Reviews
Constable: A Country Rebel, BBC FourSunday, 07 September 2014
Presenter Alastair Sooke looked alarmingly fit, careering round the British countryside and the streets of Paris on his bicycle, talking all the while (and never out of breath) as he described the artistic trajectory of John Constable. In the... Read more... |
Prom 66: St Matthew Passion, Berlin Philharmonic, RattleSunday, 07 September 2014
Peter Sellars’ work used to be about making a statement. He would dislocate texts from contexts, subvert musical suggestion and ignore written statement for the sheer joy of the artistic friction it would generate. The beauty of his St Matthew... Read more... |
MSunday, 07 September 2014
The newly restored, 111-minute cut of M is being screened 35 times during BFI Southbank's current Peter Lorre retrospective. One only has to see and hear Fritz Lang's first sound film once, however, to appreciate its undiminished power as a vision... Read more... |
A Season at the Juilliard School, Sky Arts 2Sunday, 07 September 2014
“You feel like you’re walking into Fame, the movie,“ says one of three third-year drama students towards the beginning of this six-part documentary. That’s what we might have hoped of what, at least in the first episode, turns out to be a mere... Read more... |
DiDonato, Pappano, Wigmore HallSunday, 07 September 2014
For the first night of its 114th season, the dear old Wiggy welcomed back its regulars after the summer break. A starry occasion like this recital by Joyce DiDonato and Sir Antonio Pappano gets booked out virtually exclusively by those patrons and... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Calypso CrazeSunday, 07 September 2014
Various Artists: Calypso CrazeIn 1956, calypso battled it out with rock ’n’ roll to become America’s hottest musical craze. As the year ended, newspaper reports quoted pundits predicting it would wipe Elvis and his like out. One such was Reverend... Read more... |
Prom 64: Berlin Philharmonic, RattleSaturday, 06 September 2014
After Monday’s Respighi extravaganza at the Proms, it was back on the rainbow express for more wonders of orchestral colour last night. In the young Stravinsky’s large-scale signing-in and poor depressed old Rachmaninov’s signing-off, you could... Read more... |
Kasabian, RoundhouseSaturday, 06 September 2014
The genteel north London of the Roundhouse isn’t the obvious venue for a ladtronica and bloke rock band. Especially one that’s recently come from headlining Glastonbury and is used to open horizons, and sound systems more dangerously ramped-up than... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Grieg, Mahler, Choir of Gonville & Caius CollegeSaturday, 06 September 2014
Grieg: Holberg Variations 1B1/Jan Bjøranger, Christian Ihle Hadland (piano), Erlend Skomsvoll (piano) (Simax)This release has a nifty title, and contains three different performances of Grieg's ubiquitous Holberg Suite, each one marvellous in... Read more... |
Façade/Eight Songs for a Mad King, Grimeborn Opera, Arcola TheatreFriday, 05 September 2014
Walton’s Façade is not performed very often in London, but this weekend there is the opportunity to hear it four days in a row: on Monday at a chamber Prom, but before that in this enterprising staging, paired with Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs... Read more... |
Tony Bennett, Royal Festival HallFriday, 05 September 2014
There’ll be no Lady Gaga tonight. Tony Bennett’s most public performances over the last 20 years have been in duets with such lesser talents, or in Glastonbury’s borderline ironic old-timers’ slot. The crackly recording of Sinatra calling him “the... Read more... |
The Hundred-Foot JourneyFriday, 05 September 2014
Imagine The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel crossed with Chocolat. That’s The Hundred-Foot Journey in one, meshing a previous success of director Lasse Hallström with the previously neglected but growing genre of 'the mature person's movie'. After all,... Read more... |
