Reviews
Sarah Kent
“I forgive you,” he said. “I forgive you… for the bombs.” Spoken by a young Muslim in measured tones that can’t hide his fear, these chilling words recall a random encounter with a stranger. Written and directed by Imran Perretta and based on his own experiences of growing up in London, the destructors provides harrowing insights into what it’s like to be seen by society as a potential threat, a terrorist in the making. Not long after 9/11, the attack on the Twin Towers has created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust, which registers on the stranger’s face in an “obscene gaze, full Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Are you a fan of oysters or Marmite? Mary Beard is not to everybody’s taste, but love her or loathe her she is not only a distinguished academic but a ubiquitous writer and presenter of classical histories, connected travels, and ruminations on societal problems. She is enthusiastic, staggeringly energetic, erudite, profoundly knowledgable, the antithesis of fashionable in both opinion and appearance.Surprisingly, this survey (on BBC Two) of representations of the nude in Western art was unusually bland, at times banal, even though our presenter obviously set out to be provoking. There are a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While there’s usually something for everybody on the Celtic Connections festival programme, where Glasgow’s midwinter festival tends to shine is in its collaborations and special events. Over the past 18 days the city has hosted folk icon Peggy Seeger on a cross-generational bill with her songs Calum and Neill MacColll; Glasgow singer-songwriter Beerjacket performing with the Cairn String Quartet; a new orchestral symphony inspired by the Declaration of Arbroath in its 700th anniversary year; and the annual Transatlantic Sessions shows, featuring lovingly curated lineups of musicians from Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Wigmore Hall audiences don’t usually roar. But when a star soprano who has already made her mark at the world’s major opera houses pays a visit, they do. This was the Albanian-born and now New York-based soprano Ermonela Jaho’s debut at the hall, an event which also marked the opening of the 50th anniversary year of Opera Rara, with whom Jaho has an extremely fruitful collaboration. The concert had been fitted into the Wigmore Hall’s programme at relatively short notice and sold out quickly.The moments that brought on the most vociferous baying from the packed house were opera extracts, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Anaïs Mitchell should be a star: she sings like a dream, oozes presence and charisma, and writes songs of classic simplicity, poetry and depth. Her other outstanding quality is a natural modesty and a delight in just being herself on stage, and sharing the joys of music-making with her fellow-musicians and the audience.Throughout the scintillating evening of her Roundhouse show, she never posed, sought attention or relied on well-rehearsed patter. She acted as if she were in her own front-room: relaxed, at times endearingly hesitant, and at others fiercely engaged with the emotions of her Read more ...
graham.rickson
French orchestras haven’t sounded distinctively Gallic for decades; François-Xavier Roth’s brilliant period band Les Siécles does use idiosyncratic French instruments but their polish and sheen is very modern. Still, close your eyes while Alexandre Bloch’s Orchestre National de Lille are playing Ravel and you’re struck by the polish, the elegance of the playing. Open them and marvel at how Bloch’s dance-like podium manner is matched by the musicians’ fluid movements. Even a castanet and tambourine exchange during Debussy’s Ibéria was a visual treat. The relationship between conductor and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
No more glitzy and glam musical shows for Jayde Adams, the comic tells us at the top of the hour. Now, after a few years in the business, she wants to be taken seriously (or seriously enough to host Crazy Delicious on Channel 4), so the sequinned Spandex has gone into storage – “no more camel toes” – and she's popped on jeans and a black turtleneck. In The Ballad of Kylie Jenner's Old Face she has something serious to say, and people will listen because of that black jumper, as previously modelled by Angelina Jolie. It screams earnestness. Actually, Adams does have something serious to Read more ...
David Nice
Of Wagner's four Ring operas, Siegfried poses the biggest casting problem. Most heroic tenors with the lungs to last the evening are not going to be ideal incarnations of the stroppy adolescent who learns and fights his way through an often nightmarish fairy-tale landscape. Torsten Kerl, not an agile mover to say the least, certainly wasn't. But complemented by similarly strong vocal performances of varying degrees of dramatic expressivity, and above all perfectly supported by the iridescent safety net of the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, who show clarity of Read more ...
Jessica Payn
To the Lake, Kassabova titles this book, but the journey it unfolds tells of not one ancient lake but two: “twins” Ohrid and Prespa, the Lake of Light and the Vale of Snow; these siblings feed each other’s waters through underground streams (the only "subterranean communication system" of its kind in Eurasia). Meanwhile, above, the waters sit “embedded diamond-like in the mountain folds of Western Macedonia and eastern Albania” in a region that was, once upon a time, “the nerve centre of the Balkans”. The singular of Kassabova’s title might points us towards the fact that her narrative Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Conjuring up nostalgia for a past readers never had is, perhaps, the litmus test for any good coming-of-age story. Writers have the hard task of making the general particular – because growing up, in one way or another, is universal whereas how and when and where we do is not. They also have the equally, if not harder, task of making the particular general – blurring that focus enough for the rest of us to share in their vision. A bit like using a state-of-the-art camera to take an early photograph; a twenty-first century Stieglitz.For his debut novel Swimming in the Dark, Tomasz Jedrowski Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When it was issued in May 1968, “Fading Yellow” attracted no attention. It couldn’t have as it was the B-side of “Mr. Poem”, Mike Batt’s poor-selling debut single. The top side was good, very 1968 and along the lines of whimsical 45s like Donovan’s “Jenifer Juniper” or Marty Wilde’s “Abergavenny” but wasn’t a hit. Relegated to the flip, “Fading Yellow” was obviously considered the least commercial of the two songs.However – as deep-digging collectors later discovered – “Fading Yellow” was the true treasure. Over three minutes 40 seconds Batt, who then worked as an A&R man at his label Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The role of Fred Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was made for Tom Hanks – and he excels in it. Rogers’ sixth cousin, Hanks has at his fingertips the compassion and warmth that made the zipper-cardigan-clad American children’s educational TV host a phenomenon. Slow-talking and deeply reassuring, he was a kinder, gentler version of the 1920s–‘30s actor and homespun-wisdom dispensing “cowboy philosopher” Will Rogers (no relation).Watching Hanks here should propel non-Americans to YouTube to find televised interviews with Rogers and excerpts from his late-afternoon half-hour Read more ...