Reviews
igor.toronyilalic
Once upon a time, composers ran Hollywood. As conductor John Wilson reminded us last night, 44-time Oscar nominee and movie composer Alfred Newman became so powerful as second in command at MGM that he had two security guards posted at his office door. Any directors attempting to enquire how the score to their movies was getting along were told to clear off. Big, bold orchestral scores were Hollywood's crown jewels. At the Barbican last night we got a rare chance to inspect them close up. And how they dazzled us.Erich Korngold was up first, the father of Hollywood composition. Wilson, a suave Read more ...
carole.woddis
I suspect there is a different production waiting to be unveiled for Witold Gombrowicz’s 1938 black comedy Ivona, Princess of Burgundia. Under the arches at Waterloo, tucked beside the station down a dark and dank service road is the Network Theatre. Home for half the year to amateur theatre, it also now hosts professionals such as Sturdy Beggars, a fledgling group set up by post-grads from The Poor School drama training space at King’s Cross. A complete surprise to me, the Network Theatre boasts one of the finest pair of red velvet stage curtains you’re likely to see in London, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Few would dispute the supremacy of Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford among the BBC’s current fleet of costume dramas. Measured, domestic and infinitely gentle, there are no Machiavellian footmen or illicit trysts here, just wholesome country adventures championing those unfashionable values of honesty, neighbourliness and hard work. The lamentable histrionics of the recent Upstairs Downstairs could have done well to note these successes, adapting material free from obvious drama (and in the case of Flora Thompson’s autobiographical trilogy, almost entirely without plot) and fashioning from Read more ...
David Nice
Busy, busy, busy tends to have been the watchword of Rudolf Nureyev’s elaborate choreographies. Prokofiev, as the most direct of musical dramatists, demanded streamlining from Sergey Radlov’s complicated scenario in 1935, but Nureyev tends to have jammed extra plotlines back in with un-Shakespearean knobs on. Thank heavens Patricia Ruanne, his Juliet for the initial four-week run back in 1977, and his first Tybalt, Frédéric Jahn, have returned to work so hard on the staging's fiddly bits as to make most of this accomplished revival seem like easy storytelling.Some of it has never served the Read more ...
graham.rickson
A glance at the programme hinted at the identity of the orchestra: you don’t perform Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite and Janáček’s Sinfonietta in the same evening unless you’ve industrial quantities of brass and percussion to spare. This was riveting, transcendent stuff, and the most uplifting evening I’ve spent in a concert hall for years. Plus, the echoing barn of Leeds Town Hall is the ideal size for a 170-piece orchestra, a perfect place to experience Janáček’s hocketing brass fanfares. This was the closing concert of the NYO’s winter tour, and an incredible achievement for an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What better to brighten our morbid January nights than the return of this superior Chicago-based legal drama? The Good Wife has never attracted lurid publicity or been afflicted with cutting-edge trendiness, but instead relies on the somewhat Germanic characteristics of being fastidiously designed and impeccably constructed.Co-creators Robert and Michelle King and executive producers Tony and Ridley Scott have grasped the importance of building the show on pin-sharp writing allied with sympathetic casting, with the result that The Good Wife consistently achieves a seamless balance between Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was always going to come a time when Little Britain had to stop. For a couple of years the heavily milked franchise seemed to be on a tape loop on BBC Three. Its international expansion - to the Greek islands one Christmas, to America for an entire series – suggested that its stars were getting itchy feet. That hankering to grow wings has manifested itself in the form of Come Fly With Me, a spoof docusoap in which Matt Lucas and David Walliams present an entirely new set of grotesques. In last night’s third episode, the gallery was still growing.It’s a risky strategy. When Harry Enfield Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Clichés about the frozen North aside, music from the Nordic countries is often described as redolent of glacial landscapes or icy wastelands. But the music of percussionist Terje Isungset goes further – his instruments are carved from Norwegian ice. Pulled up from the depths, his ice is 600 years old, crystal clear with no imperfections. Ice Music is literally that: music played on ice. Patting bars, hitting blocks and blowing through his ice trumpet, Isungset reflects Norway’s environment like no one else. We may have recently reported on music made by ice-cream vans, but this was music Read more ...
David Nice
Which he filled, as it turned out, with mature aplomb - no tricks, no wild extremes, but plenty of colour, space and that rare knack of finding the right tempo at any point which is the instinctive gift of the born Mozart interpreter. The programme was a mixture of top and (by Mozart's standard) second-drawer works. The earliest, fifth of those perfectly decent violin concertos which loom perhaps too large in the orchestral repertoire, needs an authoritative Mercury among soloists to keep us riveted. Aurora leader Thomas Gould was perhaps a bit too sweet and nice for that. Was it my Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The world of the media offers plenty of opportunities for satire, but the idea of a comedy about sub-editors at first glance seems odd. After all, the sub-editors, or subs, are hardly journalism’s most glamorous beings: these office-bound nerds spend their working days correcting the spellings of journalists and cutting their copy, while penning pun-heavy headlines and writing captions to pictures. Yet, as R J Purdey’s play - which was a sellout hit at this venue last year and now returns for another run - makes clear, there is some comic juice to be squeezed out of the dreams and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For a while back there, Russell Crowe was incapable of a false move. LA Confidential, Gladiator and The Insider all flagged up a thrilling talent for pugnacious individualism. Here was an actor with a bit of dog in him, a street-smart upgrade on Mel Gibson. Then he went and inherited Gibson’s gift for naff headlines. Maybe it’s an Aussie He-Man thing. Either way, the pictures got a bit smaller as tales of the incredible expanding ego did the global rounds. The films that could channel and contain Crowe’s animal aggression stopped happening. Does The Next Three Days spell a redemptive return Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 1994 half a million Rwandan Tutsis were slaughtered over a period of six weeks. Among them were the four brothers and two sisters of Jean-Pierre Sagahutu. His mother was raped before she too was killed. His father, a doctor, was intercepted on the way to the hospital and, when he was unable to pay a fine at a roadblock, was pulled from his car, hit over the head with a blunt hoe and taken to a ditch where his body was dumped. Rwanda, to which three million refugees have returned as the economy has tripled, is known as the great success story of Africa. But as this riveting film suggested, Read more ...