Reviews
Gavin Dixon
François-Xavier Roth is a distinctive presence at the podium. He is short and immaculately attired, and first appearances could lead you to expect a civilised and uneventful evening. But the facade soon drops. His movements are brisk and erratic, as he conducts without a baton and instead shakes his outstretched hands at the players. He often leaps into the air, landing in a fierce pose directed at one of the players, before returning to his repertoire of small, indistinct gestures.Yet the results are impressively detailed and precise. Rhythmic clarity is a hallmark of his interpretations, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 25 years this year since Donna Leon introduced us to Commissario Guido Brunetti, a man who in his way has done as much for Venice as Byron and Ruskin or, in our own time, Francesco da Mosto, like Brunetti a glamorous figure absorbed by the history and culture, not to mention the cuisine, of La Serenissima.Earthly Remains is the 26th novel in Leon’s Brunetti series which has become an international phenomenon, garnering crime writing awards from around the world. Sadly for the locals, there is no Italian edition because the author will not allow it, feeling that as an American in Venice ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the second week of September 1979, Nick Lowe’s “Cruel to be Kind” entered the Top 40. A month later, it peaked at number 12. The commercial success was belated validation for a song with a history. In May 1978, an earlier version was the B-side of his “Little Hitler” single. Fans with long memories heard another, even earlier, “Cruel to be Kind” when his old band Brinsley Schwarz recorded it for the BBC’s John Peel Show in February 1975. It was co-written by Lowe with fellow bandmember Ian Gomm.Now, the story of “Cruel to be Kind” is pushed back further. The new Brinsley Schwarz release It Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Text can sometimes be a prison. At its best, post-war British theatre is a writer’s theatre, with the great pensmiths – from Samuel Beckett, John Osborne and Harold Pinter to Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp and Sarah Kane – carving out visions of everyday humanity in all our agonies and glee. But the mountain of written words that they have built is only a part of the live theatre experience, and it is increasingly being questioned by playwrights themselves. Now at the Royal Court, Simon Stephens, author of the West End hit adaptation The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, offers Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Christopher Hampton's witty comedy, first performed in 1970, ingeniously inverts Molière's The Misanthrope, centring as it does on a man whose compulsive amiability manages to upset just about everyone.At the heart of the play is Philip, the polar opposite of Molière's Alceste, the man who turns scathing hatred into an artform. Here Philip is a anxiety-ridden bachelor don who seemingly likes everyone and who teaches philology because, he gaily offers, he lacks the critical faculty needed to teach literature. He's incapable of other things, too: he may be a man in love with words, but despite Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Within seconds – literally seconds – of Unforgettable it becomes apparent that this is the kind of film that in the late Eighties and Nineties used to be referred to as “straight to video”, a label that covered a plethora of trashy, sexist, by-the-numbers psycho and erotic thrillers that beat a hasty route to Blockbuster. To actually see one in the cinema, released by a major studio, is a disconcerting experience.Those first few salacious and silly seconds involve the police interrogation of a woman, who looks like the victim of an almighty beating but is actually facing a murder rap. Julia Read more ...
Robert Beale
The world premiere of a symphony by a British composer – Huw Watkins – was the chief attraction in the latest Hallé programme with Sir Mark Elder at the Bridgewater Hall. The other music on the programme, however, held interest and indeed created a foil to Watkins’ work.But first to his Symphony. Anyone looking for a contribution to a perceived “tradition” of British symphony writing would be hard put to place this one. It is of itself: one of a kind. Granted, it’s written for a fairly conventional large orchestra, but with nothing to frighten the horses in sound effect terms. Watkins can Read more ...
David Nice
"Good for the history of music, but not for music," one of Prokofiev's professors at the St Petersburg Conservatoire used to say of artistically dubious works which created a splash, according to the composer's diaries. I'm not even sure that this show is good for the history of art, though it's certainly enriching for the burgeoning discipline of queer theory, and food for thought whether or not you agree with the choices and the stance of the curator, Clare Barlow. And it's especially admirable that it's happening while the Tate is also showing major exhibitions of gay artists David Hockney Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It used to be said that the devil had all the best music. But the devil seems to have lost his touch in this ghost-story rock musical from Duncan Sheik, composer of the stage version of American Psycho and the award-laden Spring Awakening. If the plot seems familiar, it’s because it is – in essence, anyway. An isolated location. Childhood innocence in peril. Malevolent ghosts with a score to settle. Another American abroad tied up that narrative package more than a century ago in The Turn of the Screw.But the main problem with Whisper House, which premiered in San Diego in 2010 and here Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a day to open your political stand-up show, entitled State of the Nation, a few hours after Theresa May had announced a snap election. If Ayesha Hazarika needed any extra material, yesterday morning's events would certainly have supplied it. And sure enough, she gamely starts the show by saying drily, “You can only imagine how much fun I've had today,” before ripping up the show's script.She does some strong topical material at the top of the hour before she settles into the show proper, when she neatly puts the election into context for Labour voters. Jeremy Corbyn will not be amused at Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This Saturday, April 22, is Record Store Day, the annual celebration of independent record shops. Thus, everyone from the biggest major to the weeniest micro-label is putting out unique, limited edition vinyl runs. When Record Store Day was first inaugurated in 2008, record shops were in trouble, everyone was still in thrall to free invisible music. A decade ago the idea of music as content became king. The principle still holds but there’s been a significant comeback for vinyl. So don’t moan about how Record Store Day has been hijacked by the majors with their “Sir Elton John Commemorated as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
An Egyptian/French co-production directed by Egyptian film-maker Mohamed Diab, Clash is a fevered, chaotic attempt to portray some of the tangled undercurrents that fuelled Egypt’s “Arab Spring” and its subsequent unravelling. Knowing something about the toppling of the Mubarak regime in 2011, the ensuing election of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammed Morsi and then his overthrow by the Egyptian army would help, but the film successfully speaks for itself as a cri de coeur for a nation in crisis.Obviously not awash in production funding, Diab conceived the ingenious notion of setting his Read more ...