Reviews
Veronica Lee
Ben Ashenden and Alex Owen together form The Pin, a sketch duo who have won much critical acclaim and full houses in the Edinburgh Fringe shows. They have also added a huge social media following in 2020 with their lockdown skits spoofing the new Zoom age. Now they move into theatre with – what is it? – an extended sketch, or a comic playlet? Whichever it is, The Comeback is hugely enjoyable.The idea has been developed from Backstage, the duo's 2018 Fringe show, and the conceit is that “Ben” and “Alex” are a double act who are the warm-up act for Jimmy and Sid, two old stagers knocking out a Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps it’s just the conventional mind which celebrates the pathos, tragedy and triumph in Beethoven’s music at the expense of his humour. And that’s the one aspect of the composer which has been a constant revelation – to me, at any rate – in his anniversary year. Too often the laughs have been solitary, listening to CDs or watching online. On Saturday night, in the warm and friendly atmosphere of the Fidelio Orchestra Café, the pleasure could be audibly shared in two of the composer’s wittiest and most surprising piano sonatas, and amplified by the revelation of another major Beethoven Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Booking a venue, filling it with people, and handing out awards-night hardware to a range of international artists is a challenge to be reckoned with at any time, even more so in the wake of this year's pandemic. Such was the challenge met by Songlines magazine, for which I have been a regular writer for many years, as it mounted its annual World Music Awards show online – and at the mercy of an internet connection for the first time. It was fronted by singer and broadcaster Cerys Matthews, a Songlines Awards regular who, in this virtual edition, held the reins from home, and featured Read more ...
Robert Beale
Adaptability is the name of the game for big companies in the music business now. And Opera North’s streamed presentation of Beethoven's Fidelio from inside Leeds Town Hall is a prime example of just how adaptable things need to be.The orchestra is down to 33: single (hardworking!) woodwind, two horns, two trumpets, no trombones, in a score reduction by Francis Griffin. The chorus numbers 24, and between them that’s going some for a socially distanced ensemble these days. The soloists are spread along the front of the extended platform, with space to act and interact to some degree. Lighting Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Like a hokey-cokey, we’re back to live music in London – but for how long? I overheard another audience member explaining it was her third time at Kings Place this week, as people cram in as many concerts as possible before a feared return to cultural lockdown. Kings Place has been in the London vanguard (with Wigmore Hall) of venues opening as much as possible, and Aurora Orchestra have responded with imagination, transforming their Mozart concerto cycle to a festival of chamber music.The format was the same as the Imogen Cooper concert I reviewed in October: starry soloist, Mozart concerto Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It didn’t take long for The Stooges to acquire an afterlife. They played their final show in February 1974. In May 1975, Nick Kent wrote a multi-page feature for NME on the ups and downs of Iggy Pop and Co. In September 1975, Sounds reviewed a new album by the defunct band titled Metallic KO. One side of it was recorded at that final show.“I'm a tasteless little bastard and I really enjoy it,” wrote Giovanni Dadomo of the wreckage captured on the vinyl. “It's no great rock 'n' roll record per se. What I do believe is that it's an astonishing piece of documentary work, revealing as it does the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"What's happening?", or so Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) asks time and again in I'm Your Woman, voicing the very question posed by an audience. Bewilderment would seem to be a constant state of being in director and co-writer Julia Hart's film, which doesn't so much derive suspense from withholding information as revel in an opaque narrative that I, for one, tuned out of well before the close. There's no denying Brosnahan's commitment to material that couldn't be further from her star-making work in TV's The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, but you can only tease a spectator along so far before one's patience Read more ...
David Nice
For the performers and the venue there can be nothing but praise. To be back in Kings Place’s Hall One after so long was to realise afresh that no other London venue gives such air to soaring strings – and these ones truly did soar and gleam. For the programme, not quite so much. When you begin in the heights – as the first of the evening’s concerts, the one I was lucky enough to attend, did – with Ravel’s Duo for violin and cello, two bouts of romantic rodomontade can quickly pall, however committed the performances.A confession: I signed up for “Kanneh-Masons and friends” without looking at Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Travis Alabanza is black, trans, queer and proud. And they’ve got a lot to be proud about. In 2016, they were the youngest recipient of the artist in residence post on the Tate workshop programme, and two years later starred in Chris Goode’s wildly overblown adaptation of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. On Alabanza’s website, they boast that they are “known for increasingly paving much of the UK conversation around trans politics”, and certainly they’ve made an impact. If you want to know about safe spaces and communities for gender non-conforming and transgender people, this is the go-to activist. Read more ...
Robert Beale
The second of the Hallé’s Winter Season concerts-on-film is scarcely less ground-breaking than the first. But this time we are in the orchestra’s second home, the former church now extended to be Hallé St Peter’s in the regenerated part of Manchester's city centre. The same skilful use of camera techniques to show a socially distanced ensemble, with Sir Mark Elder as conductor and, this time, Roderick Williams as vocal soloist, makes satisfying visuals to go with arresting sound. Despite limited resources in the installed lighting, there’s still effective use of washes of colour in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It may seem incongruous that a factually-based film about Iraqis battling against murderous Islamic State invaders should have been produced by the Russo brothers, famous for Marvel’s Avengers and Captain America blockbusters. However, Hollywood giganticism is happily absent, and Mosul (Netflix) is a claustrophobically intense battlefield movie which also throws some penetrating light on the terrible costs borne by the long-suffering Iraqis. Writer/director Matthew Michael Carnahan has crafted a spare and purposeful narrative in which character and incident are allowed to tell their own story Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Breaking away from the outlandish shenanigans in Little Big Bear in the Canadian wilds of its first two series, this third outing for Tin Star brings Jack Worth (Tim Roth), wife Angela (Genevieve O’Reilly) and daughter Anna (Abigail Lawrie) back across the Atlantic to Liverpool to confront dirty secrets they’ve been running away from for 20 years. As you might expect, power, corruption and oodles of bloody violence are the order of the day.After the peculiar mixture of Ammonite preachers and Mexican drug cartels in series two, this return to basics could have proved to be a blessing, adding a Read more ...