Reviews
David Nice
To create a sensitive and original music-drama around the subject of a school killing is a colossal achievement. Director Simon Stone, set designer Chloe Lamford and novelist Sofi Oksanen’s cutting libretto make Innocence seem like a masterpiece. I wish I were less ambivalent about Kaija Saariaho’s score.More trenchant than her previous tapestries of bewitching sounds, it's both superbly conducted by Susanna Mälkki and played with absolute assurance by the Royal Opera Orchestra. From the start, bassoons define writhing ideas of the kind we haven’t often encountered in her music before, other Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It might be nigh on six months since Scandinavian shamen (and women) Goat released their latest opus, Oh Death, but it has taken until now for them to finally bring their energetic live show back to the UK. On Sunday’s evidence, it is a wait that now feels like a small price to pay though, as Brummies young and old blew their minds and danced their socks off to intoxicating sounds that provoked a seriously ecstatic response.Before Goatman and his hoards had even hit the stage, the Mill was a packed space of human soup that contained more dry ice within its atmosphere than even the Sisters of Read more ...
mark.kidel
The fire which engulfed Grenfell Tower in London’s North Kensington on 14 June, 2017, with a death toll of 72, is still under investigation. The dead were largely recent immigrants to the UK. The tragedy, it’s clear now, was caused by an unholy mixture of neglect, racism, greed and corruption. There’s been much shameful denial and buck-passing, and the issues around the building’s shockingly inadequate cladding haven’t led to much action elsewhere.Steve McQueen’s film, now showing in a continuous programme at the Serpentine Gallery, addresses these issues with a mixture of anger and Read more ...
India Lewis
Lydia Sandgren’s debut novel, Collected Works, a bestseller in her native Sweden, has now been translated by Agnes Broomé into English, in all its 733-page glory. An epic family saga, it has flavours of the realism of her countryman, Karl Ove Knaussgard, more than a hint of emotional American big hitters like Jeffrey Eugenides or Jonathan Franzen, and something of the twists and turns of a chronicle like War and Peace.The novel begins with Martin Berg, a Gothenburg publisher, enigmatic and adrift in a sea of papers. We then cut to his daily life at an unknown point in time, from which the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Emmanuel Sonubi burst on the scene at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, where he was nominated in the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Awards, and has since appeared on the BBC's Live at the Apollo and supported Jason Manford on tour. It's easy to see why he's broken through; the north Londoner is an instantly engaging presence on stage, with a cheeky conversational style that draws the audience in.He is now touring that nominated show, Emancipated. Its title appears to have little to do with the (at times scattergun) everyday material about parenting, being humiliated by a teaching assistant, Read more ...
David Nice
What a manifesto against those in power who seem determined to knock the UK off its hard-won classical music pedestal: hundreds of young choristers and instrumentalists of two fabulous orchestras in a week-long celebration of innovative programming and presentation. Any politician attending – I’d like to think there were a few, but I doubt it - would have been fired up to devote every effort in support of British youth and musicSorry not to have got to Wednesday night’s Albert Hall celebration of the National Youth Choir’s 40th anniversary, or Friday’s Edinburgh spectacular from the National Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dracula’s fly-eating henchman Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) seeks solace in a self-help group from his co-dependent, fanged boss (Nicolas Cage), in a comic horror action flick which posits the pair as a vampiric Steptoe and Son – though that relationship was more genuinely nightmarish.The Dark Universe Universal hoped to create around its classic 1930s monsters crashed with the redundant medieval origin story Dracula Untold (2014) and braindead Tom Cruise vehicle The Mummy (2017), but standalone hit The Invisible Man (2020) – ditching H.G. Wells for an Elisabeth Moss domestic abuse Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In today’s Britain, too many concert reviews have to begin with the vandalistic threats of damage or extinction that hang over their performers. Last week, it emerged that the BBC’s bosses may be open to negotiate an alternative future for its Symphony Orchestra that does not involve 20 per cuts in the personnel.We shall see: what’s beyond doubt is that Saturday’s programme at the Barbican saw a full-strength BBCSO, under their stalwart champion Sakari Oramo, display an exhilarating level of prowess and flair in every department. Others can, and will, ask why Britain’s national institutions Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Promises attracted a lot of attention upon its 2020 release. The album brought together UK electronica artist Floating Points, The London Symphony Orchestra and storied US jazz individualist Pharoah Sanders, who died in September 2022. It became his last album. Promises – composed by Sam Sheperd in his Floating Points guise – cannot though have been conceived to be as high profile as it became.In contrast, back in February 1978 Sanders’s Love Will Find A Way album was an explicit brush with the idea that audiences beyond his usual constituency might pick up on him. It was issued by mainstream Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
One can only admire the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland for its steadfast indifference to the laws of box office gravity. A little known contemporary guitar concerto allied to a relatively unpopular Mahler symphony would be a hard sell even in an Edinburgh Festival context. On a distinctly chilly April evening in Edinburgh, it fell to a small but vocal audience of camp followers to make up for the disappointing rows of empty seats in the admittedly cavernous Usher Hall. The evening had a slightly unusual format. At 80 minutes, Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is long enough to stand alone Read more ...
David Nice
Dream versus reality, fate and free will, love and death, nature versus nurture: they’re all here in Calderón de la Barca’ s ever-startling baroque panopticon, a play so precociously meta that every theatrical game from Pirandello onwards deserves the epithet “Calderonian”. Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod heighten the Spaniard's play-within-a-play quality by framing it as the fantasy of half-awake, stargazing ruler Basilio, bringing long-term experience to provide an extra layer of roller-coaster ride between farce and potential tragedy.Back in 1999, a then not so world-famous Calixto Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
In the centre of a Venn diagram linking climate change to the mystic landscape of Dartmoor and the West Country, sits this tightly conceived show about "green" witchcraft in contemporary art. Witches were once very common in this part of the world; the last witch to be executed in Britain was from Exeter. The local museum has invited a selection of artists to contemplate this local history and the result has brought the dark arts into the light of a 21st-century space for art.Of the four artists who have been invited to engage with the collection at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Read more ...