Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
And so the Academy of Ancient Music’s triptych of Monteverdi operas at the Barbican comes to an end, three years after it began with Orfeo. If 2014’s Poppea was the cycle’s sexually-charged climax, then this Ulisse is the dark, contemplative coda – a sobering moment of morality after the victorious excesses of opera’s most venal couple.Il ritorno d’Ulisse is always a harder sell than Poppea. Virtue, chastity and constancy don’t make for quite such an obvious drama, and the opera’s structural oddities – a complicatedly large cast, an awkward final act – make it tricky to pull off. Benedict Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Theatre is in the very bones of this bold adaptation, with the Lyric gifted a cameo role: past productions are fleetingly pastiched in a flashback to the era of the venue’s foundation. Laura Wade and Lyndsey Turner translate the vividly immediate first-person narrative of Sarah Waters’ 1998 novel into a world coloured by the experience of their heroine, whose coming-of-age story is sparked by the stage: make-believe illuminating the truth of her sexual identity. Music hall vocabulary creates a stylistic framework for this episodic, picaresque tale, but there are too few glimpses behind Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Managing the boundaries of closeness in documentary filmmaking can be a complicated issue. Does the documentarist figure only as a fly-on-the-wall observer – or become involved, caught up in the story of his or her subject? Is it possible to maintain a distinction? When, and what is going too far?All these questions, and more, were in play in Sean McAllister’s outstanding A Syrian Love Story, which has already won the Grand Jury prize at the Sheffield documentary festival and looks set to reap more such honours at other events around the world. His story of a family in discord is bruising Read more ...
fisun.guner
Ai Weiwei’s first major survey in the UK is a better looking exhibition than I had anticipated, but what it gains in looks it sadly lacks in substance – backstory and information not being quite the same. It’s visually satisfying, since Ai initially impresses with the sheer scale and elegance of some of his larger pieces – a combination of readymade and crafted materials which include chandeliers incorporating wheel and bicycle frames, rusted steel rods spread out like gently lapping waves in the Royal Academy’s spacious central hall, and a grove of petrified-looking trees rising up to Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Nelson Goerner has settled rather gloriously into being a musicians’ musician. An artist of this calibre should be selling out the Wigmore Hall – but it wasn’t his fault that yesterday was Monday, and the pianophiles who turned out to hear him were rewarded with a rich and satisfying programme.Sitting low at the keyboard, arms extended without a hint of tension in the touch, the diminutive Argentinian pianist launched into a selection of music that sometimes thrilled with its sheer positivity as well as deft musical instinct and full, bright and beautiful sound. He opened not with Bach, but Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For the final instalment of its season of 20th-century classics, the BBC left the world of fiction behind and took a Rosie-tinted amble along the leafy byways of Laurie Lee’s youth. The first part of Lee’s autobiographical trilogy is much the most read. Sales of six million means Cider with Rosie has a lot of fans who will have watched this dramatisation anxiously fearing the worst.They can rest easy. This amiable, elegiac adaptation’s commitment to honesty extended to filming in Slad, the Cotswold village where the author grew up – and, in a touching final shot, now rests in a graveyard Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s almost impossible to imagine what a Handel opera performance can have been like in London in the 1730s, when Orlando first appeared. The audience came primarily to hear their favourite singers: and these must have been sensational, if not unduly dedicated to the dramatic verities they were supposed to be representing: castrati like Senesino and Farinelli, sopranos like Cuzzoni and Faustina (who once came to blows onstage, presumably trying to upstage one another). Nobody cared much about plot or character, but they loved the magical effects: Zoroastro whisking Orlando away in a flying Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sam Simmons' new show – for which he won the Edinburgh Comedy Award last month and the Barry award at Melbourne earlier this year – is titled Spaghetti for Breakfast, but could easily be called “Things That Shit Me”; the phrase pops up repeatedly on a recorded loop, as the Australian comic runs through the large number of things that annoy him.The hour-long show is the surrealist comedian's most personal yet; among the wonderfully silly clowning, the comic delivers painfully honest anecdotes about his childhood, which help explain “why I turned out this weird”.Apparently throwaway Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Performances of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony are rare, at least in Scotland. The programme note for this series of concerts by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra records that the orchestra’s only previous performance was in 1978. Those I spoke to in the audience in the Usher Hall could not recall a performance by Scotland’s other symphony orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (or SNO as it was previously), since way before that.Complete cycles of Mahler symphonies, live or recorded, frequently miss out this untidy straggler, preferring to treat the numerous valedictory messages in the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Entertaining our troops overseas has already proved a fruitful subject for drama, and not only for its show-within-a-show potential. Peter Nichols’ Privates on Parade – revived in the West End three years ago – combined latrine-level banter and tawdry cabaret to create pathos and comedy. Now, updating the military status quo, comes The Sweethearts, a new play by Sarah Page marking the first anniversary of the withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan.Coco, Mari and Helena are a manufactured girl-band – "The Sweethearts" of the title – inured to their every move being Read more ...
David Nice
“The music quacks, hoots, pants and gasps”: whichever of his Pravda scribes Stalin commandeered to demolish Shostakovich’s “tragedy-satire” in January 1936, two years into its wildly successful stage history, didn’t mean that as a compliment, but it defines one extreme of the ENO Orchestra’s stupendous playing under its new Music Director Mark Wigglesworth. On the other hand there are also heartbreaking tenderness, terrifying whispers and aching sensuousness. A fuller picture of Shostakovich’s murdering heroine as 20th - or even 21st - century Russian woman couldn’t be imagined; soprano Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bert Jansch: It Don't Bother Me, Jack Orion / Bert Jansch & John Renbourn: Bert and JohnWhen theartsdesk last caught up with Bert Jansch, it was April 1965 and he had just issued his eponymous debut album – a set which now, as it was then, is a benchmark take on what acoustic folk and blues would be if a singular, all-embracing vision was applied. As much singer-songwriter album as template for the future of boundary-breaking British folk, Bert Jansch was as influential as it was remarkable.Jansch did not stand still after April 1965. His follow-up album It Don't Bother Me was released in Read more ...