Reviews
Adam Sweeting
The miracle of galloping digital technology has become a mixed blessing. We have iPads, space stations and self-parking cars. On the other hand, we also have what might be perfectly good TV programmes made ludicrous by absurd CGI monsters.ITV's new-look Beowulf (★★) is an odd beast. Ostensibly, it's based on the epic Anglo-Saxon alliterative poem about the titular hero and his Scandinavian exploits, but students of Old English literature should look away now, because it's more like the computer game Clash of Clans, or a reduced-scale Game of Thrones with a cheaper cast. The best thing about Read more ...
Richard Bratby
As pianist Beatrice Rana ran up the final bars of Schumann’s Piano Concerto, the conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla turned to her soloist and simply beamed. As well she might. Rana is an artist whose advance publicity belies the seriousness and selflessness of her playing. Her Schumann didn’t concern itself with flashy effects (though there were some daring variations of tempo) or even, particularly, beauty of tone (though the iridescent glow she gave to the little cascades of chords that link the Intermezzo to the finale showed that she commands an impressive palette).Rana’s performance was more Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is a drama played out in shadow. Shine too bright, too unyielding a directorial light on it, and the delicate dramatic fabric – all unspokens and unspeakables – frays into air. Just over a year ago, director David Edwards and the Philharmonia Orchestra gave us a semi-staging of exquisitely allusive simplicity, leaving the music to fill the gaps between symbol and emotion. Now it’s the turn of Peter Sellars and Simon Rattle – reuniting to stage the work that first brought them together in 1993.And what a difference a decade (or two) makes. Where Rattle and Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Please, sir, I want some more. Will Tuckett and Alasdair Middleton's Elizabeth is soul food for the hungry dance fan; an ingenious blend of words, music and dance that beguiles and entertains in equal measure. The shame is that it will be seen by so few people: created in 2013 for a special performance in Greenwich and now restaged for a week's run in the Royal Opera House's Linbury studio theatre, it will reach a total audience of mere hundreds – but I'd back it for a month or more, and to be a huge hit with theatre-goers as well as dance-lovers.The piece focuses on Elizabeth I, from Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of the more unusual Broadway offerings of recent times crosses the Atlantic with considerable style in an Off West End premiere of 2006 New York entry Grey Gardens that punches well above its weight. As luxuriantly cast as it is elaborately (and carefully) designed, Thom Southerland's loving production honours a peculiar slab of Americana that clearly won't be to all tastes, and some won't see beyond the second-act camp to locate the symbiotic portrait of love and loss that underpins the material.But step back from designer Tom Rogers' cunning scrap heap of a set, and you'll find that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Though Soft Machine were the first band to suggest Canterbury could be musically noteworthy, the appearance of Caravan’s debut album in late 1968, Kevin Ayers' post-Soft Machine solo outing two years later, and the subsequent arrivals of Gong, Matching Mole, Hatfield & the North and the solo Robert Wyatt confirmed the city had a fertile scene. It was a fluid environment where musicians from one band played with others. The mutability was captured in one of the most entangled of Pete Frame’s celebrated Rock Family Trees.And at its top: The Wilde Flowers. The band formed in 1963 and Read more ...
David Kettle
Forget your celebratory Messiahs and your crowd-pleasing Strauss galas. Instead of easing listeners gently into 2016 with conventional New Year fare, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra went for the shock approach in its 2016 opening concert: non-stop, back-to-back, uncompromising contemporary music. And it felt like a marvellously bracing, ear-cleansing, provocative way to kick off the year’s concerts.German composer and conductor Matthias Pintscher is the BBCSSO’s artist-in-association, and he’d been given free rein to curate and conduct the evening. What he came up with felt like quite a Read more ...
David Nice
"I fell in love with the psychology of Goya and his palette,” wrote brilliant composer-pianist Enrique Granados at the beginning of an evocative paean prefacing his six original Goyescas of 1909-11, finely-wrought gems of the piano repertoire. In love, too, are most of us who have gaped with awe at the astonishing range and careful selection of portraits in the current National Gallery exhibition - one of its best ever, equal in revelation to the recent Rembrandt spectacular.No-one wants music to distract from the detailed contemplation of all those Spanish nobles, intellectuals and craftsmen Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Walter Presents, Channel 4's clever and welcome strand of foreign, subtitled drama for broadcast both on television and online, is already throwing up some interesting titles. It launched with the Cold War-set Deutschland 83, and now second in the series to be given a broadcast run is Spin, first seen on French television in 2012 under the title Les hommes de l'ombre (The Shadow Men).Like many French serials (including the fantastic police procedural Spiral), Spin likes to take its time. By mistake (All 4's or mine, I don't know which) I watched the second episode first and then the opener; Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar: Sea Pictures, Polonia, Pomp and Circumstance Marches 1-5 Alice Coote, Hallé/Sir Mark Elder (Hallé)“Foam-flakes cloud the hurrying blast.” Ouch. The texts chosen by Elgar for his Sea Pictures haven't all worn well, though Alice Elgar's words do sound perfectly fine when accompanied by her husband's music. I didn't notice any longueurs at all in this delicious performance from mezzo Alice Coote, her voice appealing enough to make a tax bill seem seductive. Sir Mark Elder's responsive Hallé play with real delicacy, Elgar's scoring unusually transparent. “Sabbath Morning at Sea” is Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Like the seven previous movies written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight is violent, verbose, and self-regardingly funny. It’s also ingeniously structured (in Godardian chapters), as much so as Pulp Fiction. The eagle-eyed will spot a visual clue in the first half of the narrative that anticipates the hairpin bend it takes in the second. The knowledge that Tarantino never staunches blood for long meanwhile augurs the inevitable carnage that likens this slow-burning post-Civil War frontier mystery to Reservoir Dogs especially.Typically for a filmmaker engrossed by genre Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Interesting idea – a Western set in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1870s. Jessica Raine, spotted last year as the other Boleyn girl in Wolf Hall and evidently keen to put Call the Midwife as far behind her as possible, stars as Annie Quantain, a schoolmaster's widow forced to leave the family home thanks to a mountain of debts. As the bailiffs cart away the furniture, she's horrified to find herself a penniless vagrant. Desperate not to give up her children, she gets a tip that there's work to be had on a new viaduct-building project out in wildest Culverdale, and before long she's in among the Read more ...