Reviews
Marina Vaizey
Drifting, floating, running, crowding: all these feelings of movement and stasis apply in a mesmerising selection of scenes, imagined and observed over 40 years by a true original. Michael Andrews (1928-1995), born and brought up in Norwich, studied at the Slade School during a golden period. His teachers included William Coldstream and Lucian Freud, and a highly individual cohort of fellow students who were to inhabit the heart of the art world, from Paula Rego to Craigie Aitchison. Quiet and shy, Andrews nevertheless easily inhabited the Soho art scene, especially Soho’s Colony Room, its Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Yuri Temirkanov chose a shamelessly populist programme for the London leg of the St Petersburg Philharmonic tour. But Khachaturian, Prokofiev and Shostakovich are core repertoire for this orchestra, and ideal for showing off its many strengths. In an impressive coup, they also managed to engage the services of legendary pianist Martha Argerich for the Prokofiev concerto, and the result was a compelling afternoon of Soviet-era classics.On the basis of this showing, the St Petersburg Philharmonic is a world-class orchestra. Their tone is bold and strident, with the focus firmly on the upper Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
There were signs of a collision as early as the second series. The event loomed larger in the third last year and last night, after an actual car crash, it finally happened: Endeavour became interchangeable with Midsomer Murders. How are the mighty fallen.Morse, investigating the disappearance of an academic in 1962, had doors slammed in his face while Morris Men practiced their menacing moves in the picturesque village of Bramford. The local yokels were preparing for the autumnal equinox (even though the trees were covered in green leaves) just as they were when the botanist, checking Read more ...
David Nice
Late January, and the soul longs for winter's end. Which is why Rimsky-Korsakov's bittersweet fairy story about the fragile daughter of Spring and Frost whose heart will melt when she discovers true love, allowing the sun to bring back warmth to earth, is so apt. Unfortunately the time of year is also one for striking singers down, so we missed two of the principals on Saturday night. The good news: their covers were fine enough to carry the charm of director John Fulljames's mostly magical storytelling.It's not easy, given the plot's meanderings, even with major cuts that lop off some of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin has one of the most beautiful voices in the business – a glinting crystal blade sheathed in velvet. She wields it with skill, darting swiftly with coloratura one minute, before stabbing deep with emotion the next. In Handel she’s peerless, and this was an exhibition round of a programme, designed to show both singer and composer at their best.She was joined by violinist Julien Chauvin and Le Concert de la Loge, the French baroque band who are rapidly becoming the go-to backing group for baroque stars including Philippe Jaroussky and Sandrine Piau. Theirs is a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Francis Bacon died in April 1992, aged 82, but heaven knows how he managed to live that long. The tortuous story of his life is now fairly well known, but Richard Curson Smith's documentary marshalled a formidable array of critics, biographers and celebs including Marianne Faithfull, Damien Hirst and Terence Stamp to create a portrait of a man capable of effervescent wit and charm, yet fuelled from within by a monstrous darkness.The film lit the blue touch paper by looking at Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which, when exhibited in London in 1945, did little to Read more ...
Peter Forbes
Daniel Levitin makes one reference to Donald Trump in this book (to the latter’s claim to have seen on TV “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City cheering when the Twin Towers fell) but he couldn’t have known quite how apposite these words would be on publication: “In the current information age, pseudo-facts masquerade as facts, misinformation can be indistinguishable from true information.”Levitin belongs to a best-selling group of experts – Daniel Kahneman, Gerd Gigerenzer, David Spiegelhalter, and a few more – who want to put us right on the pitfalls of dubious statistics and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the last week of September 1973, Guy Darrell peaked at number 12 on the British single’s chart with the catchy blue-eyed soul pounder “I’ve Been Hurt” and performed on Top of the Pops. His was a grassroots-driven success. “I’ve Been Hurt” was popular on the northern soul scene and initial sales were to fans hearing the song in clubs as it packed dance floors rather than on the radio.Despite then-hot popsters David Essex, Sweet and Wizzard being lodged in the Top Ten when Darrell’s single was selling at its fastest, this was not a week when pop was looking forward. A reissue of David Bowie’ Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If Christine may occasionally be an uncomfortable film to watch, it’s impossible not to be gripped by Rebecca Hall’s sheer, virtuoso turn in the title role of Antonio Campos’ third feature: it sears itself on the memory with a pitiless rigour that won’t be easily forgetten.Hall plays Christine Chubbuck, the Florida television presenter who shot herself in 1974 while live on air on the station for which she worked. If that’s a real-life act that’s (inevitably) impossible to follow, Craig Shilowich’s script and Campos’ direction open her story out to us with a fully convincing wider perspective Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
To judge from the hype in advance of this production, you’d think it must be a premiere. In fact Philip Glass’s dance-opera hybrid, written in 1996 and based on Jean Cocteau’s 1950 screenplay, received its first London performance at the Arcola Theatre six years ago. What’s new in this presentation, timed to straddle the Barbican’s “Glass at 80” birthday weekend, is that the work has now passed through yet another extraordinary imagination, that of the choreographer Javier de Frutos. Given his history as a provocateur on stage and off, he has been something of an enfant terrible himself.Yet Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The name Mexrrissey may be unfamiliar, but the concept of a Mexican band playing mariachi-style versions of songs by Morrissey and The Smiths has brought out a decent-sized audience on a freezing January night. Their set is uneven and musically sloppy upon occasion, but at its peak, delivers an irresistible joyfulness, a curious development, given the source material’s notorious moping.For instance, Mexrrissey’s euphoric ska-tinted take on The Smiths’ 1986 single “Bigmouth Strikes Again”, boosted by the swooping fiesta trumpet of Alex Escobar, is wonderful. Jay De La Cuerva, who looks like Read more ...
David Nice
Restlessness in a good sense was the keynote of Elisabeth Leonskaja's latest revelatory recital. At 71, the Russian pianist, now an Austrian citizen, has all the supreme mastery it takes to make the volatility work: perfect weight and balance, miraculous rhythmic articulation, the right sense of space and freedom, and the ability to see where a line or a movement is going. Expect only the big, clear sound which is one of her trademarks - all-enveloping in the turbulent Capriccios of Brahms's Op. 116 set - and you can be startled by the kind of bounces and skips which made her Schubert a thing Read more ...