Reviews
Rose Finn-Kelcey: Life, Belief and Beyond, Modern Art Oxford review - revelation and delightWednesday, 19 July 2017
Rose Finn-Kelcey was one of the most interesting and original artists of her generation. Yet when she died in 2014 at the age of 69, she could have disappeared from view if she not spent the last few years of her life assembling a monograph about... Read more... |
Fearless, Series Finale, ITV review - big build-up to an anticlimaxTuesday, 18 July 2017
It was a coup by ITV to get Homeland writer Patrick Harbinson to pen this paranoid-conspiracy series, and rather droll to get Helen McCrory (wife of Homeland’s Damian Lewis) to play the lead. Yet even though the story of high-minded human rights... Read more... |
Game of Thrones, Series 7, Sky Atlantic review – slow, but it's just the beginningTuesday, 18 July 2017
If nothing else, Game of Thrones has surely been the greatest boon to the British acting profession since they invented tights and greasepaint. Part of the fun is trying to think of somebody who hasn’t been in it yet. So far we haven’t seen Maggie... Read more... |
Jette Parker Young Artists Summer Performance, Royal Opera review - vocal promise, poor stagecraftTuesday, 18 July 2017
They get to work with the best music and language coaches in the business. They make their mark in small parts throughout the Royal Opera season and showcase their art more prominently at the end of it, proving to the world that there are major... Read more... |
I Know Who You Are, BBC Four review - preposterous but hypnoticMonday, 17 July 2017
All’s fair in love and law in I Know Who You Are. BBC Four’s latest Euro-import hails from Spain and, as per the channel’s practice, is coming at you in intense double doses, two 70-minute episodes every Saturday night. Already it’s hard to imagine... Read more... |
Prom 3: Faust, COE, Haitink - Europeans tread air under 88-year-old masterMonday, 17 July 2017
The message must be getting through. On the First Night of the Proms, Igor Levit played as encore Liszt's transcription of the great Beethoven melody appropriated as the European Anthem; in Prom 2, Daniel Barenboim unleashed his Staatskapelle Berlin... Read more... |
David Lynch: The Art Life review - authentic and revealingMonday, 17 July 2017
"You drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint. And that’s it." So goes David Lynch’s memorable description of what he calls "the art life" in Jon Nguyen’s frank and engaging documentary. It’s a life that Lynch imagined himself living as a... Read more... |
A Tale of Two Cities, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre review - it was the longest of timesMonday, 17 July 2017
Much loved, yes. But Dickens’s novel is probably little read by modern audiences and so a chance to see a new adaptation of this tale of discontent, riot and general mayhem set in the French revolution and spread across London and Paris in the late... Read more... |
Katya Kabanova, Opera Holland Park review - clarity and pace in Janáček's Volga tragedyMonday, 17 July 2017
Katya Kabanova is an ideal fit for Opera Holland Park’s verismo-focussed programming. It’s Czech, of course, but the dramatic style is very close to the Italian opera of the day, the story all gritty realism, the music punctuated with intense... Read more... |
Sarah Hall: Madame Zero review – eerie tales of calamity and changeSunday, 16 July 2017
Five thousand miles away from her native Lake District, I first understood the eerie magnetism of Sarah Hall’s fiction. As a regional judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, I’d travelled to join the jury’s deliberations in Sri Lanka. I was keen... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Anne BriggsSunday, 16 July 2017
The Time Has Come was issued in late 1971. Anne Briggs’ second album and her second to reach shops that year, it followed an eponymous set released that April. That was on the folk label Topic and produced by the pivotal A. L. Lloyd, who had... Read more... |
Prom 1 review: Levit, BBCSO, Gardner - fizzing Adams finally ignites mixed First NightSaturday, 15 July 2017
The ideal First Night of the Proms sets the tone for the season, perhaps flagging up some of the themes to be followed up later, offering a blend of novelty and familiarity, and preferably ending with a roof-raising choral blockbuster. This... Read more... |
