Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Verdi's La Traviata has become one of the best-loved and most-performed works in the operatic repertoire, but this is no thanks to sections of the English press. In this entertaining romp through the opera's history, presenters Tom Service and Amanda Vickery drooled over the juiciest bits from some of the reviews from La Traviata's London debut in 1856 – for instance The Times of London deplored "an exhibition of harlotry upon the public stage", adding that this was "the poetry of the brothel" – before splitting up to examine the musical and historical background of the piece.Once you'd got Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Peter Zinovieff: Electronic Calendar – The EMS TapesRoxy Music’s June 1972 debut appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test found them miming to “Ladytron” from their debut album, released that week. A prime focus for the camera was Eno, in a fake leopard-skin jacket and shiny gold gloves. Twiddling knobs and waggling a joystick, he stood at what was obviously an instrument but not a conventional one. There was no keyboard and the noises generated bubbled and swooped. This was an EMS synthesiser.The EMS synthesiser was British and a favourite of Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, The Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
From “Printemps qui Commence“ (spring is beginning) to “Springtime for Hitler"... that really is quite some intellectual leap. Patrick Mason, an experienced and respected opera director, has uprooted the tale of Saint-Saëns's opera from biblical Gaza, and has placed the first two acts in France somewhere around the time of Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion, with Warsaw ghetto overtones.He has then clearly transported the third act in the mid-to-late thirties, and laden those final scenes with overt references to the rise of the Nazis, complete with leadership cult, book-burning and the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Zeitoper, single scene micro-opera for modern times, enjoyed a brief vogue in the Weimar era, but disappeared as fast the Republic itself. This programme from the Continuum Ensemble resurrected four examples, all from the years 1927-28, to offer a snapshot of Germany’s quickly evolving music theatre scene between the wars. The works, by Hindemith, Ernst Toch and Kurt Weill, are short, with little narrative, and even less musical subtlety. But the sheer invention and energy were satisfying compensation, and although these works probably deserve their obscurity today, making their acquaintance Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Station to Station documents the transcontinental American rail trip taken by a group of musicians, visual artists, and performers in 2013. Local artists and marching bands also contributed to the series of "happenings", often enhanced by light shows and pretty effects, which included rock concerts staged at each of the 10 designated stops on the westward journey. Organised by the artist Doug Aitken, the marathon must have brought the contributors and audiences much pleasure. His film of it is underwhelming.It's not for the want of big names, indie rock being particularly well represented. Read more ...
Thomas Rees
If you still haven’t been to Played Twice, a monthly jazz night held at Brilliant Corners in Dalston, I suggest you do something about it. The concept is simple. First there’s a playthrough of a landmark album on the venue’s top of the range analogue soundsystem – an anorak’s dream, all glistening valves and sleek silver turntables – and then a band reinterpret that recording live in the venue.I first went way back in November for a double play of Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil, and I’ve been a regular ever since. It rarely misses a beat. The musicians are always from the top flight and the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Sunday afternoon at Glastonbury is an odd time. For some it means carrying on carrying on, trying to wring the very last drops out of the weekend and putting off the inevitable, stomach-churning lurch that will signal a nosedive into a colossal comedown. For others, it’s simply a day to be a bit more sensible: after all there’s a long drive tomorrow… Whichever, there seems to be a clamour for the familiar, something to cling to while you take the edge off with more booze or think about A-road alternatives to avoid congestion. This is where the faded glory of the "once-greats" comes in: mid- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In 1998, Ian McKellen starred in Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters, an account of the final days of the ailing and tormented film director James Whale. Echoes of it are discernable here, where Condon has recruited an older McKellen for a carefully-crafted depiction of the imaginary dotage of Arthur Conan Doyle's great fictional detective. Aged 93, the doddering sleuth struggles to reassemble the jumbled jigsaw of his memories and hence solve his final case, which turns out to be himself.Condon has based his film on Mitch Cullin's novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, and the narrative whisks Read more ...
Helen K Parker
KholatFancy a trip up the Ural mountains some time in deepest winter circa 1959? No? Me freaking neither, especially when nine bodies have been found variously mangled on the "dead mountain" of Kholat Syakhl, and your mission is to retrace the steps of the investigating team who found their corpses. With naught but a map, compass and torch to guide you, you are thrown alone into the thick of a Soviet winter in the woods, and expected to hunt down scattered pages of journals and long lost artefacts from both the victims and the investigators and piece together the truth of what really happened Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The play that lost the 2011 Tony Award to War Horse is now receiving its British debut at the very address where War Horse premiered. But such theatrical coincidences won't register in most circles as much as a title, The Motherf**ker with the Hat, that sent newspaper copy desks into a tailspin (the New York Times didn't print the M word at all, even with the asterisks). Such hoo-ha, one feels, makes a certain kind of sense given the perpetual tailspin in which the characters in Stephen Adly Guirgis's high-octane theatrical universe exist.If that primal energy seems a tad muted on this Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A group of gunmen are roaming the Argentine rainforest jungle, terrorising local farmers in order to obtain the rights to their land. One farmer follows an ancient custom, praying to spirits to send a saviour. When a young stranger strolls bare-chested and barefoot out of the jungle, the farmer assumes his prayer has been answered.This is the scenario that opens The Burning, a Latin American co-production featuring some of the region’s richest talents, including the Argentine director Pablo Fendrik and his stars, Mexican Gael Garcia Bernal and Brazilian Alice Braga. Fendrik is not a household Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
If they remember the 1960s at all, the ageing population of Bexhill-on-Sea will remember Bridget Riley for her black and white experiments in perception. The iconic results of this line of enquiry can still result in a “happening” for the eyeballs. And that’s exactly what you get from the earliest paintings in this show: uniform stripes of black and white that won’t for a moment stay still. Crest, 1964 (pictured below right), is particularly dazzling, with a pair of whiplash curves that speed up before your eyes and ripple back and forth at a bewildering pace. Crest leaps out of its Read more ...