Reviews
Lucrezia Borgia, English National OperaMonday, 31 January 2011
When future historians write the story of 21st-century film, Mike Figgis will play a founding father-like role. Figgis's Timecode (2000) was one of the world's first and most ambitious digital films. I still remember the excitement the day I... Read more... |
Brighton RockMonday, 31 January 2011
Revisiting Brighton Rock was bound to cause an uproar. A couple of weeks ago, The Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer launched a ferocious assault on Rowan Joffe’s new screen version of Graham Greene's novel, while admitting he hadn’t seen it. Mind you,... Read more... |
Great White Silence with James Cracknell, DiscoveryMonday, 31 January 2011
For a while in the 1990s, the NASDAQ of polar exploration knocked Scott off his plinth and installed Shackleton as Britain’s favourite Antarctic hero. To a modern sensibility, survival seemed a more laudable pursuit than sacrifice. Better a live... Read more... |
The Kingdom, London Symphony Orchestra, Elder, Barbican HallSunday, 30 January 2011
So Starbucks-like is its reach, so tarnished its modern legacy, it's easy to overlook just how brilliant the ideology of Christianity is. How seductively counterintuitive the idea of a God who was not just a man but a bum of a man must have seemed.... Read more... |
Brighton RockSunday, 30 January 2011
Revisiting Brighton Rock was bound to cause uproar. A couple of weeks ago, the Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer launched a ferocious assault on Rowan Joffe’s new screen version of Graham Greene's novel, while admitting he hadn’t seen it. Mind you, he... Read more... |
The Irrepressibles, Gabby Young & Other Animals, BarbicanSunday, 30 January 2011
A midwinter night’s dream at the Barbican. Those who like their pop music performed by chaps with jeans, preferably gazing at their shoes, and are attached to certain ideas of authenticity would have run screaming for the exit. The Irrepressibles... Read more... |
LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival HallSunday, 30 January 2011
It was with Mahler’s Opus 1 – folkloric cantata Das klagende lied – that Vladimir Jurowski so memorably launched his role as the LPO’s principal conductor, and it was to this work that he returned last night. Four years on and he asked his audience... Read more... |
Teddy Thompson, Queen's Hall, EdinburghSunday, 30 January 2011
When the spotlight caught Teddy Thompson in profile last night it seemed to capture the physiology of an old-school country icon: tall and lean, his pale, angular face appeared all the more classically archetypal jutting out from his jet-black... Read more... |
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dudamel, Barbican Hall/ Beethoven Masterclass, LSO St Luke'sSaturday, 29 January 2011
Believe it or not, some critics can't get enough of London's superabundant concert scene. I could hardly be sour about not catching Gustavo Dudamel's first Barbican concert on Thursday night, spellbound as I was by his predecessor at the Los Angeles... Read more... |
Maurizio Pollini, Royal Festival HallSaturday, 29 January 2011
Take one venerated living pianist and one venerated epic of the piano canon and what do you get? Two and a half hours of the most inert pianism imaginable.That there was a human with a pulse performing the first book of Bach's The... Read more... |
The Cherry Orchard, Sovremennik, Noël Coward TheatreFriday, 28 January 2011
Plays these days come not in single spies but in battalions of two, whether you're talking The Master Builder, King Lear or The Cherry Orchard, the last of which closes the visiting Sovremennik Russian theatre troupe's three-play season only to... Read more... |
Christine Brewer, Wigmore HallFriday, 28 January 2011
Christine Brewer singing American song – it’s like Judi Dench in Shakespeare, or an Aaron Sorkin screenplay: it just doesn’t get any better. Forcing the restrained acoustic of the Wigmore to ring as though it were St Paul’s, and persuading a white-... Read more... |
