20th century
A Celebration of Sir Kenneth MacMillan, Northern Ballet review - a brave and worthy tributeSaturday, 14 October 2017
Northern Ballet do a challenging job really well: on a mid-scale touring company budget and doing all the things mid-scale touring companies have to do (tour, obviously, but also outreach and audience-building and Christmas ballets for children),... Read more... |
Basquiat: Rage to Riches review, BBC Two – death rides an equine skeletonSunday, 08 October 2017
An irresistible tragedy: young man of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, from Brooklyn, multilingual, brilliantly precocious, who left his middle class home to turn to street life in Manhattan, metamorphosing into a mesmerising graffiti artist. SAMO... Read more... |
Reger Cello Suites, Richard Harwood, Malling Abbey review - Bach with a dash of acidSaturday, 23 September 2017
Three “little greats,” as Opera North might put it, proved just the thing to cleanse the palate in a quiet place the afternoon after the LSO/Rattle Stravinsky trilogy. Composed following a breakdown in 1914, the year after the premiere of The Rite... Read more... |
John le Carré: A Legacy of Spies review - the master in twilight moodSunday, 10 September 2017
Over his long career – 23 novels, memoirs, his painfully believable narratives adapted into extraordinary films (10 for the big screen) and for television – John le Carré has created a world that has gripped readers and viewers alike. He has... Read more... |
'The kaleidoscope of an entire lifetime of memories'Thursday, 07 September 2017
When director Bruce Guthrie first gave me the script for Man to Man by Manfred Karge, I was immediately mesmerised by the language, each of the 27 scenes leapt off the page. Some are a few short sentences, other pages long; every one a... Read more... |
Tom of Finland review - engaging biopic of gay pioneerFriday, 11 August 2017
Finnish director Dome Karukoski has made a sympathetic and quietly stylish biopic of Touko Laaksonen, the artist who did as much as anyone to define 20th century male gay visual culture. There’s a degree of irony in the fact that we know him by... Read more... |
Buxton Festival review - early Verdi, earlier Mozart and refreshing BrittenMonday, 10 July 2017
“The subject is neither political nor religious; it is fantastical” wrote Verdi to the librettist Piave about his opera Macbeth. “The opera is not about the rise of a modern fascist: nor is it about political tyranny. It is a study in character”... Read more... |
Eureka: novelist Anthony Quinn on completing his acclaimed trilogySunday, 02 July 2017
I am intrigued by those writers who plan their novels with the bristling rigour of a military strategist, drilling their characters like counters on a model battlefield. And impressed that they seem in absolute control of the direction their story... Read more... |
Fahrelnissa Zeid, Tate Modern review - rediscovering a forgotten geniusFriday, 16 June 2017
I can’t pretend to like the work of Fahrelnissa Zeid, but she was clearly an exceptional woman and deserves to be honoured with a retrospective. She led a privileged life that spanned most of the 20th century; born in Istanbul in 1901 into a... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The Naked Civil ServantFriday, 09 June 2017
For those of us still mourning John Hurt, this lovely HD restoration of the actor’s favourite film is a real joy. Made in 1975 for Thames Television, it’s stood the test of time remarkably well. Funny, moving and often cited as a turning point in... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: My 20th CenturyTuesday, 06 June 2017
Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s 1989 debut feature My 20th Century (Az én XX. Századom) opens on a grandiose scene depicting the first public demonstration of Thomas Edison’s electric light-bulb. We see the wonder of onlookers as they ... Read more... |
Jean Arp: Poetry of Forms review - subversive pioneer honoured in HollandThursday, 01 June 2017
This summer the wonderful Kröller-Möller museum in Otterlo hosts the first major Dutch retrospective of the works of Hans (Jean) Arp since 1960 – an exhibition that will travel in a marginally smaller version to Margate’s Turner Contemporary later... Read more... |
