Reviews
Adam Sweeting
On Monday ITV showed BAFTA Celebrates Downton Abbey, in which a massed gathering of cast and crew plus a few celebrity guests toasted Downton's five-year stampede to global acclaim. Its creator Julian Fellowes waddled onstage and told an anecdote about how he'd been accosted by a Downton fan while browsing in a Barnes & Noble bookshop in New York. "Just let Edith be happy!" she wailed at him.As it turned out in this double-length finale, he did, exercising the God-like authority the Emmy, Golden Globe and BAFTA-scooping show has bestowed on him. In fact it all went a bit Richard Curtis as Read more ...
David Nice
The musical future looks bright indeed, at least from my perspective. There are more classical concerts than ever going on across the UK on most days of the year, so who can know with any authority what might have been missed? Yet each of theartsdesk’s classical music writers has a special take on the events of 2015, and part of mine has been the special privilege of following a trail of younger players in out-of-the-way places.Serendipity began in Fife’s East Neuk Festival, where travelling up a day earlier than originally planned meant I caught the second concert given by the young Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A host of pictorially arresting, even painterly images can't make a satisfying whole out of In the Heart of the Sea, Ron Howard's film that doesn't dig very deep, its penetrating title notwitstanding. Howard has always been drawn to unusual realms, whether they be the intellect in A Beautiful Mind or space in Apollo 13 but his would-be literary-historical voyage into the world of squalls at sea has too many passages that are simply wet. Bring back Master and Commander. At heart a sort of Into the Storm with English Lit 101 bells on, the film posits a look at how Herman Melville's 1851 Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
When a discussion about ‘What was the best game of 2015?" stretches through a whole evening in the pub you know that: (a) you need to stop socialising with games journalists, and (b) 2015 has been a corker of a year in videogames.Crystal balls make great paperweights, as the saying goes, and while just a year ago many games critics were lamenting the lack of original titles in the 2015 release list, few could have predicted the breadth of quality that has punctuated the calendar. It has been a year filled with high-achieving, ambitious games alongside shoestring indie gems. And the good news Read more ...
graham.rickson
Does classical music still matter? Of course it does – sample any one of these ten discs and discover why. All of them are available as CDs as well as downloads – the classical CD shop may be almost extinct, but the physical product refuses to die.CPE Bach: Symphonies Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/Rebecca Miller (Signum)You wonder what facial expressions JS Bach might have pulled when listening to these five symphonies composed by his second son Carl Philipp Emmanuel, whose career blossomed during a 28-year spell under the employ of Frederick the Great in Berlin. These short Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The sclerotic culture of dithering that afflicts the higher-ups at the BBC has been mercilessly exposed in W1A. It turns out that fear of failure was always a managerial thing at the corporation. How else did Dad’s Army have such a bumpy ride to birth? As told in We’re Doomed! The Dad’s Army Story, one of the most enduring sitcoms ever made was very nearly never made.Stephen Russell’s script took the facts of the story and wove them into a comedy drama that touched and tickled in equal measure. At the heart of it was the partnership of David Croft and Jimmy Perry, one a producer barely Read more ...
David Nice
Relatively recent tweaks to the abundant London concert scene have resulted in top-end events right up to Christmas. We have in part to thank the seasonal festival at St John’s Smith Square, postponing the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s holidays, putting them together with superb soloists and choirs, and serving up major Handel and Bach. One snag: their Christmas Oratorio when I last went to hear it turned out to be only four cantatas out of the sequence of six.You’d have to pay two period-instrument horn players if you included Part Four – the OAE didn’t – and yet as Richard Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It stands to reason that the contents of a prequel can never be entirely surprising. Some details have to be constants, some plot twists left unturned. As soon as it became clear that the second series of Noah Hawley’s Fargo predated the events of the first by some 25 years, we knew that state trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) would be left standing at the end of it. But of all the things to have as a constant, Wilson’s sympathetic portrayal of the steadfast cop was as secure a tether as they come.The universe of Fargo is one in which anything can happen, and frequently does – we’re Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
L'Arpeggiata seem to revel in being L'Anachronista. The baroque-jazz group led by the Graz-born theorbo player Christina Pluhar has been proudly and brazenly flouting the dictates of those who set the rules of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) for all 15 years of their existence.The printed programme, for example, mentioned “Francesco Turrisi – harpsichord”, and described in detail the delicious and lengthy agonies of tuning which his 1624 Ruckers copy harpsichord would have gone through prior to the concert; but what it didn't mention was that Turrisi would be spending roughly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is language a barrier to international recognition? Is English necessary to make waves worldwide? Musicians from the African continent and South America regularly perform in their native tongue beyond the borders of their home countries. But often they are – rightly or wrongly – marketed or pigeon-holed as world music, a branding which allows for eschewing the Anglophone. The always problematic label of world music can be and is debated endlessly, but one thing is certain: for Scandinavia, most internationally successful music is delivered in English.Of course, after setting quirky micro- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You'll feel guilty for having bothered with a programme after seeing The Lorax, the Dr Seuss adaptation that puts saving the environment centre-stage at the Old Vic just as the recent climate change gathering in Paris has done on the world stage. Full of unimpeachably good intentions, the production is fun and frolicsome up to a point, and sometimes simply bewildering.A second Matilda it most certainly is not, even though the Vic is now in the care of that great musical's director, Matthew Warchus. But Max Webster's production offers sufficient invention to more than sustain a six-week run, Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Is it possible for a carol concert to have a cult following? Ex Cathedra's annual Christmas Music by Candlelight performances in St Paul’s Church have quietly grown into a Birmingham institution. The audience has evolved its own rituals: camping out through the long interval in the box pews, and sharing improvised picnics of mulled wine and mince pies.The formula, devised by Ex Cathedra’s director Jeffrey Skidmore back when Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter was still lit by gaslight, is simple enough to allow creative elaboration: a candlelit sequence of mostly a capella, mostly modern choral Read more ...