Reviews
Ensemble InterContemporain, Pintscher, BarbicanWednesday, 29 April 2015
Be a soloist: take responsibility for yourself. These are not maxims often encountered in musical ensembles where unity of purpose and execution is valued, but they lie behind the philosophy and sheer style of Ensemble InterContemporain, which... Read more... |
Follies, Royal Albert HallWednesday, 29 April 2015
God love Christine Baranski: Eight years after the Tony and Emmy-winning actress played the supporting role of Carlotta Campion in a semi-staged 2007 production of Stephen Sondheim's Follies in New York, along came the leggy, eternally lithe... Read more... |
Stephen Hough, RFHWednesday, 29 April 2015
It took just two bars of Debussy's La plus que lente for Stephen Hough to transport the entire Royal Festival Hall to Paris. The nearest thing the French composer ever wrote to a café waltz – inspired by a gypsy band in a local hotel – this... Read more... |
San Fermin, Jazz CaféWednesday, 29 April 2015
San Fermin have enough brass to rock Mardi Gras and the vocal range to stretch an opera chorus, but they are, still, a pop group. The Brooklyn indie octet’s straight-through rendition of their second album Jackrabbit, released last week, inspired... Read more... |
24 Hours in the Past, BBC OneWednesday, 29 April 2015
The past is a foreign country. Celebrities do things differently there. Programmes which put people in time machines and whizz them back to a less centrally heated era have been around for a while. Back in the day they’d pick on ordinary people and... Read more... |
Empire, E4Wednesday, 29 April 2015
What Nashville did for country music, Empire may very well be about to do for the lurid world of hip hop. If not more so. Created by Lee Daniels (director of Precious) and written by Danny Hunger Games Strong, it's about ailing music mogul Lucious... Read more... |
American Buffalo, Wyndham's TheatreTuesday, 28 April 2015
From the great, gasp-inducing rush of colour when the curtain opens on American Buffalo to the embrace that closes it, this revival of David Mamet’s career-making rummage through the junkyard of the American Dream has you in a vice-like grip. It’s... Read more... |
Trial by Jury / The Zoo, King's Head TheatreTuesday, 28 April 2015
Judge Judy meets The Only Way Is Essex: this endlessly resourceful production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s first (mini) masterpiece Trial by Jury is one that cries out to appear on TV. Which in a make-believe sense it does: we’re the audience in the... Read more... |
Die Walküre Act 3, WNO, Koenigs, Wales Millennium Centre, CardiffMonday, 27 April 2015
There’s a lot to be said for concert performances of Wagner. Not only are you spared the post-prandial lucubrations of aspirant directors – the moonmen and the fighter pilots, the jackboots and the biogas installations. But it’s possible to... Read more... |
Stonehearst AsylumSunday, 26 April 2015
Stonehearst Asylum is bookended by classic Hammer horror scenes. Within minutes of Dr Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess) being dropped off at the titular, fog-bound mansion by a swiftly exiting coach and horses, he meets a full-blooded Gothic gang: stiff... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: DionSunday, 26 April 2015
Dion: Recorded Live at the Bitter End August 1971By 1971, when he was playing the Bitter End in New York’s Greenwich Village, Dion DiMucci had already experienced the equivalent of two separate stints as a pop star. In 1961, he began a run of... Read more... |
The Fall, Brixton ElectricSunday, 26 April 2015
They begin with “My Door is Never” from 2007 album Reformation Post TLC, and close a little over an hour later with “Sparta FC”, from early in the century, and from a long-gone Fall line-up. In between, a flurry of blurred, brutal songs from the new... Read more... |
