Reviews
Sarah Kent
If Madeleine Gavin’s Beyond Utopia doesn’t make you cry, you’re a hard nut to crack. The film records the fortunes of defectors fleeing North Korea, a hell hole that is more like a prison camp than a country.The phone rings with news that a family of five – an 80-year-old grandmother, her daughter, son-in-law and their two small girls – have crossed the Yalu River and are now trapped in China. They are desperate; if caught, they’ll be returned to North Korea to be tortured and either killed or sent to a concentration camp.The caller is part of the “underground railroad” network that helps Read more ...
David Nice
It’s a given that no finer Rachmaninov interpreter exists than Nikolai Lugansky – a few others may see the works differently, not better – and that Vasily Petrenko has an uncanny affinity with both the swagger and the introspection of Elgar. But just how clearly and deeply both made their understanding felt seemed like an harmonious miracle in the most famous of all Second Piano Concertos and a parallel journey of revitalisation from Petrenko in Elgar’s world-embracing First Symphony.So the theme of this season, “Icons Rediscovered”, was for once supremely apt. Petrenko, after an engaging Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It takes some chutzpah to do a substantial section of a comedy show in 2023 (and touring until mid-2024) that deals with your pandemic woes, but that’s Michael McIntyre for you – he has never been short of confidence. To be fair, it’s the closing section of a solidly constructed performance of his everyman comedy, but runs the risk of being stale for those seeing him at the end of the tour.Macnificent is his first touring show in five years, during which his career as host of various shiny-floor shows – clips of which we see in a pre-show reel – has gone from strength to strength. His latest Read more ...
Robert Beale
For the most adventurous programme in its autumn Saturday series at the Bridgewater Hall, the BBC Philharmonic’s John Storgårds brought two works from his native Finland’s repertoire, and a concerto some distance from the beaten track.Like the Hallé’s concert of mainly new music with Thomas Adès two days before, it did not pull the crowds in, despite a sweetener in the mix, but those who were there were enthusiastic.The sweetener was Sibelius’ tone poem, Pohjola’s Daughter, which, oddly for a repertoire work, seemed to get off to a slightly sticky start. Maria Zachariadou’s haunting cello Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For Finnish composer Osmo Lindeman, the decision to pursue electronic music was made in 1968 during a visit to Poland. He had recently started using graphical notation for the scores of his compositions and was having problems getting conductors and orchestras to follow what he wanted.In Poland, he met composer Andrzej Dobrowolski and visited the Warsaw School of Music’s electronic music studio. He found that Dobrowolski also used graphical notation. With electronic music, Lindeman saw that there no barriers to using any type of score. He had the way forward. He would embrace electronic music Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Derived from the similarly-titled novel by Thomas Mallon and directed by Ron Nyswaner, Fellow Travellers tracks the course of its protagonists through several decades of 20th Century American history. It’s also an account of changing attitudes to homosexuality, and how gay culture emerged from the shadows and went mainstream.Spanning the era from the Joseph McCarthy witch-hunts of the early 1950s to the Aids crisis of the Eighties, the story revolves around the entwined fates of Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer) and Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey, familiar from Bridgerton), who meet when both are Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We’ve all heard of the male gaze, but what about its subversion? Overturning masculine dominance is one of the themes of Boy Parts, the acclaimed debut novel by Eliza Clark, first published in 2020 and now adapted as a monologue for the stage by Gillian Greer.Playing in the main space at the Soho Theatre (currently also expanding into Walthamstow) and co-produced with Metal Rabbit, both great advocates of the capital’s new writing, this psychological thriller features Aimée Kelly and raises some disturbing questions about gender stereotypes and the relationship between art and life.The story Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Atmospherically and musically, the debut album from Lebanon’s Mayssa Jallad swiftly makes its case. It opens with a drifting, elegiac voice singing a wandering melody over a sound-bed including what sounds like a koto and a droning cello. The language employed is Arabic. On the next track, the meditative spell is punctured by the crack of distant gunfire. As it progresses, Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels seamlessly fuses folky introspection, orchestrated drama, crackling electronica and field recordings. Sometimes – again, without any incongruity – within the same song.Marjaa: The Battle of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The stories told by writer-director Carol Morley are poignant reclamation projects that demonstrate empathy for lost or troubled souls but don’t flinch from difficult truths.In the documentary The Alcohol Years (2000), Morley’s subject is her vanished self, a promiscuous, hard-drinking Manchester teenager. The part-dramatised Dreams of a Life (2011) questions why over two years elapsed before the death of Joyce Carol Vincent, a well-liked 38-year-old, was revealed by the discovery of her remains in her bedsit in busy Wood Green. The Falling (2014), inspired by reported events, explores the Read more ...
James Saynor
Are we all getting older, or are film award-winners getting younger? Sofía Otero won the Silver Bear for best lead performance at the Berlin Film Festival this year at the age of just nine. To achieve that, it surely needs to be one of the best moppet turns of all time – and I think it quite possibly is. She plays an eight-year-old boy who doesn’t answer to the name of Aitor even when he’s gone missing and dozens of searchers are yelling it out. This is because Aitor, amid an extended family in the Basque country, wants to go by the name of Cocó – no, make that Lucía, she later decides. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s an old-fashioned feel to the story at its outset: Young woman, guitar in hand, Northern accent announcing as much as it always did, who makes a new life in London, all the money going on a room in Camden. One recalls Georgy Girl or Darling, films that were very much of their time. But it's safe to say that, even if you missed the extensive trigger warnings on the way into the Southwark Playhouse auditorium, a volume of swear words to give a Tory backbencher pause is enough to tell you that this show is very much 2023. Maimuna Memon’s song cycle is a deeply personal story of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Philharmonia’s current season, Let Freedom Ring, celebrates American music through some notably interesting programming. And although last night’s concert was very conventionally structured, with an overture, concerto and big symphony to finish, it was also the chance to hear some repertoire only quite rarely presented.Barber’s Violin Concerto is a personal favourite, a bit of a guilty pleasure as it is undoubtedly Romantically indulgent, and old-fashioned even when it was written. But I’m surprised it’s not heard more often – I’d take it over Bruch or Brahms or Elgar every time. Here Read more ...