Reviews
Veronica Lee
Romesh Ranganathan has had an astonishing rise in comedy. The former teacher did his first full-length show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013, having made his debut there in 2010 in the newcomer competition, So You Think You're Funny? Now he's a television panel-show regular, and the second series of his travelogue Asian Provocateur is currently on the BBC. His success, he deadpans, is because, with his Sri Lankan heritage and a lazy eye, he ticks not one but two diversity boxes.It's down to talent, of course, and Ranganathan, a great student of comedy, knows what appeals. In truth his Read more ...
David Nice
It felt oddly disrespectful showing up in time for Schumann's wake on the fifteenth and final day of this year's Oxford Lieder Festival. Having started with the early piano music and many of the chamber works before moving on to Schumann's annus mirabilis of song, 1840, with frequent leaps backwards to influences and forwards to the influenced, pianist Sholto Kynoch’s labour of love reached the troubled final years dogged by whatever that insanity for which Schumann was institutionalised might have been – bipolarity, syphilis, poisoning for the mercury used in its treatment. Fortunately the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Humans is of course not about humans. Or not mainly. But if Channel 4 had called it Synths, which is what/who it is mainly about, maybe fewer would have signed up to watch, presuming it to be an eight-part series about Eighties pop. Synths, if you missed series one, are a species of robotic service provider with a humanoid appearance who perform menial tasks like scrubbing, babysitting and issuing parking fines. Inevitably a few of them got ideas above their station and started thinking like humans. Series two promises the same only more so.The first episode moved the scene on to Berlin where Read more ...
Florence Hallett
In Monster Field, 1938, fallen trees appear like the fossilised remains of giant creatures from prehistory. With great horse-like heads, and branches like a tangle of tentacles and legs, Paul Nash’s series of paintings and photographs serve as documents, bearing witness to the malevolent lifeforce that, unleashed by their undignified end, has taken hold of these apparently dead trees.Like the trees of Monster Field, piles of wrecked World War Two aircraft at Cowley Dump, removed from their proper environment in the sky, take on a new and disturbing life of their own, shifting and stirring, Read more ...
David Nice
What a relief to find Semyon Bychkov back on romantic terra firma after his slow-motion Mozart at the Royal Opera (performances speeded up somewhat, I'm told, after a sticky first night). On his own, dark-earth terms, there's no-one to touch him for nuanced phrasing, strength of purpose and the devoted responsiveness he wins from the BBC Symphony Orchestra - foot-stamping its approval at the end, a rarity - in Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. This week's two concerts in his "Beloved Friend" Tchaikovsky series both hit the heights and plumbed the depths, if not always entirely where expected.The Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Two personable musicians, who win on all fronts: at the pinnacle of their highly competitive and skilled professions, highly articulate, and perhaps unlikely partners in their art. In one corner, ladies and gentlemen, the composer, world-leading jazz trumpeter, teacher, head of Lincoln Center Jazz, the New Orleans-born Wynton Marsalis, 55. In the other, Nicola Benedetti, 29, the Scottish classical violinist, teacher and leading campaigning proselytiser for the importance of music in all spheres.Miss Benedetti played the premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto in D, with a mere 100 Read more ...
graham.rickson
Josquin: Masses The Tallis Scholars/Peter Philips (Gimmell)Listeners hoping that Josquin might have deployed aleatoric, Cageian techniques in his Missa Di Dadi might feel short-changed here, though the musical virtues of this disc are never in question. The emoji-like dice graphics which Josquin placed at the head of the tenor part in several movements mostly function like musical performance directions, their score combinations giving the singers information about note and phrase lengths. Peter Phillips’s scholarly, entertaining sleeve essay makes a valiant attempt to explain the process, Read more ...
David Nice
So many words, starting with the title - we're told we can call it iHo - and so many lines spoken by anything up to nine characters at once. But as this is the unique world of Tony Kushner, it's all matter from the heart, balancing big ideas and complex characters and leading them beyond the realms of any safe and simply effective new play, in this case towards a father-and-daughter scene as great as anything you'll see in the theatre today.This is a different sort of epic style to the freewheeling mastery of Angels in America. It's unusual to find a Kushner play where you can nominally Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having survived what you might call his boy-band years, Jude Law has emerged as a truly substantial actor, and his role here as Lenny Belardo, the newly-elected Pope Pius XIII, may prove to be a defining moment. Created by a multinational consortium including HBO, Sky Italia and Canal+, The Young Pope confronts the viewer with something of a learning curve, with its mysterious Vatican setting and arcane multi-lingual clerical hierarchy, but by the end of this opening double episode you could sense that this is going to be a weird and wild ride.Director Paolo Sorrentino didn't make it easy on Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Populist playwright Peter Shaffer, who died in June, gets a rapid honour from this flagship venue, which – aptly enough – is putting on his most popular play. So popular in fact that it has already sold out and is therefore critic-proof. Directed by one of our best youngish directors, Michael Longhurst, and with live music by the Southbank Sinfonia, this spectacular show is certainly a hugely entertaining evening. But is this story of the genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his saturnine rival Salieri the best play ever about a composer, or merely a way of flattering the prejudices of the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
For more than a decade, Neil Cowley and his trio have built a fervent and substantial following for their prog-jazz compositions of frenetic loops and engaging melodies. With a jazz trio’s organic movement and intimacy allied to a rocker’s bolder rhythm and melody, and touches of contemporary classical piano, his band occupies an important, and underrepresented, space in the repertoire. The new album, played in its entirety last night, has provoked much acclaim for the boldness of the concept, though in largely discarding his characteristic playfulness for a more conceptual focus, there is a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The original 1961 poster for Paris Blues trumpeted it as “a love-spectacular so personally exciting you feel it’s happening to you”. Would it were actually thus. Instead, it’s ponderous and features a cast so obviously “acting” that any verve implied by being filmed in Paris and set in the world of jazz is missing in action. Paris Blues is worth seeing, but don’t expect the pulse to quicken.Ram Bowen (Paul Newman) and Eddie Cook (Sidney Poitier) are American jazzers living in Paris with a residency in a smoky basement. One member of their band is a drug addict and a local Juliette Gréco type Read more ...