Reviews
Heartless Bastards, BorderlineWednesday, 02 September 2015
Some consider Heartless Bastards to be the best band you’ve probably never heard of – albeit blighted by an awful name. Others say the Texas-based four-piece are merely a jumped-up garage band. Wherever you stand, though, one thing is beyond... Read more... |
Miss JulieTuesday, 01 September 2015
The television series Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs, along with Robert Atman’s film Gosford Park, notably illustrate the public’s continued fascination with the relation between masters, mistresses and their servants. Yet none of them, not... Read more... |
Prom 60: Denk, San Francisco Symphony, Tilson ThomasMonday, 31 August 2015
One astonishing creature was missing from the cavalcade of meerkats and whatnot featured in Sunday afternoon’s Life Story Prom introduced by Sir David Attenborough. I mean, of course, the species known as henricuscowelliensis. Or otherwise, plain... Read more... |
The Trials of Jimmy Rose, ITVMonday, 31 August 2015
“Breezy” isn't a word we associate with Ray Winstone. We’re more used to something like “big slab o’ bastard”, the epithet he got (they were biased Glaswegians, admittedly) most recently for his appearance in Robert Carlyle’s The Legend of Barney... Read more... |
Murmel Murmel, King's Theatre, EdinburghMonday, 31 August 2015
It felt a bit like we were seeing things. At the fag-end of Edinburgh’s 2015 August of festival mayhem, with extreme exhaustion and input overload mixing to brain-addling effect in the heads of most festival-goers and participants, a hallucinatory,... Read more... |
Oliver Sacks rememberedSunday, 30 August 2015
Oliver Sacks, peerless explorer of the human brain, has today died of cancer aged 82. Inspired by case histories of patients suffering from neurological disorders, Sacks's eloquent musings on consciousness — which he termed 'neurological... Read more... |
Prom 58: Kullervo, BBCSO, OramoSunday, 30 August 2015
Last night's Proms performance of Sibelius's Kullervo symphony was radiant, unforgettable, but there has also been a pure coincidence this past week which is simply too good to pass over unremarked: Thursday also saw the first-time publication... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: The Isley BrothersSunday, 30 August 2015
The Isley Brothers: The RCA Victor & T-Neck Album Masters (1958–1983)Head straight for Track 14, Disc 10’s quadrophonic mix – which plays fine on a normal stereo – of The Isley Brothers’ version of Seals & Crofts’ “Summer Breeze”. It’s an... Read more... |
Missa Solemnis, SCO, Ticciati, Usher Hall, EdinburghSunday, 30 August 2015
This was a performance laden with contradictions. After last weekend’s gargantuan Grande Messe des Morts, the standard issue Edinburgh Festival Chorus seemed much smaller – but not really small enough. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra was in its... Read more... |
Prom 57: Pires, COE, HaitinkSaturday, 29 August 2015
It’s hardly surprising that at the grand old age of 86 Bernard Haitink can pack them in at the Albert Hall so that there’s no room left in the Arena and those still queueing 10 minutes before the concert have to go up to the Gallery. But he was also... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2015: Kieran Hodgson/ Richard Gadd/ Trygve WakenshawSaturday, 29 August 2015
Kieran Hodgson, Voodoo Rooms ★★★★When Kieran Hodgson was growing up in West Yorkshire in the early years of the century, he was obsessed with two things – cycling and Lance Armstrong, then the greatest cyclist the world had ever seen.In 2003,... Read more... |
The Magic Flute, Komische Oper Berlin, Edinburgh Festival TheatreSaturday, 29 August 2015
In 2007, a tiny British theatre company called 1927 staged their first ever show at the Edinburgh Fringe – the darkly reimagined collection of fairytales and fables Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Now, almost a decade on, they are back... Read more... |
