Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
Why is it so hard to write a decent play about Bach? Maybe, in part, because there are no words that can express anything as eloquently as his music did – about life and death, pain and transcendence, wretchedness or rapture at the simplest aspects of existence. So much of what he represented was distilled into that music – and what we are left with biographically is the workaholism, the curmudgeonliness, the rows with figures of authority.Nina Raine wrestled with this only semi-successfully in her 2021 play, Bach & Sons, and now Oliver Cotton has taken on the challenge by focusing on Read more ...
David Nice
Dublin theatregoers have been inundated with Irish family gatherings concealing secrets or half-buried sorrows, mixing “bog gothic” with very real horrors. Clearly they’re willing to try again with Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, because its run has just been extended. The vanishings familiar to Butterworth’s wife Laura Donnelly, whose uncle was among the disappeared, still resonate, as a programme article by Sandra Peake, CEO of WAVE Trauma Centre, reinforces.In the London premiere (vividly reviewed on theartsdesk by Aleks Sierz), Donnelly played Caitlin Carney, who along with son Oisin has Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston just gets better and better, both as singer and as actor. Last night’s recital at Temple Church had an unusual and wide-ranging programme – consisting of a first half hopping through the centuries, followed by a complete performance of Schumann’s “Kerner-Lieder” cycle.Charlston and Sholto Kynoch had originally devised this programme for last autumn’s Oxford International Song Festival. It certainly looked very appealing on paper, with all kinds of music to discover. And so it proved.The first half worked brilliantly as a sequence, with all kinds of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night was the first time I had heard the 12 Ensemble, a string group currently Artist-in-Residence at the Wigmore Hall, and I was very impressed, both by the standard of the playing and the enterprising programming. This gave regular audience-members a little of what they’re used to (a chunk of Brahms) and a decent portion of what they’re not.The first half featured a sequence of pieces which in some way dealt with music of the past, starting with an arrangement of Bach by cellist Max Ruisi (one of the co-founders of 12 Ensemble). Komm, süsser Tod was played with poise and warmth by the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
On walking into Mikalene Thomas’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery my first reaction was “get me out of here”. To someone brought up on the paired down, less-is-more aesthetic of minimalism her giant, rhinestone-encrusted portraits are like a kick in the solar plexus – much too big and bright to stomach. Could I be expected to even consider accepting these gaudy monstrosities as art?A brash assault on the senses, they seemed to be daring me to turn away. Then came two installations – recreations of the living room in the terraced house in Camden, New Jersey where the artist grew up in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Microtonic comes into focus on its third track, “Infinity Peaking.” Album opener “Goit,” featuring a guest vocal by Working Men’s Club’s Syd Minsky-Sargeant, is doomy post-Balearic impressionism with spoken lyrics seemingly about the loss of self. Next, the distant-sounding rave-shoegazing hybrid “John on the Ceiling.” “Infinity Peaking” is the point of coalescence; where beats-bedded, drifting electronica is suited to the comedown experience.After this, bdrmm’s third album – their second for Mogwai’s Rock Action label – settles into developing the marriage of Seefeel-esque post-rock Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
At the age of 83, Martha Argerich contains more personality in her little finger than many people do in their entire bodies.Her vigorous, technically dazzling delivery of Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto began before she even touched the piano. As the orchestra played the opening passage she wasn’t just swaying in time to the music, she was hunching forward for the diminuendos and mouthing “ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum” along to the dotted rhythms. She couldn’t wait to be part of the performance, and right from the crisp ornamentation of her first entry she was its life and soul.Argerich has Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Myra Hess was one of the most important figures in British cultural life in the mid-20th century: the pre-eminent pianist of her generation and accorded “national treasure” status as a result of the wartime lunchtime concert series at London’s National Gallery, which she singlehandedly masterminded through 1,698 concerts between 1939 and 1946.This new biography, the first for nearly 50 years, is meticulously researched and richly illustrated: Jessica Duchen brings to her task not just the biographer’s curious eye but a music critic’s ear and discernment.Hess had to battle prejudices Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An album is one thing, a live show is another. A truism of course, but one which is inescapable during this London date by the Rotterdam-based Rats on Rafts at a shabby chic pub in Dalston, East London.Rats on Rafts’ measured new album, Deep Below – released a couple of weeks ago – inhabits the shadows cast by the early Eighties Cure, with a nod to the Cocteau Twins of slightly later. The hyperactive sonic assault colouring their predecessor albums is set aside in favour of a hazy shade of grey.It’s not-quite goth and not-quite a fun factory, but this is irresistibly kinetic stuffThis Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Steven Knight is beginning to resemble the British version of Taylor Sheridan. While Sheridan has been saturating our screens with Yellowstone, 1923, Landman etc, Knight has been reeling off Peaky Blinders, SAS Rogue Heroes and even the story of opera star Maria Callas.With A Thousand Blows, Knight has travelled back to Victorian London in the 1880s, the era of Jack the Ripper, for a lurid exploration of the city’s foul-smelling underworld of crime, corruption and illegal boxing rackets. His chief protagonists are boxer Henry “Sugar” Goodson (Stephen Graham, pictured below, making a deft Read more ...
David Nice
Let’s finally face the elephant in the room: the most popular Viennese operetta, packed with hit numbers, no longer works on the stage as a whole. The central party, yes, never more high-energy delight than here, with a cast of 13 and 10 instrumentalists on stage. As for the rest, not even the likes of Richard Jones, Harry Kupfer and Christopher Alden have won a total victory. Davey Kelleher comes closer, but the high jinks can still be wearing in the outer acts.For its touring farce, Irish National Opera has dropped the "Die" from the title of Johann Strauss II's smash hit, allowing the Read more ...
Robert Beale
The second of the Philharmonic’s Boulez-Ravel celebrations (birth centenary of the former, 150th of the latter) brought Bertrand Chamayou back: after his performance of the G major piano concerto in January, this time it was as soloist in the Concerto for the Left Hand, with Ludovic Morlot on the podium.It’s a different piece of stuff from the two-hands concerto (though contemporary). Whereas the G major varies the role of the soloist, sometimes offering a balance of power between orchestral and keyboard resources, in the left-hand one Ravel was at pains to see that the solo should never seem Read more ...