Reviews
igor.toronyilalic
Word was that four strings had broken in rehearsals. One had snapped only half an hour before the start of last night's Liszt-fest at the Barbican. It meant one of two things: either pianist Evgeny Kissin had finally switched off the safety-first autopilot that some had worried had taken hold of this former child prodigy. Or we had a dodgy piano. Thankfully, it was the former. The Russian was a transformed pianist in these transformative works. He had flicked the switch from autopilot to shaman. But before we got to the epic, David Copperfield-like acts of magic of the second half - Read more ...
graeme.thomson
When it comes to the Seven Ages of popular music we are now well into the post-retro era. In 2011 every artist is a magpie and every song sails out beneath a pirate flag, greedily plundering where it pleases. When everything that has gone before is up for grabs, it’s now simply a question of how you want your yesterdays delivered: rare, medium or well done?Imelda May might reheat the past but at least she serves it up red hot. A performer since her early teens, her career has crept forward by increments. Now in her mid-thirties, May's third album Mayhem, released late last year, has provided Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have come a long way from Spaced, the Channel 4 sitcom Pegg created with Jessica Hynes (then Stevenson). When it was canned after two series in 1999 and 2001, Spaced - a very funny and edgy comedy about a group of assorted idlers and oddballs - assumed cult status; now More4 are unashamedly cashing in on Pegg and Frost’s Hollywood debut, PAUL, by repeating Spaced on Sunday nights, which is good news all round.PAUL is Pegg and Frost’s third movie collaboration after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, both entertaining, feel-good bromances that spoofed zombie movies and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
@Wossy seems to have been cast as second baddie in #PiratesduCaribbean 4This intro is entirely about namechecking the films so they can cut away to the US stars who've jetted in from #TinseltownLame string of Little Fockers jokes.These clips montages always make films look like the complete Shakespeare. Then you go and see them...@Wossy seems to have been cast as second baddie in #PiratesduCaribbean 4This intro is entirely about namechecking the films so they can cut away to the US stars who've jetted in from #TinseltownLame string of Little Fockers jokes.These clips montages always make Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Those WNO regulars who remember the company’s last Fledermaus (directed nine years ago by Calixto Bieito) with a shiver of horror can rest assured that its replacement contradicts it at almost every point. John Copley, past-master of Texttreue (truth to the text, or at least its spirit), does not rummage around in Strauss’s frothy masterpiece for a critique of modern man, does not transplant it to Merthyr Tydfil or turn it into a rugger-club knees-up, does not coarsen the text or doublecross the music.Instead, he accepts it as it is: a middle-class fantasy of the high life with Vienna as its Read more ...
David Nice
Metcentric New Yorkers tend to think an opera hasn’t achieved classic status until it arrives at their vast inner sanctum. Whereas other cities worldwide know that the inimitable Peter Sellars production of grand opera’s last masterpiece (to date) has become a virtual brand since its 1987 Houston premiere. John Adams's first, and biggest, opera was an obvious here-to-stay triumph at the Edinburgh Festival the following year, and its strengths become more apparent with the passing of time. What we celebrated last night was the way this hallucinatory musical meditation around 1972's East-meets- Read more ...
joe.muggs
Avant-garde art, by its very nature, always treads a fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous, and between entertainment and alienation. Thankfully this is something understood very well by the joint curators of Friday night's show at the Vortex Jazz Club: Baron Mordant of the Mordant Music record label and Jonny Mugwump of the Exotic Pylon website and radio show. As the names perhaps suggest, these are people versed in the potential deep silliness of what they do, even as they take it very seriously indeed – and their event certainly ranged far and wide between the weird, the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Something of a bad boy in the Baroque world, Philip Pickett can generally be relied on to provoke discussion. Whether it’s by teaming up with one of Rolling Stone magazine’s Greatest Guitarists of All Time, or restaging Purcell’s The Fairy Queen with tumblers, jugglers and an excess of hand luggage, there’s always an angle. While collaborators, contexts and repertoire may change, what you can generally set your watch by is the quality of the musicianship – which made last night’s concert all the more of a puzzle.The Fairy Queen is something of an awkward work. Classed generally as a semi- Read more ...
David Nice
Never envy a relatively new voice in music his or her place in a concert shared with Sibelius. Invariably the economical Finnish master will triumph with his ideas and how he streams them in a forward-moving adventure. You sit staring at all the percussion Sibelius never needs, and wonder whether the newcomer will engage it more imaginatively than most of his peers. Which fortunately turned out to be the case with Detlev Glanert's 15-year-old Music for Violin and Orchestra, fearlessly taken on by one of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's two world-class leaders, Stephen Bryant. But given Principal Read more ...
fisun.guner
After writing about a recent survey of French artist Philippe Parreno at the Serpentine Gallery last year, I found myself wondering about his collaboration with the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon. In 2006 the two artists made the acclaimed film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, and while Parreno’s skills as a film-maker were pretty evident from that first UK solo exhibition, Gordon’s talents must surely lie elsewhere - that is, outside the frame. Neither technically ambitious nor visually seductive, his films are not even meant to be seen in their entirety, certainly not his 1993 24-hour Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Yes, the Sky 1 drama department is trying to elbow some room on the national sofa and their policy with Mad Dogs is to cast it to the very hilt. Thus John Simm, Philip Glenister, Max Beesley and Marc Warren, playing four old lags who’ve sort of lost touch over the years, board a plane for Spain, summoned for a nostalgic bunfight by another compadre. Like all gentlemen of a certain age let off the leash to play, they were full of cock-of-the-walk swagger as they marched out of the airport in shades, wielding the videocams they’d been given for the trip. However, you knew it was all going up Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“The problem is that you’ve been told and not told.” While Ishiguro and his discerning fans would never indulge in anything so crass as hype, there have been whisperings in North London wine bars, over the coffee-morning brews of Home Counties ladies, on terraces of rented villas on the Amalfi Coast. Yes, Never Let Me Go is the one about human cloning, whose characters are living organ farms, existing solely for harvest. It is neither a twist nor a secret (and to treat it as such is to misunderstand Ishiguro’s withholding narrative), so when director Mark Romanek lays it out on the (operating Read more ...