Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
The fascination of the East has been a constant in classical music’s history, from the jangling sounds of the Janissary bands to Mozart’s Seraglio, Sheherazade’s dreamy tales to Britten’s seductive gamelan. Last night’s Prom gave the East a chance to answer back, setting Nishat Khan’s new Sitar Concerto in dialogue with Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony – a musical portrait of a landscape rather closer to home.Getting us into the mood, Holst’s short tone poem Indra was something of an oddity. Anyone expecting swirling Orientalist fantasy would have been disappointed by the rather anonymous Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
It makes a lot of sense for the National Youth Orchestra to give the first ever free Prom. Both, one assumes, economically but also in terms of ethos and atmosphere. New and tentative concert goers would have had very little cause to be intimidated by the fresh faces on the Albert Hall stage last night. That’s thing about youthful energy – you can’t fake it. The same goes for musical quality, or course, and thankfully the NYO has bags of that too.Vaughan Williams’s Toward the Unknown Region showed off the beautifully rehearsed choirs, making controlled and expressive use of dynamic range Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Gyles Brandreth, Pleasance Courtyard ***This is an agreeable hour of theatre and political anecdotes that former MP and now BBC presenter Gyles Brandreth tells with great aplomb. He drops a lot of names, but he's very good mimic – John Gielgud, Frank Sinatra, Prince Charles and others make an appearance – and the stories (whether wholly true or not) are very funny.Brandreth is an engaging stage presence and he's whip-smart – certainly smart enough to know to make himself the butt of the joke more often than not, and offering us a cheap laugh at the top of the show as he comes on dressed as a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Two new dragons have joined the Dragons’ Den, and it may be even scarier for them than it is for the entrepreneurs. How can pale, uppercrust, celebrity hotel designer Kelly Hoppen possibly match up to our ‘ilary, the trucking queen with the Buzz Lightyear shoulder-pads and the bass-baritone snarl? And how can a faceless cloud-computing bloke supplant Theo, the affable little emperor of high-street bras and waspies? Will we the viewers invest 60 minutes of our precious time in 100 percent of their business?Call me cynical, but my acid test is whether Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse would Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"What do you call a bachelorette party without a bride?" asks maid-of-honour Regan (Kirsten Dunst). "Friday," comes her fellow hen’s deadpan response. In Bachelorette the bridesmaids lose the bride, tear up her dress and get trashed; these are high-school mean girls all grown up and, hey, they're just as mean as ever. Bachelorette is the spunky, spiky, sweary debut of writer-director Leslye Headland and appropriately it feels like a woman's work, albeit a woman proudly in touch with her inner bi-atch.The film begins with Becky (Rebel Wilson, pictured below) announcing that she's getting Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s not a crowd-pleaser like Albert Herring, nor wittily fanciful like A Midsummer Night’s Dream or macabre like The Turn of the Screw and certainly not the classic that Peter Grimes has become, and until three years ago Glyndebourne had never even staged Britten’s Billy Budd. But Michael Grandage’s 2010 production was a sea-changer. Aided by Mark Elder in the pit, the director made his operatic debut with devastating simplicity, reminding us all of the power of this uneasy tragedy. This anniversary year the production returns, and though there are some significant changes among the crew of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Eddie Noack: Psycho – The K-Ark and Allstar Recordings 1962–69Eddie Noack’s 1968 single “Psycho” was virtually unknown until Elvis Costello released his cover version in 1981. By that time, Noack had been dead for three years. After its resurrection “Psycho” was recognised as one of the strangest songs ever. Although musically it is straight, George Jones-styled country, in its lyrics an unrepentant killer describes his actions to his mother – whom he had just killed. There was no redemption, no punishment, no pay off. Just the cold refrain “You think I’m psycho, don’t you mama?”“Psycho”, Read more ...
David Nice
Mahler, who like most of us thought Bach was “the greatest of them all” and studied in depth the edition of his complete works, would have been delighted by last night’s extravaganza – a true celebration of what makes the Proms the much quoted “biggest music festival in the world”. Only two Bach oratorios – cantatas in all but name – could possibly follow, after a sizeable break for supper, the Mahler symphony, his Second, which ends in such a blazing resurrection. It’s disappointing, then, to record that while there was so much to enjoy in both concerts, the expected transportation on angel Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Precious few musicians can instill such a sense of intimacy into their playing as to have us believing that the Royal Albert Hall is the Wigmore Hall and that their performance is for an audience of one and not six thousand. Mitsuko Uchida is among the select few. Indeed there were feats of projection in pianissimo during her performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Mariss Jansons that I’m not sure any other living pianist can achieve in quite the same way. It’s the quality of the soft playing, the limpidity and beauty of the sound Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There are not generally a lot of laughs in dead bodies. So Raymond Chandler saw the funny side of murder, and Carl Hiassen dresses felonies in a bright Hawaiian shirt. But Glasgow, you’d think, would tend to keep corpses and comedy in separate boxes. Not here. Denise Mina’s fiction can keep a straight face when it needs to. Her trilogy of novels set in a hard-boiled Glasgow news room in the early 1980s takes a head-on look at the worst in humanity. But as adapted for BBC One, they’re also a hoot.The Field of Blood made a bit of a splash when it was adapted in 2011. Its sequel has now been Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There had been a buzz of anticipation about this late-night Prom by Nigel Kennedy, the Palestine Strings and his Orchestra of Life, and it was completely sold out. After a long association with Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and 2.4 million sales of the 1989 album, Nigel Kennedy doesn't seek or need either forgiveness or permission to open the doors of this music to other tendencies.“Let's just do it” is the approach he defines in the programme, where he also praises the young players (their ages range from 12 to 23) of the Palestine Strings for the “rich, wholehearted and unique” spirit in which Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Kemosabe, The Lone Ranger is fun. Despite its star and producer blaming American critics for poor box office stateside, this film is Pirates of the Caribbean on horseback - and that's the Pirates franchise before it bloated in 2007.There is a lot of good in The Lone Ranger, starting with Armie Hammer. Perfectly cast as John Reid, he’s the long, tall and handsome lawyer whose rough-hewn brother Dan (James Badge Dale) is the town’s ranger and husband to the gal John loves (Ruth Wilson). Coming upon a strange Native American called Tonto, John puts him in jail, only to meet him again in a Read more ...