Reviews
Marina Vaizey
Reputations and popularity rise and fall and rise again in cycles, and so with the redoubtable Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879). Now considered one of the finest photographers ever, she was an amateur gifted with incredible tenacity, intellectual and physical energy, and stamina. Stubborn and ambitious, for her class and gender she was unusually interested in business. She sold her work, which indeed she copyrighted, through the printsellers Colnaghi’s, and she was always experimenting and thinking of ways to promote her achievement.One of the seven Pattle sisters – classical Victorians Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
"Exhibition on Screen" is a logical extension of the recent phenomenon of screenings of live performances of opera and theatre. Initiated with the Leonardo exhibition of 2012 at London’s National Gallery, this is its third season, and the format remains unchanged: a specific show provides the pretext for a bespoke film that goes beyond the gallery walls. Acting as an introductory biography, it interweaves the narration of an artist’s life and work with an illuminating visit to the exhibition; the high-definition, large-screen experience of the cinema more than trumps television, computer or Read more ...
David Nice
Send in the clowns, as they sing in this palace-of-varieties first act, not for Pagliacci, Leoncavallo’s sole foothold on today’s operatic repertoire, but for the fool-for-love heroine of a sparkling, swooning rarity. Musically, Zazà is a notch above Mascagni and Giordano for orchestral delights, just below supreme genius Puccini, but its admittedly thinly-spread plot ends by being rather remarkable. Our heroine-artiste may be temporarily broken by her infatuation with a bourgeois theatregoer who turns out to be married, but she’ll return to the stage, and she even manages to expose him for Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It might sound hackneyed but Sculpture can only be described as truly psychedelic. They achieve this via a thoroughly original stage set-up. Dan Hayhurst, in a black tee-shirt and military cap, manipulates sounds on a laptop, with a rack of magnetic tape loops to his left which he carefully plucks up and sets on reels, but what makes the London duo a unique proposition is the zoetrope-style visuals of Reuben Sutherland.Moustachioed and clad in an eye-watering multi-coloured poncho, long stripey socks and what appear to be plus-fours, he places cards of images on a vinyl turntable with a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1986, the Russian state honoured Mikael Tariverdiev with the People's Artist of Russia award, a mark of respect given to only the most significant figures in the arts. The Tbilisi-born composer was the head of the Composer’s Guild of the Soviet Cinematographer’s Union and had written concertos, operas, ballet music, song cycles (Russian poetry was a favourite), music for television and for 132 films. He was prolific, saw few boundaries and, in 1956, had set Shakespeare sonnets to music. The following year, he did the same for Japanese poetry. But his film music resonates most as it was Read more ...
geoff brown
There are 12 of them, standing in a semi-circle. No conductor in sight. Instead they start singing by striking some invisible match. Immediately the hall is blazing with heat, light, and the ecstatic sounds of Tudor polyphony. Now celebrating its tenth concert season, the British unaccompanied choral group Stile Antico have been singing this repertoire since they first came together; and this Wigmore Hall shindig, exuberantly received by a packed house, marked the anniversary by revisiting the music sung on their very first CD, Music for Compline, in 2007.Have they got bored with this Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The great Caryl Churchill careers down a blind alley in Here We Go, and the results aren't pretty, especially within the cavernous confines of the National Theatre's Lyttelton – this writer's second play this year at that address. A 45-minute triptych about death that gets worse as it goes on, the play put me in mind of the American critic Walter Kerr's famous remark about Neil Simon not having an idea for a play but writing one anyway. On this occasion, it would occur that Churchill had an idea or two and then forgot to write the accompanying play. That, in turn, comes as Read more ...
David Kettle
James MacMillan’s sacred drama Since it was the day of preparation… got its first outing at the Edinburgh International Festival back in 2012. But it was an entirely different experience hearing it in a cavernous Edinburgh cathedral on a chilly November evening – in a welcome re-performance from co-commissioners the Hebrides Ensemble plus Synergy Vocals – to catching it amid the city’s August festival mayhem. And one that suited the piece’s slow-moving, contemplative atmosphere far more strongly, too.In fact, it’s a moot point what the work actually is – sometimes operatic, sometimes Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Any partnership that lasts for 20 years deserves a party, and last night at Sadler's was a celebration of the wonderfully fruitful working relationship between choreographer Russell Maliphant and lighting designer Michael Hulls. Both clinking with awards by now, they have been a signficant force in British dance for two decades, and have been right there at some of its key moments – think of Broken Fall, the 2003 piece for Sylvie Guillem and the BalletBoyz which launched Guillem's extraordinary post-ballet career; think of PUSH, the 2005 Guillem/Maliphant vehicle that was the first Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nostalgia for the good old days of mutually assured destruction? You’d have got long odds on such a thing on 9 November 1989, the day the Berlin Wall was breached. A quarter of a century on, the Americans and the Russians are entangled in a whole other theatre of war in which the idea of negotiating with the enemy is unthinkable. The Soviets may have been abominable commie bastards but, hey, our guys could still clink a glass with them. So Steven Spielberg is able to visit the Cold War in something like a spirit of levity.Bridge of Spies is much more overtly an entertainment than Schindler’s Read more ...
Florence Hallett
There are some wonderful things in this exhibition, and that’s no surprise: the British Empire endured for over 500 years and at its peak extended across a quarter of the world’s land mass. Preparing an exhibition of corresponding reach must have involved considering a vast range of objects, but choosing well is another matter entirely. Severely overfilled, this is a show hampered by too broad a scope, but also by the sensitive nature of its subject; in its eagerness to present points of view other than that of the British colonists, there is a crippling reluctance to omit anything at all.So Read more ...
David Nice
Greek family smashups at the Almeida now yield to northern agony sagas, less bloody but potentially just as harrowing. In Little Eyolf the 66-year-old Ibsen dissected a failed marriage as ruthlessly as Euripides, Strindberg or Bergman, who was in turn influenced by both of the great Scandinavian playwrights. Something of that pitilessness does emerge in Richard Eyre’s return to the Almeida, chiefly through an unsparing performance by Lydia Leonard and a blend of cold intimacy with powerful nature in Tim Hatley’s designs. The lower depths of pity and terror, though, remain unsounded. Read more ...