Reviews
theartsdesk
It was the year of Pokémon Go, and it was the year the mainstream offered sequels. There were also some gems on console and mobile platforms. Steve O'Rourke and Steve Houghton look back on the developments in the world of gaming in 2016. CONSOLEThe year 2016 was certainly not a vintage one for mainstream videogames. In a risk-averse industry where it is so much easier, cheaper and commercially safer to roll out another sequel, the release roster would often read more like high-scoring football results: Civilisation VI, Street Fighter V, Gears of War 4, Dark Souls III.The majority of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Cambridge 1954, and Christmas was coming, which meant carol singing, mince pies and an unnecessarily conceptual nativity play. But murder was also on the menu, and once again handsome, jazz-loving vicar Sidney Chambers (James Norton) was about to prove himself a more imaginative crime-fighter than his buddy Inspector Geordie Keating (Robson Green).Our victim on this occasion was a banker, Bill Davis, a widower about to marry his platinum blonde girlfriend Linda (Maimie McCoy) and then leave gloomy Fifties Britain for a romantic honeymoon cruise under sunnier skies. In doing so, he was defying Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Gather round the fire, friends: no Santa down the chimney this Christmas Eve, but the curiously comforting Alan Bennett, with his sardonic and occasionally optimistic diaries. The latest published instalment has the slightly wry title Keeping On Keeping On; Bennett tells us the original title was to be Banging On Banging On.Bennett is 82 now, and lives much of the time in NW1 – the very street once home to the Lady in the Van, who parked in his front garden, in a neighbourhood memorialised in the Mark Boxer comic strip, Life and Times in NW1. Now much has gone: the real-life Mr and Mrs String Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
French Pictures in London was a bolt from the blue. Issued in June, four decades after being recorded, it was a previously unknown, unreleased album better than most mid-Seventies rock offerings. It was also better than about 99 percent of albums retrospectively hailed as classics. However, it had escaped attention and its maker was barely heard of.It wasn’t meant to be this way. In 1975, A&M Records paid for the sessions and the album’s master tape was passed to pop star and Bensick’s fellow Ohio native Eric Carmen, who was meant to get it to music industry bigwig Clive Davis, the then Read more ...
David Nice
Tinseltown's relationship to its more sophisticated, older New York brother is analogous to Ethan Mordden's engagement by Oxford University Press. The presentation is a sober, if slim, academic tome with an austere assemblage of black-and-white photos in the middle; what we get in the text is undoubtedly erudite but also racy, gossipy, anecdotal, list-inclined, sometimes camp and a tad hit and miss.The proviso that this is an ideal seasonal read comes with the knowledge that you can have fun searching YouTube for some of the more arcane musicals in question and find out exactly what Mordden Read more ...
graham.rickson
Adrian Corker: The Have-Nots OST (SN Variations)German director Florian Hoffmeister’s debut film The Have-Nots is a European exploration of the emotional after-effects of 9/11. The score comes from the British musician Adrian Corker. He’s worked with the likes of Antonia Bird and mentions Giacinto Scelsi on his website, so he must be worth investigating. Corker’s palette is dominated by a string quartet, though one including viola da gamba and bass. Luminous string textures are often undercut by ominous crackles, spits and hisses, the effect achieved by recording their parts straight to Read more ...
David Nice
Fiftysomething may well be the new 32, the age Strauss and Hofmannsthal made the central figure of the Marschallin in their "comedy for music" Der Rosenkavalier. Hearts and minds no doubt still move with Renée Fleming, senior doyenne of the role in Robert Carsen's Royal Opera production, but she is mirroring her character in bowing out gracefully to the next generation, and fellow American Rachel Willis-Sørensen is clearly the new Princess Werdenberg on the Viennese block. Even cast one's Octavian, the impassioned Alice Coote, is a known quantity to many of us, cast two's London-trained Anna Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I avoided seeing Art when it was first staged in 1996, even though Matthew Warchus’ production created a huge buzz and won an Olivier Award for Comedy. (On receiving the award, Yasmina Reza joked that she thought she’d written a tragedy not a comedy.)I knew the story involved an all-white painting bought for a whopping €100,000 and, in my paranoia, assumed the play was an invitation to snigger at contemporary art and anyone foolish enough to take it seriously. As a critic valiantly supporting young artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, I’d been made to squirm in front of a guffawing TV Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It could only happen in Halifax. The series' two families, whom we have come to know so well and – with exceptions – love, had arranged a pre-Christmas dinner out, festive-like as Alan, the ever-saintly Derek Jacobi, might put it. Instead there was Gillian (Nicola Walker) all on her tod, nursing a glass, until Caroline (Sarah Lancashire), equally solo, hoved into view. Pity the waiter who approached to ask what they’d like: a smaller table, pronto, and the wine list. The wine list is usually the crucial element when these two get together, though a later scene in the second episode of Sally Read more ...
David Nice
Sheku Kanneh-Mason isn't just BBC Young Musician 2016 - he's the year's top player in my books, a master at any level. Despite a contract with Decca, starting with the Shostakovich First Cello Concerto he played in the competition finale, he looks likely to remain loyal to family and friends, including the Fantasia Orchestra, founded this year, in which he's already played as part of the cello section.You have to pinch yourself to realise the ages delivering this quality. Kanneh-Mason is 17, as was Mendelssohn when he composed the work of total genius which launched last night's concert; Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite being kitted out with a full-scale intergalactic spaceship and all known computerised effects, Passengers is essentially a two-hander for its stars Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. Or you could maybe stretch that to a two-and-a-half-hander, if you include Michael Sheen's oily and obsequious bar-tending android.Perhaps it's part of director Morten (The Imitation Game) Tyldum's point that even if you're surrounded by the most lavish futuristic technology, space is still an infinite and soulless wasteland of nothingness, into which all human life might easily vanish without trace. The Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Classical dancers conventionally have the briefest of all performing careers in the arts, knowing from the very beginning that they'll be lucky to have 20 years of performing at the top of their abilities, after at least 10 years training from childhood onwards. But Dame Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991) was a phenomenon, dancing into her sixties, for reasons that this painful and affectionate programme tactfully explored.Darcey Bussell comes across as someone who in spite of the usual dancer's injuries has remained optimistic and even upbeat on her own trajectory to the top, into retirement from Read more ...