Reviews
Sánchez, National Symphony Orchestra, Martín, National Concert Hall, Dublin review - Spanish panache
David Nice
Ravel’s Boléro, however well you think you know it, usually wows in concert with its disconcerting mix of sensuality, fun and violence. Context can make it even more powerful: in this case as the culmination of NSO Chief Conductor Jaime Martín’s brilliantly programmed Spanish fiesta, a cool and even customer at first after chameleonic Chabrier and fidgety-brilliant, fluid Falla.The special guest was well known to many Dubliners. During lockdown, the orchestra’s programming of Falla’s El amor brujo (Love the Magician) came up against the 14-day quarantine rule for visiting musicians. Seville- Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At the turn of the 20th century, London’s smart set queued up to get their portraits painted by American-born artist John Singer Sargent. Sitting for him was a performance, a way to show the world just how rich, glamorous, clever or important you were. And everything – from the pose to the hair, jewellery and clothing – was stage-managed to create the best impression.At Tate Britain, the brilliance of Sargent’s showmanship is on display from the start in his 1907 portrait of Lady Sassoon, who stands decked in an opera cape. Beside the painting is the garment itself, a gorgeous confection that Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s not often one comes out of a concert of mainly new works with a spring in one’s step. A sigh of relief is rather more usual. But this concert on Thursday by the Welsh new music ensemble Uproar was an exception, partly but by no means exclusively because of the brilliant performance of John Adams’s invigorating, even appropriately uproarious Son of Chamber Symphony with which it ended.Michael Rafferty, Uproar’s founder and conductor, had keyed the programme backwards from the 17-year-old Adams piece, naming the concert after it and commissioning three new works for roughly the same 17- Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Is there a healthier sound than that of laughter ringing round a theatre? There are plenty of opportunities to test that theory in Tinuke Craig’s riotous revival of The Big Life, two decades on from its first run at this very venue. Much has changed in that time, specifically the coming to light of the appalling mistreatment of the Windrush Generation at the hands of a callous, racist state. What might have felt then like an unnecessarily heavy-handed political undertow now feels, if anything, underplayed. If that’s the grit in the oyster, the substance of this feelgood musical is a Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
An opera about a day in the life of Karl Marx doesn’t exactly sound like a barrel of laughs. But then so much of Jonathan Dove’s witty 2018 work proves that things are not always what they seem, whether that’s through Dove’s jaunty score-writing, Charles Hart’s ingenious libretto or Jürgen Weber’s drolly imagined scenario.The setting is 41 Maitland Park Road, London, where Marx moved to in 1875 with his wife and one of his daughters, and where he would spend the remainder of his life. The opera follows Marx and his family over a course of 24 hours on a summer’s day, which sees various Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In 2017, two years after Hir premiered, Taylor Mac was awarded a “Genius Grant” and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for drama. The new production of Hir at the Park demonstrates why. It’s a rich, provocative piece about the ideas that drive us now, thrown into a blender and blitzed.Mac is a Swiss Army knife of a creative force: performer, singer/songwriter, writer, performance artist, director, producer. His preferred pronouns are judy/judy’s – not a reference, he has insisted, to Judy Garland but to the custom of gay men to disguise their boyfriends by calling them Judy or Mary. (That said, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is given a new lease on life in Mexican director Michel Franco’s moving, complex film, full of fine performances.Saul (a wonderful Peter Sarsgaard), who has early-onset dementia, plays the song constantly. It’s a kind of comfort blanket for him and his fading memory gives those loopy lyrics a new significance.The film starts with a slightly confounding, busy scene in which Sylvia (an unadorned Jessica Chastain), a care worker in an adult day centre, attends an AA meeting in a Brooklyn church with her teenage daughter Anna (an impressive Brooke Timber, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You do not need to be Einstein to feel it. If the only dimension missing is time, 75% of a place’s identity can invade your very being, hollow you out, replace your soul with a void. It happened to me at Auschwitz and it’s happening to Samuel at Cape Coast Castle, Ghana.Not at first. We meet him as our host, full of bonhomie, not just reading his script, but revelling in communicating his love of history to the tourists who come to the last staging post for slaves before the dreadful Middle Passage to the Americas. Disillusion sets in. Some visitors are ticking off a bucket list, others Read more ...
Mert Dilek
Less than three years after her magnificent Macbeth, Yaël Farber returns to the Almeida with another Shakespeare tragedy. Her take on King Lear (main picture) offers a full-bodied, slow-burn version of this devastating drama, where Danny Sapani’s masterful performance as Lear sears the stage.While bringing a modern-dress aesthetic to Shakespeare’s play, Farber’s production sets great store by a poetic minimalism that foregrounds the expressive powers of her outstanding cast. On a stage surrounded by a string curtain and occasionally featuring only a few chairs, a piano, and a metal globe Read more ...
Bill Bailey: Thoughtifier, Brighton Centre review - offbeat adventures with a whirling, erudite mind
Thomas H. Green
I first saw Bill Bailey at least 30 years ago in the cabaret tent at Glastonbury Festival, the audience lying on hessian matting, a fug of hash smoke in the air. He seemed one of us, a bug-eyed, Tolkien-prog hippy with a stoned sense of humour and charged musical chops. A lot of water under the bridge since then. Animal rights champion. Won Strictly Come Dancing. Mellow middle-of-the road chat-show regular. Cuddly national treasure status approaching. Even recently told The Guardian he’d forgiven Bryan Adams his multiple musical atrocities. No way, dude. No way. And yet, and yet… at 59-years- Read more ...
Mert Dilek
Doom and gloom, we are told, may have abounded in the classical underworld, but Hadestown suggests otherwise. Returning to London five years after its run at the National Theatre, this time with a slew of Tony Awards, this bracing musical proves its mettle as a heart-warming and atmospheric feast of deeply soulful tunes.With music, lyrics, and book by American singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, Hadestown reimagines familiar tales from mythology through exquisite songs and eloquent stagecraft. The story centres on the tragic romance between the bard Orpheus and Eurydice, as king Hades and Read more ...
Jon Turney
Consider a chimp peeling a stick which it will poke into a termite nest. It strikes us as a human gesture. Our primate cousin is fashioning a tool. Just as important, the peeled stick implies a narrative. Chimp is hungry, will deploy this neat aid to catch termites that lie beyond normal reach, and eat them.The example comes from historian of technology David Nye, but makes a point that recurs throughout Tom Chatfield’s excellent book. Any technology is part of a story. That holds for the chimp, whose story is implicit. It remains true in the high-tech 21st century, when the commercial for Read more ...