Reviews
Thomas H. Green
The music year draws to a close and theartsdesk on Vinyl presents its festive selection. We go easier on the cheesier at this time of year, but there are also gold nuggets in there too. Time to buy the vinyl lover in your life a little something? Here's a vibrant cross section of many, many kinds of music on plastic, running the gamut from Neil Diamond to a feminist concept album about mermaids. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHTiña Positive Mental Health Music (Speedy Wunderground) + Tom Sanders Only Magic (Mosho Moshi)Usually December’s Vinyl of the Month is a Christmas album but this year, for Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Chilean director Maite Alberdi makes warm, witty, empathetic, fly-on-the-wall documentaries, whose subjects are always surprising. Lifeguard, her first, was about a lifeguard working on the most dangerous beach in Chile, who was actually afraid of water.Tea Time sat in with a group of elderly female friends who had been meeting for monthly tea parties for over 60 years. And The Grown-Ups followed the 40-something "pupils" of a private school for people with Down’s Syndrome, as they navigated love, ambition and the desperate desire to be independent. And now comes The Mole Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Although this streamed concert from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra featured the music of Schubert and Tchaikovsky, the ghost at the feast was Mozart, the acknowledged inspiration behind the two main pieces. In particular these works sought to capture the charm and ease of Mozart but cast in the later composers’ idioms.As with the SCO concert I reviewed a fortnight ago this was broadcast on YouTube, the presentation simple and unobtrusive – no son et lumiere to get in the way of the music. And the repertoire was chosen to show the advantages of a small orchestra: lithe textures, fast tempos Read more ...
Tom Baily
American Utopia is not your average Spike Lee joint. He has teamed up with David Byrne of Talking Heads to make a concert movie based on Byrne’s lauded Broadway show of the same name, which opened in October 2019 in a limited run. After the success, Byrne invited Lee to direct this screen version. Two unlikely titans match, with good results. Byrne hasn’t lost anything of what he always had, and Spike Lee does interesting things with the camera, but it's hard to avoid envying the real audience we see singing and dancing in the grand Hudson Theatre. I wanted to be there.But who wouldn’t? This Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The key of C minor threw a dark shadow over music long before it became the tonality for Beethoven to express the struggle of one against many in the Fifth Symphony and the Third Piano Concerto. Mozart was a feted teenager and Beethoven a babe in arms when Haydn wrote his C minor Piano Sonata in 1771, 60 years before Schumann began to make his own inner turmoil into music in the wake of Beethoven. Yet through silence as much as sound, Paul Lewis made something personal and almost confessional from the Sonata’s slow introduction, placing the full tonal weight of the Wigmore’s Steinway at the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Add the Hampstead Theatre to the swelling ranks of playhouses opening its doors this month, in this case with a revival well into rehearsal last spring when the first lockdown struck. Re-cast in the interim, Alice Hamilton's 60th-anniversary production of The Dumb Waiter finds the menace in a defining play from the early career of Harold Pinter, without catching the linguistic brio that in other hands can give this same text an often-surprising lift. Running just under an hour, this play was last revived in London at the start of 2019, as part of a double bill and bringing to near- Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
How do you create a secular version of the Nine Lessons and Carols? The original can feel like a formulaic trot through tunes and stories as stale as fossilised mince-pies. Yet it helps to remember that in essence it reflects on the story of a world suddenly turned upside down; a story of refugees, single motherhood, the kindness and cruelty of strangers, and the eternal curveballs that life can throw.It's completely fitting then that Rebecca Frecknall’s swiftly constructed response to the year of Covid derives its spiky power from the fact that it too portrays a world suddenly turned upside Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The last time George Clooney was in a space movie, Gravity, he and Sandra Bullock were marooned above Earth and desperate to get home. The Midnight Sky has the opposite dynamic: here Clooney is Earthbound, urgently trying to warn incomers to stay the hell away. As science-fiction premises go, it feels rather apt. With Clooney both sides of the camera, the film itself alternates between the Arctic and deep space, human drama and special effects spectacle, a certain novelty but with doses of sci-fi cliché. It’s quietly proficient rather than awe-inspiring, yet Read more ...
aleks.sierz
A Christmas Carol is a seasonal standard. In a normal year, there are a couple of versions to be enjoyed, usually led by the Old Vic in London, but this winter it feels like there’s an epidemic of adaptations. Whether this reflects an attempt to create a warmhearted response to the current depressing political and health atmosphere, or just an acknowledgement that this is Dickens’s evergreen masterpiece, doesn’t really matter. Watching Nicholas Hytner’s Bridge Theatre adaptation of this classic, which stars Simon Russell Beale, the only question is whether this is good theatre. And the answer Read more ...
David Nice
A good idea on paper – commission composers of all ages who happen to be women to write music for one, two or three instruments with the fundamental theme of swiftness and brevity, food element an optional extra – turns out to work brilliantly on screen, even if it was originally destined for a live lunchtime festival event. Take 11 personable women – nine composers, including Spitalfields Festival curator and presenter Errollyn Wallen, viola-player and producer of the film Rita Porfiris and pianist Siwan Rhys – one man, very funny when necessary, violinist Anton Miller, blend skilfully Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Four Broadway denizens resolve to change the world "one lesbian at a time" in the cheerful if often cheesy The Prom, the film adaptation of a recent Broadway musical that continually reminds you of at least a half-dozen similar titles, almost all of which are better (Hairspray, to name but one). That the film is nonetheless entertaining enough is due to material that wears a generous heart on its sleeve and that wants to reach across the aisle, so to speak, to temper bigotry and small-mindedness with dollops of acceptance and a jazz hand or two.Insofar as the film often feels like a none-too- Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
With the wealth of online performances during the pandemic, it is easy to forget the regular offerings from the Wigmore Hall. The Hall found itself in a better position than most, as it was able to present its autumn schedule largely unchanged, the only programming issues arising from international travel limitations for the performers. And the finances somehow permitted them to give concerts even without audiences when restrictions dictated, but broadcast everything live on webstreams. An appeal for donations on every broadcast suggests some hardship, but the fact that these broadcasts have Read more ...