Reviews
Sarah Kent
American photographer William Eggleston is famous for dedicating himself to colour photography at a time when it was still considered kitsch – acceptable for wedding and Christening photos, but not much else. The best known example of his embrace of colour is a 1973 photo of a red light bulb hanging from a red ceiling, a picture devoid of subject matter beyond redness and the associations it triggers.You could almost say the same of a photograph he took the following year of a young woman at a fast food counter in Biloxi, Mississippi (main picture). We see her from the side waiting Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bruckner: Mass No. 3 in F minor Soloists, Bavarian Radio Choir, Bamberg Symphony Orchestra/Robin Ticciati (Tudor)Good Bruckner recordings aren’t just the preserve of elderly conductors. Robin Ticciati’s version of the youthful F minor Mass is both musically satisfying and emotionally involving: his non-interventionalist approach reaping huge dividends. He’s helped by the performers: the Bamberg players’ burnished warmth irresistible alongside supple, rich singing from the Bavarian Radio Choir. Their dynamic control is glorious – sample the “Gloria”’s full-throated opening, the choir’s tone Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Two cultural giants from different spheres align to occasionally sublime results in The BFG. Steven Spielberg's film locates the beatific in its (literally) outsized star, Mark Rylance, but lapses into the banal when its eponymous Big Friendly Giant – Roald Dahl's 1982 literary creation made motion-capture fresh – isn't careering across the screen.As a sort of companion piece to E.T., which shares this film's screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, who died last year, the film brings an otherworldly presence into our world of the everyday. And yet there remains something pro forma about the abiding Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
London’s West End may be the envy of the world, but when it comes to musicals the big-hitting theatres might have to up their game a bit if they’re to keep up with the city’s rival offerings. Compare the summer’s biggest opening, Aladdin (currently failing to pull a genie out of its bottle at the Prince Edward Theatre) with just a few of the current upstart alternatives: the cheeky and charming Bugsy Malone at the Lyric Hammersmith and the thoughtful Into The Woods at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Now, from Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, comes yet another challenger – a gritty new Jesus Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Winifred Knights (1899-1947) was an impeccable draughtsman: her portrait drawings are compelling. She deployed fine webs of lines, her sure hand applying gradated pressure resulting in mesmerising studies of people that are hypnotically fascinating. Who knew pencil could do so much? But she was also a painter, a slow worker using techniques that were deliberately old-fashioned.As much of her surviving work as it is possible to retrieve is on view at Dulwich in an act of inspired re-discovery. The exhibition also tells us much about women artists near the beginning of the 20th century and of Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Does Alexei Ratmansky, former Bolshoi director and current world-leading classical choreographer, really love Prokofiev's Cinderella, or did he choose to create a new one for Australian Ballet in 2013 principally because he wasn't happy with his first (for the Mariinsky) in 2002? My bet is a bit of both: the second production, like the first, shines with an unfeigned affection for both score and story, but it also reads as a candy-coloured riposte to the usual adjectives applied to the 2002 production: ugly, spiky, uneven. If Ratmansky's first Cinderella was a tongue-scorching Wasabi pea, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the third of the rebooted new generation Star Treks, and ultimately leaves you with the feeling that the intrepid crew of the starship Enterprise continue to boldly go, but still haven't quite arrived. On the other hand, the fact that a sprawling high-tech movie like this can manage to recapture some of the friendly intimacy of the old TV series gives it an undeniable charm.The opening sequence, where Captain James T Kirk is on a diplomatic mission to deliver a peacemaking gift to a funny-looking race called the Teenaxi, suddenly turns to farce when the angry locals prove teeny indeed Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Even in a performance as well-organised as this one, masterminded by Gianandrea Noseda, there is still something of the codebook about the Missa solemnis. Its length and scale simultaneously attract devotion and repel the kind of affection drawn by earlier, spaciously conceived and more abstractly “spiritual” works such as the “Pastoral” Symphony and Violin Concerto.On a practical level, Noseda staged the work to best advantage across the resounding space of the Royal Albert Hall. The 200-strong combined forces of the Hallé Choir and Manchester Chamber Choir made no concession to the kind of Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Becca Stevens’ limpid, luscious and artful fusion of Appalachian folk, jazz and indie rock found a perfectly empathetic setting in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, in an inspired choice for Lauren Laverne’s Wonder Women series of summer gigs. Stevens’ band began honing their connoisseur's stylistic melting pot more than a decade ago, and has been a fixture on the New York scene for some years. As she begins to make a name over here, British audiences are due for a treat. Stevens blends original compositions with covers of a broad range of sympathetic writers, from Usher to Joni Mitchell. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Squash! Bulldoze! Blow-Up! Tie Up! Break-Up! Re-Build! There is practically nothing the artist Cornelia Parker won’t and can’t do with found materials, offcuts, the discarded and the recycled, not to mention tieing up Rodin’s The Kiss at the Tate in miles of string. Since she discovered bulldozer drivers like nothing better than bulldozing, she has been practically unstoppable. That DANGER! sign can be all too true when she is blowing something up, although found materials have included two small wooden American churches, one hit by lightning, and the other torched by racist biker gang Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Neil LaBute’s exercise in self-flagellation, first seen in 2005 and adapted for film in 2013, offers his familiar misanthropic take on the battle of the sexes. This one concerns Guy (Charles Dorfman), engaged to be married and embarking on a tour of ex-girlfriends across America – ostensibly to right wrongs, but murkier motives soon emerge.It’s inescapably formulaic and repetitive, with Guy visiting a series of women in a series of hotels, each exchange following a similar pattern: defensiveness, rekindled intimacy, revelation and recrimination. Gary Condes’s production differentiates the Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
If you've been outside in the past week or so, you will have seen someone playing Pokémon Go even if you didn’t realise it at the time. To the casual eye, a Pokémon Go player might appear to be checking their phone for an incoming text or studying a Google Map. Just normal people doing normal phone stuff.But if you were to peer over their shoulder, you would see that they're actually looking at a simplified street layout of the surrounding area as they walk along, sometimes glancing up to dodge an oncoming lamp post or pedestrian. After a few paces they might stop, hold their phone in one Read more ...