Reviews
Sebastian Scotney
It was not until October 2017 that The New York Times ran a front page story by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey with the title “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harrassment Accusers for Decades.”A few days later, the board of the Weinstein Company, including the crucial vote of his younger brother Bob, ejected him. And from then on, the prosecution started to put together the case against Weinstein, which, after over a hundred women had testified against him, resulted in his conviction and imprisonment in February 2020.But could the tide have turned against him many years earlier? Why didn’t it Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
“We love you, Neil!” came the shout from the back of the circle. “Well, you’d have to,” he replied. Five nights, ten albums, 113 songs and 30-plus years of releases: The Divine Comedy’s residency at the Barbican was an opportunity to savour the artistry of Neil Hannon, as his creative life unfolded in fast forward for our pleasure.He began the first concert saying – and acting like – he was worried it was all a grand folly and he was about to fall flat on his face. In fact, the opposite was the case. First – and no mean achievement – Hannon filled the Barbican for all five nights, both with Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Jane Campion’s enigmatic, triple-Oscar-winning film looks as beautiful as it did when it was released almost 30 years ago. Holly Hunter (you can’t help thinking she’s been underused ever since, give or take her performance in Campion’s Top of the Lake) is magnificent as the black-haired Ada, a mysteriously mute Scot who is sold by her father to frontiersman Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill) and joins him as his wife in the wilderness of 19th-century New Zealand.Ada brings her daughter and sign-language interpreter, Flora, the marvellous 11-year-old Anna Paquin, with her, as well as the precious Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In more ways than one, Beethoven’s last piano sonatas can make the listener lose track of time. It’s not just the delirious freedom with rhythm, accents, signatures and note-values that the ageing, afflicted composer of Op. 109, 110 and 111 unleashes in these epoch-shifting works. Played with as much consummate, fuss-free art as Sir András Schiff brings to them, the unfolding drama of this revolutionary trio can truly seem to stop the clock.I wondered, at the close of Schiff’s Sunday-morning solo recital at the Proms, why it had been so short. But it hadn’t: our pre-lunch banquet had Read more ...
David Nice
Match the most multi-timbred, flexible orchestra in the world with the iridescent peak of symphonic mastery, and you have an assured winner of a Prom. Yet not even Kirill Petrenko’s previous London performance of Mahler’s Seventh with the Bavarian State Orchestra, nor the brilliance of his two previous Proms with the Berlin Philharmonic, had prepared me for the miracle he achieved last night with players who will clearly do anything for him.Unlike his predecessor in Berlin, Simon Rattle, Petrenko makes Mahler fly, much more air and fire though not without earthiness when it’s needed (update: Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Eddie and the Hot Rods played London’s Rainbow on 19 February 1977. A big deal, the Saturday headliner was at the largest venue they’d been booked into to date. Their debut album Teenage Depression had been issued in November 1976 and this confirmed them as an on-the-up band just as punk was asserting itself.At The Rainbow, the pub rockers debuted a new line-up – former Kursaal Flyers guitarist Graeme Douglas joined them for the first time. Crucial to their future, he would co-write their summer 1977 smash single “Do Anything you Wanna Do.” Their label, Island Records, recognised this as a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Last night’s riveting, meticulous account of Beethoven’s Ninth from the Chineke! Orchestra was as daring in its restraint as it was thrillingly revelatory. Right from the subtle shimmer of the first movement’s opening cascades it was clear that this interpretation had put each bar under the microscope and found it teeming with new life.This is, of course, not just one of Beethoven’s most famous works, it is one of his most famously difficult; Donald Tovey called it “a law unto itself”, while musicologist Nicholas Cook has written eloquently on its “diametrically opposed interpretations”. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Before there was cinema, there was story-telling around the fire with those who could spin the best yarns, conjure the most vivid visions, winning the love of their audience. George Miller has been bringing innovative and entrancing stories to the screen ever since his debut with Mad Max in 1979, and has never limited himself to one genre.The Australian director, now in his 70s, has given us not only action heroes in post-apocalyptic landscapes but also a sagacious pig in Babe and dancing penguins in Happy Feet. Along the way, he cast three beautiful actresses as Read more ...
David Nice
When I worked in the Music Discount Centre decades ago, and non-stop CDs in the background were ordained, a customer remarked wryly of eight Bayreuth Festival horns playing Wagner “very crepuscular”. Five cellists playing Bach and Villa-Lobos as darkness fell beneath the roof of Peckham’s Multi-Storey Car Park could also be so described, but as a compliment: this was a grave and beautiful way to start the perfect entertainment.What a team the already-great Sheku Kanneh-Mason had assembled from among his many colleagues – they all deserve a credit. The others were Hedwych van Gent, currently a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
John Michael McDonagh’s acerbic tragedy of manners and morals sees West meets East, in a literal car crash of sloppy behaviour and messy intentions.Alcoholic doctor David and blocked children’s author Jo (Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain) are the burnt-out upper-class couple speeding through the Moroccan night, David drunkenly at the wheel, when Berber boy Driss (Omar Ghazaoui) steps into their path. They fatally hit, and run on to the decadent party at the desert home of Richard (Matt Smith). It seems a clean getaway, till Driss’s father Abdellah (Ismael Kanater) arrives at the gates Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This raw, joyous, irreverent take on Joan of Arc made headlines before opening night for its depiction of the fifteenth-century warrior saint as non-binary. Yet what shines out in Charlie Josephine’s fresh, deliberately pared-down script is that all of us struggle to fit precisely into the categories that language assigns to us. There’s no sense of the erasure of the female struggle in this re-examination of Joan’s legacy – the play features many strong women, not least the king’s mother-in-law, Debbie Korley’s stylishly fearsome Yolande of Aragon. The fact is that Joan of Arc was by anyone’s Read more ...
David Nice
Asked which work suits capricious Albert Hall acoustics best, I’d say Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, partly due to the choral billows – this year there’s been an extra thrill about massed choirs – but also because the Kensington colosseum haloes this spiritual journey of a soul. Best singer in the space? Based on years of Proms experience, surely the palm should go to tenor Allan Clayton, ringing of tone and so clear in diction that you can hear every word.So the work and the protagonist were assured before a note had been played. What really allowed everything to take flight, though, Read more ...