Reviews
Classical CDs Weekly: Honegger, Paul Hillier, LiberaSaturday, 10 December 2011
Honegger: Une cantate de Noël, Pastorale d’été, Symphony No 4 London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, New London Childrens’ Choir/Jurowski (LPO)Arthur Honegger’s best-known work is his short, mechanistic portrayal of a steam engine, Pacific... Read more... |
The Nation's Favourite Bee Gees Song, ITV1Saturday, 10 December 2011
“They’re some of the greatest pop songs ever written,” declares Sir Elton John. He’s right. The Bee Gees – Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb – are responsible for songs that will live forever, songs that are part of successive generation’s cultural... Read more... |
Anne Schwanewilms, Charles Spencer, Wigmore HallFriday, 09 December 2011
Now that Margaret Price is no more and Kiri's well past her heyday, whose is the most limpid soprano of them all? "The beautiful voice" was a label slapped by PR on Renée Fleming, but that fitfully engaging diva is all curdled artifice alongside... Read more... |
Green Gartside and Friends, The VictoriaFriday, 09 December 2011
Clever people often make terrible music. Not always: the best pop is smart as well as direct - but an inability to stop analysing, comparing and explaining is the anathema of the pleasure principle, and encyclopedic knowledge often leads to bone-dry... Read more... |
The Nutcracker, English National Ballet, London ColiseumFriday, 09 December 2011
I don't want to get the blues at The Nutcracker of all ballets. It should be all snow and Christmas, flowers and presents, firelight, moonlight, candlelight and unearthly brilliance. What with the lush magic of the Birmingham Royal Ballet Nutcracker... Read more... |
Haunted Child, Royal Court TheatreFriday, 09 December 2011
Can you replace a wife with a doctrine? Under normal circumstances, the question would be absurd, but given that Joe Penhall’s new play, which opened last night, is the latest of a crop that have explored belief, spirituality and religion, the... Read more... |
Without You, ITV1Friday, 09 December 2011
It's your worst nightmare. Two WPCs appear at your door and inform you that your husband has been killed in a road accident. It doesn't help that the one doing the talking looks like the uglier sister of Macbeth's witches. Then they twist the knife... Read more... |
The Ladykillers, Gielgud TheatreThursday, 08 December 2011
The great Ealing film comedies are often viewed as sacred cows, no matter that a small but significant number of them were decidedly sacrilegious. Indeed, one of the studio’s last productions, Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955), was also... Read more... |
Khatia Buniatishvili, Wigmore Hall/ Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Queen Elizabeth HallThursday, 08 December 2011
Before his slightly over-extended majesty drops behind a cloud at the end of this bicentenary year, and following Louis Lortie’s light-and-shade monodrama on Sunday, Franz Liszt has moved back to left-of-centre in two ambitious midweek concerts. In... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Rennes: 33rd Trans Musicales FestivalThursday, 08 December 2011
Glass crunches underfoot. It’s been raining constantly, but the odour reveals that a fair amount of what's in the cobbled street's central gutter is urine. Everyone appears to be drunk. The French equivalent of crusties aren’t content with one dog-... Read more... |
The Mighty Uke, Hyde Park Picture House, LeedsThursday, 08 December 2011
Recorded music has a lot to answer for. Until its arrival, most people made their own music – at home, using whatever resources were to hand. If you were lucky, you might have owned a piano. The less well-off might have had access to a ukulele. Tony... Read more... |
Pippin, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 08 December 2011
Should the people who made Tron - or for that matter James Cameron - ever decide to take on a Broadway musical, they owe themselves a trip to the Menier Chocolate Factory's ludicrous production of Pippin to find out how not to do it. Just because... Read more... |
