Reviews
Peter Quantrill
This is how new and modern music should be done. In the London Philharmonic, we had an orchestra well-prepared to meet technical challenges and resolved to making sense from them. Vladimir Jurowski is a conductor who places faith in composers and audiences, who can welcome listeners and guide them through the evening as a congenial master of ceremonies rather than dessicated college lecturer.In both words and performance, Jurowski made a case for the Symphonies of Wind Instruments as Stravinsky’s first radical orchestral work (setting aside the trio of ballets for Diaghilev). The verse- Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Could Jeremy Paxman explain the inexplicable, so that viewers could begin to understand the meaning of the astonishing theatre that is the 2016 American presidential election? We can hardly even grasp the plot, let alone the coming denouement and its repercussions.To those of us on this side of the pond, one candidate is a misogynist lying bullying businessman with a red face and badly dyed hair, who seems to have garnered enormous support among the white working class. Here was Republican Donald Trump, aged 70, aka The Donald, known in Scotland for controversial golf courses, in New York for Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kemp Powers’s play is set in a motel room in Miami on the night of 25 February 1964, after Cassius Clay (as Muhammad Ali then was) had earlier beaten Sonny Liston to gain the world heavyweight title. He is joined by two friends, the singer Sam Cooke and the American football star Jim Brown, and his political and spiritual mentor, the civil rights activist Malcolm X.Inspired by real-life friendships, but heavily fictionalised by Powers, this set-up allows the playwright to examine momentous times for African Americans – within days Ali announced he was joining the Nation of Islam and casting Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Freshly minted for ITV's Golden Age of Empire slot on Sunday nights, this new four-parter breezily splices together Edwardian derring-do toffery with a patina of Indiana Jones and (not least in the music) a miasma of Lawrence of Arabia. Our story began in 1905 in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, as archaeologist Howard Carter sought to beat a swarm of international treasure-hunters to the holy grail of an undiscovered Pharaoh's tomb.As played by Max Irons, Carter is rude, irascible, ferociously single-minded and stuffed with more facts about ancient Egypt than a Google server-farm. One of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Ambition trumps (if you'll forgive that verb) achievement in Ella Hickson's new play, a long-aborning exercise in time-travel whose audacity of vision can't override one's impression that the final result is an effortful slog. Tracing a mother-daughter relationship across several continents (not to mention 162 years), Oil doesn't so much conjoin the political and the personal as graft various musings on the topic of its title atop a distended family drama that only flickers into life in its final scene. Hickson bookends her action in Cornwall then (1889) and still to come (2051) while Read more ...
David Nice
No living composer writes more compellingly for choir or for strings than James MacMillan (a surprisingly accepted "Sir" is now an optional addition to the name). This beautifully planned programme's first half gave us the former, a cappella choral music at its most masterly in the setting of the Miserere premiered by The Sixteen in 2009, before Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis lay down the gauntlet for the latter. Both were matched - though it would be hard to surpass them - in the world premiere of a masterpiece combining the two forces, MacMillan's Stabat Mater.Post- Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Philharmonia’s Sunday concert wasn’t quite the event they’d planned. Christoph von Dohnányi scored a hit last season with Schubert's Ninth Symphony, so his reading of the Eighth seemed an ideal way to begin. But Dohnányi withdrew early on, leaving the work in the less inspiring hands of Josep Pons.The second half was devoted to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with the star pairing of Robert Dean Smith and Matthias Goerne. But Goerne too pulled out, and at very short notice. Fortunately, Catherine Wyn-Rogers proved a worthy stand-in, and Pons found his stride, making the second half more Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Fans of the Birkenhead post-punk humorists are a patient crowd. It’s been two years since the last album (they haven’t been more frequent since the 1990s) and now followers are rewarded not with new music, but, as the title allusively suggests, a collection of B-sides and EPs that are in some cases hard to find elsewhere. Stony ground indeed.There are some gems here. “Vatican Broadside” – all 30 seconds of it – is still genuinely funny, as is “Hair Like Brian May Blues”. Both songs combine verbal and musical humour in a way few musicians manage. The best of these pieces start with humour, but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For decades Brian Wilson was depicted as the mad, lost genius of the Beach Boys, but these days, at 74, he's looking more like one of pop's great survivors. After all, he has comprehensively outlived his brothers Dennis and Carl, and has restored his reputation with deliriously acclaimed performances of Pet Sounds and the salvaged Sixties masterpiece SMiLE. He gets invited to all-star galas and awards ceremonies at the White House.Of course, a lot of care and attention (much of it medical and psychiatric) has gone into bringing Wilson back from the brink. In the opening chapter of this Read more ...
Peter Forbes
Scientists today tend to patronise the early Greek philosophers who, 2500 years ago, inaugurated enquiry into the nature of things. The Atomic Theory? A lucky guess, they allege. But Carlo Rovelli accords them, and especially Democritus, the key atomist, pride of place in his narrative: a see-saw battle between notions that the world consist of discrete units, beyond which we cannot go, and the idea of continuum without beginning or end.Rovelli gives these abstractions a local habitation and a name, using the insights of the Greek philosophers and the Latin poet Lucretius, who wove the atomic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The period between the October 1966 release of his eponymous debut album and its follow-up, August 1967’s baroque masterpiece Goodbye and Hello, saw Tim Buckley and his label Elektra reconsider how best to help him generate an impact. No matter how strong its songs and how unique his voice, the folk-rock styled Tim Buckley hadn’t been a big seller. Label boss Jac Holzman thought a non-album single would be good marketing tool, paving the way for a second album. One side of the shelved release surfaced in 2009 on the Where The Action Is! – Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968 box set. Otherwise, no Read more ...
David Nice
What would Glyndebourne, staging Madama Butterfly for the first time, bring to Puccini's most heartbreaking tragedy? Subtle realism, perhaps? Certainly the composer, along with his superb librettists Giacosa and Illica, offers plenty of opportunities. Yet director Annilese Miskimmon botches nearly every significant moment, and it's surely her fault if her three principals are as wooden as the suggestion of lacquered trees dominating the sets.Vocally, at least, this was a respectable evening, occasionally a little more than that. Korean soprano Karah Son can fill high-lying phrases with Read more ...