Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
Prior to their Messiah, due this evening, Stephen Layton’s choir Polyphony brought a version of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio to the seasonal festival at St John’s Smith Square. You can of course slice and serve Bach’s majestic 1730s combination of musical leftovers (both sacred and secular) and fresh dishes in a variety of ways. But Layton’s choice spun a special mood of its own. With the dozen-strong choir supported by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and four luxury-cast soloists, this gig amid the Baroque splendour of St John’s always promised a celebration in high style. Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Wigmore Hall, the high church of Beethoven and Brahms, hosted something less elevated last night: a programme called “Hey for Christmas” presented by vocal ensemble Siglo de Oro and period instrument band Spinacino. The conceit was of recreating a mid-17th century English family’s musical diet through the Christmas season. And it was a whole lot of fun.As director Patrick Allies explained in his witty introduction, the scenario has traditional music as demanded by the older members of the family, while the teenage daughter is into contemporary dance music – and there is also a starchy Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
How do you make a play out of Stalin’s defecting daughter Svetlana, the psycho-economic theories of Daniel Kahneman and a fictionalised version of Derek Black, the son of a leading American white nationalist?Playwright Jonathan Spector, who reveals in a programme note that one of his favourite British dramatists is Tom Stoppard, has had a lot of fun playing in the same dramaturgical sandpit. HIs new play at the Hampstead, This Much I Know, is a sparely staged three-hander, but it cleverly expands to cover all the above ideas and references within the context of the faltering relationship of a Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Reviewing, they say, never gets easier. How can one possibly describe chamber music playing as good, as stupendously memorable, as last night’s all-Brahms programme from Dutch violinist Janine Jansen, English violist Timothy Ridout, Swedish cellist Daniel Blendulf and Russian-born pianist Denis Kozhukhin? (Clue: skip to the end for a three-word version.)Kozhukhin, at the centre of everything, was just fabulous. He really does have some very special qualities indeed to bring to Brahms. First, the listener has the assurance that every possible element of technique is Read more ...
peter.quinn
A flawless song list comprising Richard Rodney Bennett originals plus some of his favourite standards, stunning arrangements by conductor Scott Dunn, plus the mellifluous vocals of Claire Martin magically aligned in my Album of the Year, I Watch You Sleep, an extraordinarily beautiful tribute to Bennett marking the tenth anniversary of his death.It was one of several outstanding vocal jazz releases this year. Returning Weather, a new song cycle from the Dublin-born vocalist and composer, Christine Tobin, presented a fascinating exploration of cultural reconnection. The album’s striking sound- Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Admirers of Hayao Miyazaki will find much to love in The Boy and the Heron, which he has said will be his final feature before retiring from film-making at the age of 82. It’s a beautifully crafted piece of work with all the tropes that admirers of Studio Ghibli have come to love over the years. The film opens with an apocalyptic fire; it’s night, the air raid sirens howl and the skies are filled with flaming fragments. We hear the frantic breathing of a boy, running towards the burning Tokyo hospital where his mother works. It’s 1943, the Pacific War is raging and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As the panto season is in full swing, theatregoers will be expecting to hear some smut. For those who don't like the traditional artform but still like a bit of filth – with songs – then Reuben Kaye's The Butch Is Back will do nicely.It's a storytelling show in a cabaret format as the fabulously dressed Australian comic and singer performs with his six-piece band. He has an extraordinary voice and the songs (arranged by his musical director Shanon D Whitelock, who is on keyboards) – bombastic, full-throated affairs and camp-as-you-like rockers – recount his childhood or act as a soundtrack as Read more ...
James Saynor
You don’t have to be a casting director to know that Britain has a remarkable reservoir of unstarry middle-aged actors who might, just occasionally, get top spot in a movie – Joanna Scanlon in the wondrous After Love (2020) being an excellent example. Now we have Maggie O’Neill, veteran of TV shows like Shameless, Peak Practice and EastEnders, who takes the lead in this equally likeable effort by writer-director Leo Leigh.It’s an ambling, facetious character-piece about hopeless classless numpties going round in circles, a film with surprisingly zero dud notes for a first-time moviemaker. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Back in those halcyon days of 2017, before the pandemic, Marc Almond did a tour of large concert halls, singing songs that had influenced him over the years. Needless to say, there was something of a focus on glam and proto-punk tunes from the likes of Lou Reed and David Bowie – which all seems to have sown the seeds for his latest musical direction.The Loveless are a Garage Rock band which comprise Marc Almond, Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s bequiffed guitarist, Neal X and Iggy Pop’s touring rhythm section of Max Hector and Ben Ellis – with additional help from James Beaumont’s keyboards and a brass Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
What a beautiful, alternative evening of Christmas music this was, ranging in tone from bleakness to transcendence – a thrilling escape from the season’s cloying commercialism to a sense of something both mysterious and profound. Powerful new commissions from Ukrainian composers including Natalia Tsupryk heightened the sense that Christmas is a time to reflect as much on redemption from cruelty and the unknown as on any status-enhancing material possession.Last year the SANSARA vocal collective won universal plaudits for their album The Waiting Sky, which traces the journey from Advent to Read more ...
Alastair Davey
"Beautiful outside, unmissable inside" is the is the new tagline for the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. If the restoration of James Thornhill’s painted hall wasn’t enough to prompt a journey on the Thames Clipper, Paul Cocksedge’s installation, Coalescence might do the trick. Though contemporary critique is nothing new (think of Flora Yukhnovich’s interpretations of the Rococo style), Cockridge uses the hall as a backdrop for 2,500 pieces of anthracite, a high carbon coal, suspended in front of scenes depicting the Hanoverian dynasty. The resulting orb is remarkably striking and though Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
Plays about the theatre tend to go down well with audiences. Why wouldn’t they? The danger is that they become too cosy as actors and audience smugly agree on the transcendence of the artform. Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue comes perilously close to falling into that trap, but, in the end, its wider preoccupations with old age, change, and the perils of the new, make it a rewarding and sometimes even challenging evening.You have to admire Thorne’s versatility. Last week, Stranger Things – The First Shadow opened, for which he contributed to the original story. While that show attempts Read more ...