Reviews
Florence Hallett
It’s far too easy to think about the history of art as a series of class acts, with one superlative achievement following another. Exhibitions tend to encourage this view, and the notion of a superstar artist is key to persuading us that the latest blockbuster is unmissable. We know that the artists with the biggest reputations were not always celebrated in their own lifetimes, but just as the characterisation of the great artist as a lone genius is misleading and fanciful, this one-room exhibition shows that casting art history’s lesser-known figures as sorry failures is equally misguided. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For Australians and New Zealanders, the grim meat-grinder of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 was their equivalent of the Somme, albeit under brilliant Aegean skies. The Australian-made Anzac Girls is based on real-life diaries and letters from the era, and homes in on five nurses from Down Under who were sent to treat the casualties. Inevitably they found conditions far more shocking and horrific than they'd imagined.However, as the BBC discovered with its own nurses-at-war yarn The Crimson Field, this fraught and poignant environment may theoretically sound like a goldmine for drama, but Read more ...
graham.rickson
Lutosławski: Concerto for Orchestra, Szymanowski: Three Fragments from Poems by Jan Kasprowicz Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra/Alexander Liebreich, with Ewa Podleś (contralto) (Accentus Music)I've never come across a lousy recorded performance of Lutosławski's Concerto for Orchestra, and this stylishly packaged new one has loads going for it. An early work, it isn't at all typical of this composer's mature output – written before an encounter with the music of John Cage led to a bold change of direction. Lutosławski's use of folk melodies remains brilliantly idiosyncratic, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The arrival of Thomas Vinterberg's new treatment of Thomas Hardy's novel has triggered a retro-wallow in John Schlesinger's 1967 version, but happily, that was long enough ago to allow Vinterberg's vision to resonate in its own space. My expectations weren't high, but more fool me. This Madding Crowd rocks.Maybe Vinterberg's Danish perspective was just what the project needed, because the director has adhered to the logic of place and period but skilfully sidesteps the fussy dressing-up and anodyne wallpaper-scenery familiar from too many home-grown costume romps. The 1880s rural Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a certainty, a reassurance that comes with attending a Globe show. You know that however bad things get, however bloodied the stage at final curtain, however bruised the relationships on stage, everyone – corpses and all – will rise and come together for a spirited closing jig. Julius Caesar and Cassius have done it, the tragic Duchess of Malfi has returned to life for a final Pavane, and even Lear and his daughters have joined hands in the dance. When director Jonathan Munby tried to do without the jig in last summer’s Anthony and Cleopatra it jarred, left audiences unsatisfied. How Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
It was as a violin soloist with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra that Joseph Swensen first appeared, in the mid-1980s, on the Scottish musical scene. He went on to become the orchestra’s principal conductor – a long and fruitful collaboration that lasted from 1996 to 2005. In this concert he returned to the orchestra where he now holds the title Conductor Emeritus, as both conductor and soloist, taking the podium for Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks and Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, and picking up his violin for Prokofiev’s Cinq Mélodies and Barber’s Violin Concerto.I have lost Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Rum old business, espionage – at least in the way we Brits are still pursuing it. For all the reality that the existential threat has long moved locations, in its television incarnations we remain addicted to the Cold War, the attraction to those gloomy postwar years seemingly a fatal one. The BBC’s new spy drama The Game was back in prime le Carré territory and the early Seventies, with industrial unrest and power cuts further turning down the visual wattage. The props department duly delivered curtains that risked depriving viewers of the will to live, while the fact that Birmingham’s old Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
The typical episode of the Game of Thrones TV show has been memorably compared to Twitter: there are 140 characters and something terrible always happens. The first episode of Telltale Games' story-driven take on the franchise came close, introducing four of our five playable characters alongside a large cast of non-playables before pulling a very Thrones move and murdering one of our would-be heroes while we looked on, helpless. The message, as in the show, was clear – nobody is safe.Despite that hard-hitting final scene, the first in this series of gameplay episodes felt a bit long-winded Read more ...
Marianka Swain
As we stagger towards electoral chaos, isn’t it comforting to think there might be a master plan at work? That Russell Brand’s meddling is preordained, or Cameron’s "brain fade" an act of divine intervention? The second play in Rufus Norris’s inaugural season – and first with the new boss in the director’s chair – constructs a self-consciously colloquial, contemporary framework for 15th-century morality tale Everyman, but no amount of synchronised coke-snorting, public urination, expletives or shiny mannequins disguises the fact that this universe’s unquestionable, safely ordered Read more ...
David Nice
Deep pain and sadness expressed through intense creative discipline aren’t qualities noted often enough in the music of Sergey Rachmaninov. Yet they’ve been consistently underlined, with rigour to match, in Vladimir Jurowski’s season-long “Inside Out” festival with his London Philharmonic Orchestra playing at a consistent white heat. Last night’s typically singular finale was crowned by a performance – Jurowski’s first – of the enigmatic Third Symphony as far removed as you could imagine from “tinsel”, a term with which it found itself bizarrely associated alongside lighter pieces in a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Tamasha is a new writing theatre company which specialises in plays — often adaptations or reimaginings of classics — written from an Asian perspective. As the company celebrates its 25th anniversary, it is touring this, the latest play by Emteaz Hussain, who worked with them on her debut, Sweet Cider, in 2008. Blood is a co-production with the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, where the play opened in March. It’s a beautifully imagined bitter-sweet love story told by just two actors.Sully (Adam Samuel-Bal) and Caneze (Krupa Pattani) meet in a college canteen. They are opposites, and boy do they Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A French romantic comedy about immigration? Seeing Samba in election week may not be on Nigel Farage’s to-do list, but that should not deter anyone else. Based on a novel by Delphine Coulin, this is an affectionate and touching look at the absurdities of life as an illegal, and at its heart are two charming performances.A splendid tracking shot which opens the film moves through a blingy hotel from the choreographed celebrations of a very white wedding through to the crowded chaos of the multi-ethnic kitchen. In a minute directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano have deftly ferried us into Read more ...