Reviews
Adam Sweeting
And now we faced the final curtain. Spooks responded with an inspired burst of hyperactivity and plots-within-plots, and even a micro-cameo from Matthew Macfadyen as Tom Quinn, the original head of Section D. Up to now this hadn't been the finest of seasons, partly because the death of Richard Armitage's Lucas North at the end of Series 9 left a void which was never successfully filled. Lara Pulver never seemed comfortable as Erin Watts, Section D's new head, because she looked as if she'd been seconded from a modelling agency, while promoting Dimitri (Max Brown) up the batting order merely Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Following a rejuvenating foray back to his one-man-with-a-mike stand-up roots throughout 2009 and 2010, this summer Dave Gorman returned to the Edinburgh Fringe after an eight-year absence to launch Dave Gorman's PowerPoint Presentation. The man who invented the genre of data-heavy, technology-based interactive comedy with Are You Dave Gorman? and Googlewhack Adventure once again found a haven in the Apple Mac and comedy pie chart; could we have been forgiven for thinking that he was playing it just a little safe?Now Gorman is taking the show on tour – and gosh it’s good. Not Read more ...
graham.rickson
This new production, Opera North’s first, sounds fantastic – Tchaikovsky’s lurid colours are brilliantly painted, and the compact dimensions of the Grand Theatre mean that the big orchestral tuttis have a devastating impact. Richard Farnes’s conducting is faultless – this music really swoons, screams and seduces. And despite the occasionally overpowering volume, Farnes never lets his orchestral playing drown out the singers.The piece is given in an excellent, witty English translation – sung with such clarity that the surtitles feel unnecessary. Tchaikovsky adapted and expanded Pushkin's Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The anticipation of Glen Campbell’s valedictory concerts has gone far beyond the goodbye to his music. It’s involved a reflection on his entire life. The sugar-throated cowboy with film-star looks and ballads as epic as daybreak in Arkansas has lived life like a great American novel. One of 12 children of a sharecropper, he went on to play the guitar with The Beach Boys, act with John Wayne, marry four times, and count Ronald Reagan as his friend. But with the onset of Alzheimer’s this is the last time the public will get to see him reflecting on his extraordinary years.Recent interviewers Read more ...
David Nice
Tchaikovsky songs, the most obvious missing link in Olga Borodina's all-Russian programme a couple of Fridays back, formed a spare but unforgettable apex to this second recital in the Barbican's Great Performers series. That in itself, and unusual repertoire - Sviridov the other week, Tchaikovsky's rigorous protégé Taneyev last night - gave the sense of a mini-festival in two concerts. Not forgetting the fact that after Borodina, Amati viola among mezzos, came Hvorostovsky, Guarnerius cello of baritones.Which was almost as far as it went for three-quarters of this much less inflected and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Schumann: Geistervariationen András Schiff (ECM)Hungarian pianist András Schiff has been revisiting some of the core repertoire with which he first made his name. This ECM two-disc set offers a revelatory Schumann recital – this label’s typically dour cover art giving little hint of the vibrancy and colour of Schiff’s playing. Papillons and the Kinderszenen are both performed with unshowy sincerity – Schiff’s lightness of touch in the miniatures which make up Papillons is a delight, and Kinderszenen never sounds clichéd – this is the sweetest, sincerest Träumerai I’ve heard. Schiff also gives Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the end of the first series, we left our bedraggled band of survivors in Atlanta, their expectations dashed that they might be able to find some glimmer of hope at the Center for Disease Control. Instead, all they'd discovered was a lone, slightly deranged scientist who had failed to find a cure for the zombie plague. Then the generators ran out of fuel, fail-safe devices kicked in and the CDC blew up.Back to the drawing board. Sheriff Rick Grimes (an increasingly haggard and stubbly Andrew Lincoln) is now leading his tattered troupe towards the army outpost at Fort Benning, where there Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Turner Prize has headed to the North East. It’ll be back in London next year, thence to Derry for 2013. Tate Britain plan to host the prize biennially, with a regional public gallery presenting it in the years in-between. This must be hailed as good news for those who complain of London-centricity. But as well as gaining new audiences, I do hope the prospect of leaving the capital won’t put others off, for this year the Turner Prize exhibition is looking very good indeed, and for that the Baltic must be commended for doing a fine curatorial job.In fact, I can’t remember the Turner Prize Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Maybe it’s a quirk of night-filming that the minister’s eyes look blood-red. But the earth in the Democratic Republic of Congo is Martian too, especially near the hell-hole where many of the minerals that power our mobile phones and laptops are mined. Danish director Frank Piasecki Poulsen enters that hole, motivated it seems by unusually visceral guilt that, even in liberal Scandinavia, casually used electronic paraphernalia is linked to terrible crimes.As we often half-hear, 5 million people have been killed in the last 15 years of civil war in the DRC; 300,000 women raped. This is death on Read more ...
judith.flanders
It may be that there is no sunnier place than Ashton’s La fille mal gardée. Certainly there is no sunnier ballet. It speaks not of great drama, nor ecstasy, but instead of gentle happiness, of quiet content and loving kindness. Not, one might think, the stuff of great art. But one would be – one is – wrong, and Ashton is happy to set us straight.The standard tale of a girl whose mother wants her to marry a rich simpleton, and how she instead gets her way and marries a simple farmer, is not the point. Ashton takes this and embroiders it with magic – a dash of music hall, a splash of folk Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is a strangely kaleidoscopic approach to documentary. A selection of recently unearthed footage and interviews which shows the Black Power movement in the USA through the eyes of idealistic Swedish film-makers, now re-edited and framed with the voices and music of both modern and veteran black radical cultural figures, it provides a disorienting, shifting set of superimposed viewpoints of a period in which in any case change seemed to be the only certainty.The footage itself is gripping and often truly eye-opening, particularly when it's at its most ordinary. The stories of dramatic Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Time is a rare privilege in a choreographer’s career - in Britain, anyway. We don’t have the equivalents of Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham or Paul Taylor, who build careers into their eighties and beyond, with mighty efforts from private patrons and friendly art giants of their generation (Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Isamu Noguchi et al). UK choreographers are fortunate to get 10 years until the Arts Council deems it time to push them out of the subsidised nest, to vanish in their late thirties, most of them.Hence the interesting anomaly of Richard Alston, who stands out as the senior Read more ...