Reviews
Kieron Tyler
In 1969, a tranche of American musicians looked back to the country’s past for inspiration. Bob Dylan followed John Wesley Harding with Nashville Skyline. The Band’s eponymous second album hit the shops. The Flying Burrito Brothers debuted with The Gilded Palace of Sin. The rootsy was a default. But choosing to draw on country and Appalachian traditions did not have to mean playing it straight. On the amazing Farewell Aldebaren, Judy Henske and Jerry Yester used banjo and hammered dulcimer. They also employed the Chamberlain, a Mellotron-like instrument where the keyboard triggers tape Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Symphonies 5-8 Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra/Lan Shui (Orchid)Lively speeds which never sound hurried. Sparky, well-articulated playing, the period brass adding a distinctive colour. Crisp, clear, recording. All present. One of this job’s many pleasures is coming across a disc from an unexpected source which confounds expectations. And here’s Volume 2 of a Beethoven cycle from an orchestra and conductor I’d never heard of. It’s not damning with faint praise to say that I couldn’t believe how good this set is, and for a second I wondered whether I was the victim of a Joyce Hatto Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Have you seen Fleabag yet? If not, here’s the one-word review: brilliant. You need three hours to watch the lot on the iPlayer, which is BBC Three’s main address these days. Do come back afterwards and read this longer appreciation, which contains spoilers.So, Fleabag. Brilliant. It was written by and stars Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the eponymous singleton, and began life as a fringe play at Edinburgh before moving south. Like Miranda it features a dark-haired single woman making confiding asides to camera. It’s as if she’s her own Greek chorus supplying a running commentary from the wings. ( Read more ...
Helen Wallace
He still looks every inch the golden boy, but Vasily Petrenko has just turned 40, and next month celebrates a decade with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Time well spent, as this impressive evening revealed: after years of Russian immersion under his crisp command, here’s a band who can conjure Shostakovich’s smoudering darkness, and all the glitter and the grit in Rachmaninov’s third symphony.If the concert belonged to Petrenko, it was probably the promise of Truls Mørk playing Shostakovich’s first cello concerto that had packed the hall. Young Russian Alexey Stadler (pictured below) had Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Red, the colour of blood, passion, love and hate, is Almodóvar’s trademark and in Julieta, his 20th film (and surely one of his most visually lustrous), it’s never far away. It’s there in the opening sequence, a close-up of thick folds of red fabric moving like a curtain. Then we see, as the camera cuts away, that it’s a dress worn by Julieta, a woman in her fifties (Emma Suarez, pictured below).She’s new to Almodóvar, as are most of the actresses in the film apart from his idiosyncratic muse Rossy de Palma and Susi Sanchez (the soundtrack is written by his usual musician, Alberto Iglesias). Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Do you carry a small part of the Congo every day on your person? Probably. Your mobile phone will contain coltan, aka columbite tantalum, which is used to make your electronics work better. And this is mined in the Congo. The trouble is that fluctuating prices for this mineral, as well as competition for such resources, encourages conflict between militia groups, which is one reason for the constant wars in this region of Africa. Another reason is the legacy of colonialism. Another reason is unfettered masculinity. And so it goes on.Adam Brace’s new play, whose title alludes to the advert for Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
H Division has a new home in Whitechapel that basks in the white heat of the technological revolution. The police station not only has a telephone but a “microreader” that allows the user to check thousands of miniaturised card indexes. Alas, a wry smile is all the viewer is likely to get from this opening episode of the fourth season. Nothing happens until the last ten minutes.When it was originally broadcast on Amazon Prime, Ripper Street 4 began with a two-hour episode. Terrestrial viewers on BBC Two have to make do with 60 minutes of scene-setting, throat-clearing and explanation. Three Read more ...
Andrew Cartmel
As I waited outside the entrance to the Royal Albert Hall, someone leaned over to me and said: “My cocaine is to your left.” I glanced in that direction and realised they’d actually said “Michael Caine is to your left”, and indeed he was, on his way inside to hear a prom devoted to music by his old friend Quincy Jones.It’s hard to know where to begin with Jones’s musical CV. He’s had a towering career in jazz, film music and pop, and any one of these genres could enough provide material from him to fill a series of proms.The Metropole Orkest, conducted by Jules Buckley and led by Arlia de Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Angel by Henry Naylor, Gilded Balloon ★★★★Rehana tells us what her hometown Kobane, in Syria, is like – “A small border town where nothing happens … like Berwick-on-Tweed” – a typically wry and smart line in Henry Naylor's final instalment of his “Arabian Nightmares” triptych (following The Collector and Echoes).It's based on the modern legend of Rehana, or “The Angel of Kobane”, a Kurdish resistance fighter and sniper who reputedly killed 100 Isis jihadis. She tells her story chronologically and plays all the people mentioned; we begin by seeing her close relationship with her farmer Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
If you go down to the woods today, to be sure of a big surprise is a contradiction in terms, but this pair of sylvan adventures by Matthias Pintscher and Mendelssohn was another example of the discreetly sensitive programme-building which has distinguished the present season of BBC Proms.Cello concertos have been a theme. Two in the last week alone (from Charlotte Bray and Colin Matthews) alongside classics by Elgar (at the First Night) and Haydn, played in yesterday’s matinee Prom by Narek Hakhnazaryan and the Ulster Orchestra. Pintscher's Reflections on Narcissus falls between them: written Read more ...
David Kettle
Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs ★★★★★ Is this even theatre? Hardly – cabaret, more like, as Scottish actor-author-provocateur Alan Cumming sings his way through songs by Sondheim, Weill, Lady Gaga and more, interspersing them with anecdotes about tattoos, Liza Minnelli and a less than happy childhood. It’s one of the flagship shows of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, which has transformed the hall in its own Royal Mile HQ into a sumptuous nightspot for the event, with crowds – including Mark Thomas and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on this particular evening – flocking to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Zoë Coombs Marr, Underbelly Cowgate ★★★Zoë Coombs Marr's debut show last year, Dave, gained a lot of attention, and rightly so. Dave is an old-school male comic whose line in misogyny doesn't sit well in modern comedy – even if his material might find an audience in the wider world.For this year's show, Trigger Warning, which won the Barry Award at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in April, Coombs Marr has broadened out the gag, here placing Dave in a situation in which he is hilariously out of place. To combat his critics, he tells us, he has stopped delivering any gags at all and will perform Read more ...