Reviews
stephen.walsh
This revival of Puccini’s Trittico a mere three and a half months after it was first shown on the Millennium Centre stage seems to bear witness to WNO’s current financial uncertainty. In effect, it reduces their 2024 repertory to half what it was a decade ago – four shows instead of eight, though admittedly all four productions have been new, at least to this company. The problem was also to some extent compounded by the number of empty seats at Sunday’s first night. For most Bohème-lovers, no doubt, one Trittico a year might seem plenty. But there they will have been mistaken, not just Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s hard to work out why Kwame-Kwei Armah chose to end his tenure at the Young Vic by directing this soggy musical by Elvis Costello (songs/lyrics) and the American playwright Sarah Ruhl (book). Was it because of it seemed to be a warning about the dangers of populism? Such warnings are always welcome, but this isn’t the piece to do that. In its original form it was a punchy Elia Kazan film that in 1957 launched the career of future sitcom star, Andy Griffith. HIs TV show was a byword for down-home values and folksy wisdom, but In Kazan’s film he had played an Arkansas drifter, Larry “ Read more ...
David Nice
Wonders never ceased in Elisabeth Leonskaja’s return to the Wigmore Hall. Not only did she play Schubert’s last three sonatas with all repeats and the full range of a unique power undiminished in a 78-year old alongside a never too overstated pathos, radiance and delicacy; just before receiving the Wigmore Hall Medal (presentation by John Gilhooly pictured below), she also gave us more revelations in the compressed world of Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces, Op. 19.Only this pianist could possibly follow Pavel Kolesnikov's revelatory take on Schubert's crowning glory, the B flat Sonata D960 the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“What happens if you’ve overstepped your mandate?” aristocrat-architect Cesar Catalin (Adam Driver) is asked. “I’ll apologise,” he smirks. Francis Ford Coppola’s forty years in the making, self-financed epic is studded with such self-implicating bravado, including a wish to “escape into the ranks of the insane” rather than accept conventional thinking, as if at 85 he is not only Cesar but Kurtz, plunging chaotically upriver again, inviting career termination.Coppola subtitles Megalopolis “a fable”, and its tale of an imperious architect fighting venal New Rome’s Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just as the first autumn chills began to grip, English Touring Opera rolled into Hackney Empire with a reminder that the sun – “god of love and life” – will eventually return. But at what price of suffering and sacrifice? Rimsky-Korsakov’s third opera, premiered in 1882, The Snowmaiden overflows with abundant musical riches – you can’t really miss the musical debt the composer’s star pupil, Stravinsky, owed his master – as it ambitiously seeks to balance fantasy and humanity in its fairy-tale of an ice princess thawed by mortal passion. Yet its mythic, and exotic, aspects make The Read more ...
David Nice
If there was ever a time for the inevitable "Rach Three” (piano concerto, not symphony) in the composer’s 150th anniversary year – and I confess I dodged other occasions – it might as well have come in the fresh and racy shape of Leif Ove Andsnes' interpretation and the equally alert, forward-moving playing of the London Philharmonic Orchestra under a kindred spirit, its principal conductor Edward Gardner.In short, there was no slack either in the concerto or an even greater masterpiece, the Choral Symphony The Bells, and yet no lack of emotional intensity either. Andsnes is usually Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Velvet Underground first played before an audience on 11 December 1965. A year earlier, their two founder members Lou Reed and John Cale were beginning a period of schlepping around New York and New Jersey as supposed members of an equally dubious band called The Primitives. The job was to promote a single titled “The Ostrich,” just issued under that name.There wasn’t really a band called The Primitives. “The Ostrich” was a studio creation, fashioned by Reed and his fellow employees of the budget Pickwick label. But it was decided that the Reed-penned and sung single might have legs, so Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
It’s hard not to review the Israeli occupation of Palestine when writing about The Teacher. The political context of this first feature by British-Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi, who also wrote the screenplay, is so thoroughly appalling that it sometimes overshadows the TV-style melodrama onscreen.In one scene, for instance, West Bank teenager Adam (Muhammad Abed Elrahman), burning with anger and grief – his house has been bulldozed and his brother shot dead by a Jewish settler – sits down in front of the evening news: “Bombs continued to pound Gaza today,” announces the unseen newsreader Read more ...
David Nice
Puccini elevated the operatic tearjerker to tragic status in three masterpieces: La bohème, Madama Butterfly and Suor Angelica, rivalling the other two in intensity despite its brevity. Its special atmosphere works best as the central part of a trilogy (Il Trittico) between a dark melodrama and a pacy comedy. The jury’s still out on whether it works on its own, so disappointingly undernourished is Annilese Miskimmon’s production.For a start, Puccini’s delicate evocation of a cloister towards sunset in springtime, with crepuscular birdsong, doesn’t tally with the grim picture of pregnant girls Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Before Joe Rogan gained fame for his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, he has been, variously, a comic, presenter of goofball television shows and an analyst of UTC bouts. Now with his Netflix Special he’s returning to his first occupation, as a stand-up. It was recorded at the Majestic Theatre in San Antonio, Texas.Rogan, as his fans will know, is not short of opinions (with his politics on the right of the spectrum in the United States) and can turn a smart phrase. But in Burn the Boats he muses on the quotidian rather than the weighty political subjects often discussed in his Read more ...
Robert Beale
In an autumn season of three revivals, Opera North begin by inviting James Brining, artistic director of Leeds Playhouse, to oversee his own production from five years ago of Mozart and Emanual Schikaneder’s extraordinary musical play. It’s the mainstay of the season, returning in 2025 (with some cast changes) as well as dominating the next two months.The fifth version of The Magic Flute I’ve seen from the company, and one of the best, it’s performed in English, with side-titles in use to ensure that no one misses the progress of the story.Technology has changed, and a creation that Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
This autumn, the Philharmonia’s “Nordic Soundscapes” season promises music suffused with the epic vistas, and weather, of high latitudes, along with reflections on the climate crisis as it threatens the traditional bonds between nature and culture. So far, so piously programmatic. But what difference can such a high-minded schema make to the music made by the orchestra’s outdoorsy Finnish maestro, Santtu-Mathias Rouvali, and his colleagues? On last night’s evidence from the Royal Festival Hall, enough to refresh and reframe the works they play. In particular, Sir Stephen Hough’s bracing Read more ...