ravens flew home and at the twilight’s last gleaming the immortals were consumed by fire and water. All was finally and irrevocably redeemed by the power of love, and the most beautiful of all the leitmotifs in Wagner’s Ring rolled... Read more... |
The Returned, Series Finale, Channel 4Monday, 29 July 2013
It could so easily have been The Walking Dead, where the living endlessly battle an ever-increasing tide of returnees from the beyond. The resurrected in the contemplative Returned weren’t zombies, but actual living people with a desire to pick up... Read more... |
The Mill, Channel 4Monday, 29 July 2013
Does it always have to be so flipping grim up north? In Channel 4's new four-parter, the Mill in question is at Quarry Bank in Cheshire. The date: 1833, during the Industrial Revolution. Villains du jour: the Greg family, industrialists and... Read more... |
Only God ForgivesMonday, 29 July 2013
Introducing his latest film at a preview screening, the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn commented, "If Drive was like taking really good cocaine, Only God Forgives is like taking really good acid." It's an appropriate (and characteristically... Read more... |
Prom 19: Tristan und Isolde, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BychkovSunday, 28 July 2013
Such has been the justifiable flow of superlatives this week about the Berlin Staatskapelle's Ring conducted by Barenboim, the centrepiece of the BBC Proms' Wagner bicentenary celebration, it would have been easy to forget that the 2013 Proms season... Read more... |
