Reviews
Jon Turney
If you are bothered about climate change – and who isn’t? – you’ll soon come across references to the “energy transition”. Example? Look, here’s one in this week’s New Scientist, a full-page ad from Equinor, the rebranded Norwegian state-owned oil and gas giant. Why is Equinor, now styling itself an energy company, still exploring for new oil and gas deposits?Because, they say, demand will persist for decades to come, so it’s “the responsible thing to do” – even though the company is also investing in renewables, albeit only a quarter as much, to help “speed up the energy transition”. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest true-crime adaptation about a murderous man and his female victims turns its star into a bloody mess on a hospital table, her vital signs flatlining. And that’s just halfway through, with two episodes to go. At least the second half of Until I Kill You offers less gruesome generic territory (spoilers ahead): the bungled police investigation of the assault; the sympathetic WPC assigned to the surviving woman, Delia Balmer (Anna Maxwell Martin, pictured below, left); the dangerously clumsy twists and turns of the justice system; the eventual resolution of this sorry saga. But Read more ...
David Nice
As Steven Isserlis announced just before the final work, in more senses than one, of a five-day revelation, the 79 year old Fauré’s last letter told his wife that “at the moment I am well, very well, despite the little bout of fatigue which is caused by the end of the Quartet. I am happy with everything, and I should like everyone to be happy all around me, and everywhere”.The world is an unhappier place than ever this morning, yet somehow that incandescent performance of a uniquely beautiful string quartet made things not so hard. Today there’s calm resignation, though that probably won’t, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Catalan capital has given its name to a famous number in the Stephen Sondheim musical, Company. And here it is lending geographical specificity to the second two-hander, following the far-superior Camp Siegfried, from American writer Bess Wohl to reach London in recent years.The star presence of TV name Lily Collins in a demanding stage debut will pique curiosity, for sure, but the play feels as if it wants to be weightier than it is and can't decide whether to surrender to cliche, or subvert it.Collins plays Irene, a glammed-up American abroad whom we first see in a lustful embrace with Read more ...
Guy Oddy
More than once during their barnstorming performance this weekend, Bobby Vylan, vocalist with Bob Vylan proclaimed from the stage of Birmingham’s O2 Institute that “We are the cutest band in punk rock. The friendliest band in rock’n’roll. The most important band in Great Britain”. He might just have been right.Bobby and his drumming buddy, Bobbie Vylan (in a world of celebrity-botherers Bobby and Bobbie like to keep things anonymous) certainly have the songs; they’ve definitely built up a rapport with their fans and stay long after the house lights come up to chat, sign merchandise and have Read more ...
Robert Beale
The BBC Philharmonic were right to bill Garrick Ohlsson, soloist in Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, as the main attraction in Saturday’s concert.The septuagenarian American is a force of nature and an exceptional artist: his playing of Rachmaninov in his last visit to Manchester remains in the memory as an exhibition of mastery. So it was again, in another concerto thick with notes.But those notes were played with entrancing grace and melodic power, as well as virtuosity, and delicacy of touch as well as insight. Clara Schumann (whose performances did much to establish it at first) said there Read more ...
David Nice
Earlier this year, Steven Isserlis curated a revelatory Sheffield Chamber Music Festival spotlighting Saint-Saëns, with plentiful Fauré towards the end. Now it’s the younger composer’s turn, marking his death 100 years ago on 4 November 1924, but his mentor has more than a look-in over five concerts featuring six bright stars, "Team Fauré".Friday’s launch made us love Fauré even more, but also opened many ears to the early genius of Saint-Saëns. The programme, delivered to an audience dotted with familiar faces among musicians, was not quite as planned. Personable and wry as ever, Isserlis Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
In Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), set during the summer of 1983, the young gay narrator, William Beckwith, lives in Holland Park. That same year and location furnish the setting of the first part of Hollinghurst’s third novel, his masterpiece, The Line of Beauty (2004), in which the young gay hero, Nick Guest, becomes a lodger – a guest – in the house of a recently elected Tory MP, Gerald Fedden, whose son Toby he’d fancied at Oxford.Nick loses his virginity with a young black man called Leo in the bushes of a communal garden behind the Feddens’ house, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Springs begins cooking with “Spaced Out Invaders - Part I Quirks,” its fourth track. A spindly, rotating guitar figure interweaves with clattering percussion and pulsating electric bass. Around three minutes in, a sax – which, until this point, has kept in the background – begins whipping up a maelstrom. Overall, the effect conjured is that of a space rock-inclined exotica, Martin Denny had he been an early Seventies freak.Elsewhere, Springs turns corners into pure kosmiche-adjacent spaciness (“Spaced Out Invaders - Part II Vessels”), Canterbury scene jazz rock were it informed by a Gang Of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After the chart success of his second album, June 1969’s Hot Buttered Soul, it was inevitable that any single had to represent Isaac Hayes in a different way to the LP. The album’s 12-minute version of “Walk on by” would not work as a seven-incher. There was also “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which clocked in at over 18 minutes. They did, though, become the A- and B-sides of a tie-in single. But only after significant editing.The decision to truncate album tracks for the singles market set a pattern. Follow-up album The Isaac Hayes Movement opened with a just-short of 12-minute cover of “I Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s 1648 in Agra, and an excitable young guardsman has come up with an idea: a giant flying platform that he calls an “aeroplat”. As he might slide off it in transit, for good measure he gives it a belt to tie him down. It would be a “seat belt”, he suggests triumphantly.This detail tells you a lot about the world the American playwright Rajiv Joseph has created in Guards at the Taj (2015). It’s a fantasy, semi-surreal, with one foot planted in the quotidian. The terrain is from a distant era that verges on mythology, a time of autocratic emperors with grand projects, though its two Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In the foyer of the Linbury Theatre is an exhibition which gives a very upbeat account of the presence of black dancers in British ballet. Photographs dating back to the 1950s, 60s and 70s show practitioners of extraordinary physicality and verve, with wide, confident smiles.So what happened? On the whole, not much. Yes, Jerry Douglas, aged 19 in 1997, became the first African American officially to join the Royal Ballet. But was he given roles to match his talent? On this point the exhibition text is mute, but my last remembered sighting of Douglas on the Covent Garden stage was as a Read more ...