Reviews
Britten War Requiem, London Symphony Orchestra, Noseda, Barbican HallMonday, 10 October 2011
Nearly 50 years have passed since Britten’s War Requiem premiered at the consecration of the reconstructed Coventry Cathedral in May 1962. The intervening years have seen British military campaigns in the Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and... Read more... |
Imagine - U2: From the Sky Down, BBC OneMonday, 10 October 2011
Never knowingly under-mythologised, U2 have chosen to mark the 20th anniversary of their album Achtung Baby with this sizeable documentary about the making of the record and the traumatic soul-searching that went into it. It dovetails neatly... Read more... |
Limen/Marguerite & Armand/Requiem, Royal BalletMonday, 10 October 2011
The cool physical activity of McGregor’s Limen, the crimson passions of Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, the symbolic sculpture of MacMillan’s Requiem - the weekend's new triple bill at Covent Garden shows three faces of British ballet-making over... Read more... |
Anri Sala, Serpentine GallerySunday, 09 October 2011
A single snare drum greets you on entry to the Serpentine Gallery; there’s no one playing it, yet in response to an inaudible cue, the drumsticks begin to vibrate autonomously. Meanwhile on a nearby wall, a pair of blue rubber gloves revolves slowly... Read more... |
The Killing of Sister George, Arts TheatreSunday, 09 October 2011
The 1968 film at least has Beryl Reid, who could even have lit up the kind of third-tier Carry On affair Frank Marcus’s flat script often resembles, as well as documentary-value scenes of the famous lesbian Gateways club in Chelsea. Without anything... Read more... |
Wayne Shorter Quartet, BarbicanSunday, 09 October 2011
Wayne Shorter's current band do strange things with time - it seems to stretch and bend like in some subatomic experiment featuring rogue neutrinos. Their nifty time signatures would fuse any computer. The nature of the music itself seems outside... Read more... |
Xerxes, Britten Theatre, Royal College of MusicSaturday, 08 October 2011
“Morning at the airfield: King Xerxes admires the new Spitfire, which he hopes will transform his continental campaign.” If the title – emphatically Xerxes rather than Serse – hadn’t already given the game away, the synopsis for English Touring... Read more... |
Snoop Dogg, O2 ArenaSaturday, 08 October 2011
In the 19 years of his million-selling gangsta-bragging pimp-shizzling hip-hop-rapping career, the man born Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr has gone to some lengths to inform us that his name is, in fact, Snoop Dogg. He has appeared as himself - or... Read more... |
Rostropovich: The Genius of the Cello, BBC FourSaturday, 08 October 2011
How can even a generously proportioned documentary do justice to one of the musical world’s greatest life forces? John Bridcut knows what to do: make sure all your interviewees have a close personal association with your chosen giant in one of his... Read more... |
Grayson Perry: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, British MuseumSaturday, 08 October 2011
You might think that a sharp-talking, cross-dressing potter-artist with a teddy bear obsession would present a challenge to the British public. Not a bit of it. Grayson Perry is music hall, he’s pantomime – there’s even a touch of Brideshead in... Read more... |
Olga Borodina, Dmitri Yefimov, Barbican HallSaturday, 08 October 2011
In Italian opera, where lustrous Verdi mezzos are rare indeed, Olga Borodina tends to a first-the-music-then-the-words approach. In Russian song, the sole focus of last night's Barbican recital until the second encore, her classy, naturally... Read more... |
Katya Kabanova, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 08 October 2011
Katie Mitchell’s production of what many regard as Janáček’s greatest opera began life 10 years ago on the stage of Cardiff’s New Theatre; and there are times in this revival when you feel its director Robin Tebbutt’s yearning to be back in that... Read more... |
