Reviews
Richard Bratby
It would spoil the surprise to say what exactly emerges when – after a breathless build-up and a few glimpses of a seductive silhouette – the living doll Olympia finally makes her entrance in Act One of English Touring Opera’s new production of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Let’s just say that it’s startling, beautiful, strange and ever-so-slightly spooky. In a word: uncanny. In an even better word: Hoffmannesque. The audience gasped, and James Bonas’s production found its stride.The Tales of Hoffmann(*****) is the centrepiece (with Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande and Massenet’s Werther) Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Laraaji: Ambient 3 – Day of Radiance“If you are OK with this as being an ‘ambient’ record, then I am OK with it too,” says Laraaji in the booklet accompanying this new reissue of his first album, 1980's Day of Radiance. He goes on to explain that back then he described his music as “‘beautiful’ or ‘ethereal’ or ‘celestial’.” As for being defined as New Age, he declares: “I have always accepted it. It was a term that was very alive at the time I began exploring this direction.” Minimalism is another genre which Day of Radiance could slot into quite comfortably. Pinning down exactly what Read more ...
David Nice
It’s Orfeo in the original Italian: not Monteverdi’s, nor yet another version of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, but a cornucopia of invention in the shape of the first Italian opera for the French court. When the Ensemble Correspondances presented its very much slimmed down version of a 13-hour “Ballet Royal de la nuit” for Louis XIV at the Chaise-Dieu Festival this August, it was the fragments of ravishing music from Luigi Rossi’s work which stood out among the six featured composers. Furnishing a finer line-up of soloists than the French group could muster, the Royal Opera’s second opera to be Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Final thoughts: a fitting theme for the farewell concert of this year’s Gewandhaus Barbican residency. But the connections proved tenuous: Death and Transfiguration, the gloomy opener, was written when Strauss was only 25, and the Mozart Clarinet Concerto which followed, while it was one of his last works, shows little concern for mortality or summation. But the motivation was honourable – to find homes for Strauss’ tone poems, which rarely fit comfortably in any concert programme.This will probably be the last time that Riccardo Chailly conducts the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the UK (he’s about Read more ...
Barney Harsent
As part of BBC4’s continued course of musical regression therapy, we revisited a time of wide-eyed innocence, when ideas were big and pupils even bigger. The Sixties had swung and now they were set to start spinning as people looked to the past for inspiration, and to the future with aspiration.It’s often said, mainly by ageing hippies I suspect, that if you can remember the Sixties then you weren’t really there. Ageing hippies are, of course, notorious bullshitters as the parade of contributors here proved, having both very clear memories – and opinions – about what went on in the build Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
To create this strikingly original portrait of the man some (though not Frank Sinatra) liked to call "the greatest movie actor of all time", writer/director Stevan Riley has plundered a remarkable trove of Brando's own audio recordings and used them to create a kind of self-narrating autobiography. The notion that we're hearing Brando telling his own story from some post-corporeal ether is reinforced by the device of opening the film with a computerised 3D talking head, based on a digital image of Brando's own head made in the 1980s. "Actors are not going to be real," it predicts, in Brando's Read more ...
David Nice
In practice as well as in prospect, the second in Riccardo Chailly’s Strauss/Mozart trilogy was a concert of two very different halves. The first offered small Bavarian and Austrian beer in the shape of Strauss’s fustian Macbeth, unbelievably close in time to the masterly Don Juan which blazed on Tuesday, and a pretty but just a little too anodyne Mozart violin concerto at the other end of Mozart’s prodigious composing life to the last work for piano and orchestra, which had amazed us in the first concert. Part Two was pure LSD: Also sprach Zarathustra, in which I’d hoped Chailly would invest Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I always like watching Matthew Macfadyen, so I was appalled to see him horribly slain barely 20 minutes into this gutsy new adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories. Not just slain, but then nailed to a post by the Vikings, who put a flipping great bolt in his mouth and hammered it through the back of his head.Despite this brutal display of bloodthirsty triumphalism, it was the Vikings, or some of them, who emerged as the slightly preferable faction in this tale of 9th century Saxon Britain, a murky, muddy country terrorised by the murderous Norse invaders. Unrecognisable from the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As further proof that films in a lower-key can often land with the greatest impact, along comes Mississippi Grind, a casually mournful, beautifully made road movie that is perhaps best described as the picture that Robert Altman didn't live to make. A conscious throwback to the era of Altman's California Split, this latest from the writer-director team of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden locates an almost Chekhovian melancholy in its portrait of two gambling men, drifters both, in search of an actual and metaphoric pay-off from life. As unforced in its telling as the neatly arrived-at Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Two years ago, Dylan played his best concert in years here at the Royal Albert Hall, the dim stage circled by vintage movie studio lights, and circling Dylan a band seasoned enough to bottle its own oil, delivering a new kind of quiet, late-night music. The broad unpredictability may have had gone, but so had those too-common troughs in quality and penchant for urban barns in Wembley. Could this new quality – forget the width – be sustained?After the release this year of Shadows in the Night, recorded at the same Capitol studio Sinatra used, with the same band that joins him tonight, a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title sequence of Bond number 24 is a bit of a nightmare, with Sam Smith's mawkishly insipid theme song playing over a queasy title sequence featuring a hideous giant octopus, but the traditional opening mini-movie is an explosive chain reaction which doesn't disappoint. This takes us to Mexico City on the Day of the Dead, where Daniel Craig's ghoulishly attired Bond is on a mission to take out a chap called Sciarra.He does this at some length, casually demolishing an entire city block and then engaging in an epic punch-up inside a loop-the-looping helicopter. But back in London, Bond, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Standing in front of a table filled with small consoles, Beardyman reaches into a blue bucket for an audience-suggested title to the next song he’ll create live, from scratch, in front of us. “The Muppets on Trial” is what he ends up with. Tapping speedily at the equipment – presumably his custom-designed Beardytron 5000 Mk II – he loops his own beatbox percussion and haunting soundscape noises into a backdrop, then starts a preposterous dialogue wherein he does an extended impression of Miss Piggy in court, relating how Kermit mistreats her. As the song goes on, she and Elmo from Sesame Read more ...