Reviews
Bavarian State Orchestra, Kirill Petrenko, Barbican review - Mahler's Seventh as dance suiteSaturday, 02 June 2018
Serendipity as well as luxury saw to it that the night after Simon Rattle gave his farewell Festival Hall performance as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, his imminent successor appeared over at the Barbican with another excellent German... Read more... |
Fatherland, Lyric Hammersmith review - loud and proud, shame about the contentSaturday, 02 June 2018
Masculinity, whether toxic or in crisis (but never ever problem-free), is a hardy perennial subject for British new writing, and this new piece from playwright Simon Stephens, Frantic Assembly director Scott Graham and Underworld musician Karl Hyde... Read more... |
Line of Separation, All 4, review - handsome if soapy epicSaturday, 02 June 2018
You don’t see a lot of German drama imported to British television. France, Italy, Scandinavia, yes. But the biggest country in Europe is less of a player. The great exception – and it really was great - was Deutschland 83, a thrilling hit when... Read more... |
Così fan tutte, Opera Holland Park review - the pain behind the prettinessSaturday, 02 June 2018
A proper production of Così fan tutte should make you feel as if the script for a barrel-scraping Carry On film has been hi-jacked by Shakespeare and Chekhov – working as a team. The story is so silly (even nasty), the music so sublime. When, in... Read more... |
Songlines Encounters Festival, Kings Place review - mellifluous launch from African stringsSaturday, 02 June 2018
The Songlines Encounters festival is in its eighth year, and opened its doors on Thursday night at Kings Place in London with 3MA, (TroisMa in French), comprising Malian kora player Ballake Sissoko, Moroccan oud player Driss El Maloumi and... Read more... |
Africa: A Journey Into Music, BBC Four review - too little, too late?Saturday, 02 June 2018
BBC Four is the TV music equivalent of those oldsters music mags like Q and Mojo. Have there been five, or is it six, documentaries about Queen on the channel? You can sense the commissioners feeling with this new series they have now done... Read more... |
Die Zauberflöte, Garsington Opera review - visually stimulating, conceptually confusingFriday, 01 June 2018
Something is afoot at Garsington this season. Walking past the lake you might just catch sight of three strange figures in the distance – white-clad pawns engaged in a solemn game of human chess. Continue towards the auditorium and, somewhere among... Read more... |
Ismael's Ghosts review - call me novelisticFriday, 01 June 2018
The literary allusions and aspirations come thick and fast in this roomy, novelistic, most French of films from Arnaud Desplechin. Naming its characters after Joyce and Melville, interpolating passages from Philip Roth and Bernard Hermann’s score... Read more... |
Gringytė, Williams, CBSO, Gražinytė-Tyla, Symphony Hall, Birmingham review - living in the momentFriday, 01 June 2018
How to judge a genius who died at 25? Gerald Larner, in his programme note for this concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, suggests that Lili Boulanger’s tragically early death was actually central to her achievement. She knew she... Read more... |
Translations, National Theatre review - an Irish classic returns with cascading forceThursday, 31 May 2018
What sort of physical upgrade can a play withstand? That question will have occurred to devotees of Brian Friel's Translations, a play that has thrived in smaller venues (London's Hampstead and Donmar, over time) and had trouble in larger spaces: a... Read more... |
Berlin Philharmonic, Rattle, RFH review - everything but inscapeThursday, 31 May 2018
Questions of interpretation apart, Simon Rattle has yet again proved the great connecter, this time in concerts separated by just over a month. Having set his seal on his new, galvanizing partnership with the London Symphony Orchestra by asserting,... Read more... |
Tartuffe, Theatre Royal Haymarket review - dual-language production loses its wayThursday, 31 May 2018
The idea of producing a classic play in a mix of two languages is pretty odd. What kind of audience is a bilingual version of Molière’s best-known comedy aiming at, you wonder. Homesick émigrés? British francophiles with rusty A-level French?... Read more... |
