Reviews
David Nice
It feels like a decade, but only two and a bit years have passed since Steven Isserlis stepped out in front of a small but very much live audience at what was then the Fidelio Orchestra Cafe in July 2020. Three hundred or so Fidelio events later, he’s back, and much as he clearly loves the place, he loves the French repertoire he’s been playing with violinist Irène Duval and pianist Alasdair Beatson even more.I’m with Isserlis on Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello being the greatest masterpiece ever composed for that combination – I’d go even further and say for any meeting of two stringed Read more ...
Guy Oddy
When I first started going to music festivals in the late 80s and early 90s, they were all wild celebrations of bacchanalian excess. Children were nowhere to be seen and there was always a crustie on hand, openly plying a wide array of brain spanglers, if that was what you wanted.These days, however, kids’ entertainment is viewed as an essential part of any such knees up – and even Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival has a kids’ gig and activities each year. Top of the family-friendly music festivals, without doubt, is Camp Bestival and this year saw Rob Da Bank’s musical empire expand beyond Read more ...
David Kettle
Those working-class people really are appalling, aren’t they? Racist, sexist, definitely homophobic, violent too. Thank god our young hero can escape their clutches into the safety of a nice, bourgeois acting academy where he can be his true self.Okay, the degradations and brutal humiliations inflicted on the gay central character in Édouard Louis’s autobiographical 2014 trauma memoir The End of Eddy are undeniably horrific, and apparently unending. But to call Louis’s portrayal of his working-class background in northern France problematic is a bit of an understatement. He surrounds himself Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite the jarring effect of having British actors speaking colloquial English while purporting to be Dutch policemen working in Amsterdam, the second series of ITV’s Van der Valk arrived at its third and final episode feeling as if it had reached its comfort zone. The culture-crossover works less jarringly than it did in ITV’s recent Murder in Provence, and by keeping the show securely locked within the streets, docks, canals and familiar landmarks of Amsterdam, it brews up a persuasively Dutch flavour. The fact that the Dutch are famously fluent English speakers (probably because Dutch is Read more ...
David Kettle
In many ways, The Stones is what the Fringe is all about: a new theatre company (London-based Signal House); a single actor; a small black-box space; just a chair, a bit of smoke and some almost imperceptible lighting changes for a staging. And with those modest ingredients, it generates a work that’s really quite unnerving in its quiet power, and magpie-like in its references.Out of the blue, Nick receives a text from an old schoolfriend – well, someone he used to taunt with sinister messages in the hope of attention. As a result, he dumps his boyfriend, quits his job, and – almost as if it Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Edinburgh International Festival is playing its part in the UK/Australia Season 2021-22 (no, me neither) by hosting this concert from the Australian World Orchestra. It’s comprised of Australian musicians who play in orchestras across Europe and North America, as well as in Australia itself.Consequently, it’s as global as it’s Australian, and you could sense that both in their choice of programme as well as the way they played.Their take on Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony, for example, sounded decidedly Central European, with a lovely brightness to the strings but with a good sense of the music Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The third track of All Of Us Flames is titled “Dressed in Black.” Its protagonist “come[s] to me by night beneath my window sill…you leave before the sun comes up. Haunted eyes, you’ve got those haunted eyes.” Though tortured, this relationship doesn’t seemed to be doomed despite a mention of weapons.Ezra Furman’s “Dressed in Black” shares it title with a March 1966 Shangri-Las B-side telling the tale of a forcibly sundered love. “They said he was much too wild for me,” wails a broken Mary Weiss. “They thought we were too young to be in love… I climb the stairs, I shut the door, I turn the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s 2022’s art-house image du jour – a self-absorbed 30-year-old running to get what she wants, irrespective of the long-term consequences to herself or anyone else.Watching the pell-mell scurry of Anaïs Demoustier’s title character in Anaïs in Love, it’s impossible not to compare it with the elegant canter with which Renate Reinsve’s Julie freezes time in The Worst Person in the World. If they were running toward the same admirer or career opportunity, you’d back Anaïs to leave Julie in the dust because, as her ex-boyfriend complains, she’s a bulldozer.The knowing first feature written and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lou Reed went to the Baldwin, New York post office on 11 May 1965 to mail himself a five-inch reel-to-reel tape with 11 recording of songs he had written. The sealed package was registered and stamped, and also signed with that date by a local Notary Public, Harry Lichtiger – a partner at Baldwin’s Nassau Chemists.The 11 titles were “Buttercup Song,” “Buzz Buzz Buzz,” “Heroin,” two versions of “I'm Waiting for the Man,” “Men of Good Fortune,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “Stockpile,” “Too Late,” “Walk Alone” and “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams.” The package, addressed to Reed’s parent’s house in Freeport Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lee Haven Jones’ Welsh-language folk-horror debut dissects a family’s treachery to the land in eventually apocalyptic fashion. It starts in silent, jagged style, the characters seeming as artificial as their minimalist house, abstract paintings and intensely designed rooms, set down like a lunar outpost in rugged Welsh farmland.Cadi (Annes Elwy) is up from the village to help Glenda (Nia Roberts) prepare a dinner party during which MP husband Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones) means to seal a deal between the mining company which has enriched them and the neighbouring farm. As the canapes are Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Like many people, I grew up with cut-and-paste Handel. It could take decades before you found out where that shiny snippet of a childhood earworm truly belonged.A full-length Solomon, for instance – as delivered by The English Concert with a luxury handful of soloists at the Proms – will reveal that the so-called “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” (named, it seems by Thomas Beecham) takes place just after an extraordinary middle act. In it, two “harlots” compete before the wise king for custody of a babe both claim as theirs. Exercising that famous judgment, Solomon orders the kid to be bisected Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was the end of an era, as Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s bittersweet epic of the brilliantly devious Saul Goodman wound to a close. Hints of redemption were in the air, signalled by Saul reverting at last to his real name, James McGill. A closing shot of Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and his estranged soulmate Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) gazing at each other wordlessly through the wire of ADX Montrose prison (aka “The Alcatraz of the Rockies”) might even have brought a tear to a blackmailer’s eye.Still, it wasn’t enough to lead you to conclude that Saul was really a good guy at heart. These final Read more ...