Reviews
Gavin Dixon
Vladimir Jurowski began his latest season as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic with a typically bold and adventurous programme. At its core were the two Szymanowski violin concertos performed by Nicola Benedetti, and these were framed by Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin Suite. The two concertos are stylistically distinct, the First impressionistic, the Second folk-influenced, so the pairings were apt. As ever, Jurowski delivered supple, well-crafted performances, and Benedetti shone, but the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Copland: Orchestral Works Volume 2 Jonathan Scott (organ),BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/John Wilson (Chandos)This disc is a welcome reminder that Aaron Copland’s populist, diatonic ballet scores only tell half the story; the early and late stages in his career contain music which is far less ingratiating. Pieces like the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, first performed in 1925 and the source of a much-repeated quote from conductor Walter Damrosch that if Copland could write a piece like this aged 23, “within five years he will be ready to commit murder!” It isn’t an organ concerto, the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They keep on coming, these crime dramas, from every direction. The Viking invasion continues, the co-productions with France, the ongoing American global takeover. Meanwhile back in Blighty, Red Productions have been a reliable source of quality drama since the 1990s. Their most recent forays into crime have both involved Sally Wainwright: Happy Valley was theirs, and so was Scott & Bailey. Their latest, modishly, is an international collaboration: Paranoid, a new eight-parter set somewhere quiet and northern, was made in conjunction with Studio Canal and is destined for Netflix.In one Read more ...
Alison Cole
Of all the mesmerising images in William Kentridge’s major Whitechapel show, the one that lingers most, perhaps, is that of the artist himself, now turned 60, hunched and thoughtful, wandering through the studio in Johannesburg where he lives and works. He paces, meditates over a "magical" cup of coffee, imagines, draws, tears paper, works, adjusts, observes, directs – all in the gentle manner of a Buster Keaton-style silent film star. Time in this metaphoric space is thick with possibilities, under-stated humour and conundrums. It is also a Utopian universe, where mistakes can be undone, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Very occasionally the playing of a play leaves a deeper impression than does the play itself. This is the case with Good Canary, a lippy, sweary tragicomedy by Zach Helm about secrets and addiction on the New York publishing scene. It has already played in translation in Mexico and in France, where it won Molière awards for direction and design. Its director, the prolific screen and stage actor John Malkovich, now brings it to London for the first time – and obligingly lends his famously dark-chocolate tones to the reminder to turn off mobile phones.This is also one of those plays with a plot Read more ...
David Nice
Prospects hadn't seemed that great for this new Covent Garden Così. Could Semyon Bychkov, powerful earth-and-fire conductor of Richard Strauss's darker operas, possibly find the right proportions of air and water in Mozart? Would German director Jan Philipp Gloger prove better than his Bayreuth reputation? As it happened, the sextet of half-unknown principals never sang less than respectably, and the production had some good ideas, though mostly linked to the look of expensive sets rather than to focused work on the psychology of confused lovers. It was Bychkov who nearly sank the evening. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As we know, Hollywood loves a remake, and John Sturges's original Magnificent Seven from 1960 is now venerable enough to be a complete blank to contemporary yoof. But while Sturges's tale of mercenaries defending a Mexican village from bandits had itself been adapted from Kurosawa's classic tale of 16th century Japan, Seven Samurai, this new Magnificent Seven merely moves the action north of the border to the badlands of the Old West.It's 1879, and we find ourselves in the isolated town of Rose Creek, a rickety settlement with a church, a saloon and the usual collection of old-timers, whores Read more ...
Barney Harsent
This look back at the events earlier this year when the country elected to buy a car, sight unseen – and from proven liars – to drive us into an imagined and politically unstable future, was a little confusing to me at first. Now, I do remember a fat, milky manchild holding a pasty aloft like some kind of magic totem – that definitely happened. I remember Toad of Toad Hall standing in front of a deeply racist poster hoping to elicit passion from patriots on the very same day that a Labour politician was brutally murdered by an angry racist. I also remember a man with the complexion of vacuum- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
American director Ira Sachs is becoming a master at telling the small stories of life, giving them a resonance that speaks beyond the immediate context in which they unfold. That context, for his three most recent films, has been New York, and he’s as acute as anyone filming that metropolis today in sensing how the city itself plays a role in the lives of those who make it their home.Or rather, as often as not, who struggle to do so. His last film, Love Is Strange, was about the tribulations involved in finding a new home for a long-established couple whose circumstances had changed (as had Read more ...
Florence Hallett
If you’ve had half an eye on BBC Four’s conceptual art week, you’ll have noticed that the old stuff is where it’s at, with Duchamp’s urinal making not one but two appearances, equalled only by Martin Creed, that other well-known, conceptual stalwart (who actually isn’t as old as he looks). The BBC would say that this is because 2016 marks the centenary of Dada, the anarchic, absurdist art movement (if a movement is what it was) that saw artists begin routinely to challenge and ridicule accepted ideas about art – what it is, why it is and what it’s for.The other reason, as demonstrated in Tate Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Michael Head's new play is based on the book They Took the Lead by Stephen Jenkins, which tells the true story of events at Clapton Orient (now Leyton Orient) Football Club during the First World War, when 41 men associated with the east London team – players, backroom staff and supporters – joined up en masse to fight the Kaiser. Three never returned and several others were seriously injured.It's a familiar story of young men – whether united by town or occupation – who joined “pals regiments” (the Orient players joined the Footballers' Battalion) where they thought they would be having a Read more ...
Marianka Swain
We are lost in the wood. In the limbo state between dream and reality, memory and present, youth and age, companionship and seclusion, life and death, struggle and success, fame and obscurity. Pinter often visits that place of in between, but the elusive and haunting No Man’s Land – electrifyingly presented by two of our greatest thespians – dwells deep within it.There’s a primal power to Sean Mathias’s staging of this absurdist work (returning to the site of its 1975 premiere), with projection designer Nina Dunn's whispering trees conjuring dark fairy tales as our introduction to this Read more ...