Reviews
Adam Sweeting
When Ridley Scott returned to his hideous intergalactic monster with Prometheus five years ago, he brought with him a new panoramic vision encompassing infinite space, several millennia of time and the entire history of human existence. With Alien: Covenant, he makes a more modest proposal.Picture, if you will, a spacecraft loaded with 2,000 hibernating colonists. They are en route to a distant planet called Origae-6, but the voyage is interrupted when the ship (it’s called Covenant) is battered by a blast of cosmic radiation. The emergency wakes the crew, and you might find yourself thinking Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is God female? It says a lot about Yaël Farber’s pompous and overblown new version of this biblical tale at the National Theatre that, near the end of an almighty 110-minute extravaganza, all reason seemed to have vacated my brain, and its empty halls, battered by a frenzy of elevated music, heaven-sent lighting and wildly gesturing actors, were suddenly open to the oddest ideas. You could call it the Salomé effect. I staggered out of the theatre, dizzy from witnessing this portentous and defiantly ridiculous bulldozer of a show. Yes, it certainly is an experience.The main problem with the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title of this exhibition is typical of Pink Floyd’s mordant view of the world, not to mention their sepulchral sense of humour. Needless to say, the band that took stage and studio perfectionism to unprecedented lengths have pushed the boat out here, memorialising over 50 years of their collective history with thoroughness and fanatical attention to detail.The event was four years in the planning, with all three surviving members pitching in and giving it their blessing, and drummer Nick Mason attending “many a long meeting” as he coordinated the event with curator Victoria Broackes and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"This is the most fun province in Iraq" isn't the sort of sentence you hear every day on a London stage. On the basis of geographical breadth alone, one applauds Occupational Hazards, in which playwright Stephen Brown adapts global adventurer-turned-Tory MP Rory Stewart's 2006 account of his attempt to bring order to a newly-liberated Iraq. Ambitious in scope but piecemeal in impact, the play gains immeasurably from Simon Godwin's fleet, pacy production, though you wonder if the whole enterprise might not work better on screen. In terms of content, Brown's adaptation furthers the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Few young singers make a UK recital debut like Lise Davidsen’s. But then, few singers come to that debut with such a weight of reputation and expectation. Taking not only the First Prize but also the Audience Prize and Birgit Nilsson Awards at 2015’s Operalia competition, established the then 28-year-old Norwegian soprano as one to watch. Two years on and Davidsen is sounding better than ever, poised on the brink of a major international career, with debuts at the Teatro Real, Covent Garden, Aix-en-Provence and the Wiener Staatsoper in the diary.This Rosenblatt recital at Wigmore Hall Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Whatever musicologists may tell us about the patchy authenticity of Monteverdi’s last two operas, they unquestionably make a pair. Il ritorno di Ulisse is all about fidelity and ends with a love duet between the reunited husband and wife. L’Incoronazione di Poppea is almost entirely dedicated to infidelity and ends with a disturbingly beautiful love duet between the adulterous couple, Nero and Poppea, after he has exiled his wife, Ottavia, and ordered his moralising tutor, Seneca, to kill himself, among other equally vicious, if slightly less murderous, diktats.Happily Monteverdi’s only other Read more ...
David Kettle
Has Glasgow’s Tectonics weekend turned away from its wilder excess? Has it, in its fifth outing, even – well, grown up and got serious? That was partly the sense from the opening day of conductor Ilan Volkov’s visionary mix of contemporary classical, rock, folk, jazz, electronica, and all the uncategorisable hinterlands in between them, a concept that he kicked off in Reykjavík and which he’s now delivered all over the globe. In Glasgow’s previous offerings, we’ve had works directed from a kids’ sandpit, foley artists making music from scrunching packets of dried pasta and flicking through Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Barbara Windsor’s laugh belongs in the National Sound Archive. It’s a birdlike chuckle that wavers between innocence and dirt. We all know Babs’s laugh. But what about her tears? There have been plenty of those too according to Babs, BBC One’s feature-length drama which sifted through the jigsaw pieces of a tumultuous life spent in the public eye.Any fans of EastEnders hoping for a straightforward soup-to-nuts account of Windsor’s story may well have been thrown for a loop by Tony Jordan’s playful, metatextual script. Jordan made his reputation of EastEnders, before going on to flirt with Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Made from girders, say the brewers of an infamous Scottish fizzy drink. If you could siphon the music of Edgard Varèse into a can, that’s what it would taste like. Blunt, acrid, inimitable, fizzing with closely guarded, possibly unpleasant ingredients. The danger was that exposure to his entire output in one day would prove no more palatable than chugging through a two-litre bottle of Irn-Bru.Thanks to some sensitive programming and superbly prepared performances, however, the BBC’s “Total Immersion Day” did not entail saturation. Instead, the indomitable strength of a personality, and a Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone who missed the opening Southbank concerts of the Chinike! Orchestra, figurehead of a foundation which aims to give much-needed help to young Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) classical musicians, could and now can (on YouTube) catch snippets of the players in action on the splendid documentary about young cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. There's no doubt at all that Kanneh-Mason, BBC Young Musician 2016, who reprised his already celebrated interpretation of Haydn's C major Cello Concerto in All Saints Hove on Saturday night to launch the Brighton Festival, is the real deal, and so are the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Is it true that the blob of jelly resembling convoluted grey matter that we carry around in our skulls is really what we are? And how we are, and why? This is the profound question that is obliquely omnipresent in Henry Marsh’s second book on his life as a neurosurgeon as he describes his encounters with this physical part of us that seems to be, well, us. As he pithily puts it in his last pages, he does not believe in an afterlife: “I am a neurosurgeon. I know that everything I think and feel, consciously or unconsciously, is the electrochemical activity of my billions of brain cells… When Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A strong candidate for reissue of the year, World Spirituality Classics, Volume 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda is a rarity amongst archive collections as it does what is always hoped for but seldom accomplished. A new story is told, the music is unfamiliar but wonderful, and it has been put together conscientiously.The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda collects tracks – eight on the CD edition, 10 on the vinyl set – recorded between 1987 and 1995 which initially had limited circulation. The original releases drawn from were issued by the Avatar Read more ...