Canada
CD: Emilie & Ogden - 10,000Monday, 16 November 2015
Names can be deceiving: take Emilie & Ogden. Once you know that the name is not that of a traditional duo, but rather describes Canadian musician Emilie Kahn and her Ogden harp, it’s hard to escape the thought that the music will be syrupy-sweet... Read more... |
887, Edinburgh International Conference CentreMonday, 17 August 2015
Incoming director Fergus Linehan has assembled some of the most respected names in their fields for his first Edinburgh International Festival. For classical music, that means Anne-Sophie Mutter, Valery Gergiev and Michael Tilson Thomas (among many... Read more... |
DVD: VideodromeTuesday, 11 August 2015
I walked out of Videodrome into Soho’s neon in 1983, and felt the film’s hallucinatory visions had infected the street. It’s one of a handful of times a film has shifted my mind. David Cronenberg’s crowning achievement before, as critic Kim Newman... Read more... |
Remembering Jon Vickers (1926-2015)Wednesday, 15 July 2015
Canadian heroic tenor Jon Vickers, who died on Friday 10 July aged 88 and whose full life took him from work on a Saskatchewan farm to the great opera houses of the world, was inimitable, terrifying and titanic. Faced with the intense flavour of... Read more... |
Ehnes, Armstrong, Wigmore HallWednesday, 27 May 2015
Violinists either fathom the elusive heart and soul of Elgar’s music or miss the mark completely. Canadian James Ehnes, one of the most cultured soloists on the scene today, is the only one I’ve heard since Nigel Kennedy to make the Violin Concerto... Read more... |
Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, Corn Exchange, BrightonMonday, 25 May 2015
Margaret Atwood’s Forties childhood was spent knocking around the Canadian backwoods with her forest entomologist, proto-ecologist dad, and it shows. Interviewed alongside her husband Graeme Gibson on the Brighton Festival’s closing night, the... Read more... |
MommyWednesday, 18 March 2015
“Loving people doesn’t save them” could be the epitaph to the young Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s exuberant, emotionally draining fifth feature Mommy. Its vivid colours, concentrated in an unusual square screen ratio, seem to burst out with... Read more... |
Kill Me Now, Park TheatreWednesday, 25 February 2015
The big news was that dashing Greg Wise was returning to the London stage after an absence of 17 years. Still best remembered as the handsome cad Willoughby in the film of Sense and Sensibility – now 20 years old – he appears in the... Read more... |
DVD: EnemyTuesday, 10 February 2015
Jake Gyllenhaal and Canadian director Denis Villeneuve shot Enemy before their collaboration on Prisoners (released in 2013), but already the combination was working stunningly well. In outline, Enemy doesn't sound hugely original – university... Read more... |
CD: Tanya Tagaq - AnimismSunday, 01 February 2015
It’s not obvious, listening to her work, just how funny Tanya Tagaq is. Her modified version of Inuit throat-singing-for-one, introduced to a wider audience on Bjork’s Medulla, has been called many things: intense, powerful, primal. But just when... Read more... |
Timber, Brighton DomeSunday, 04 January 2015
Timber! would be best described as a folk-themed lumberjack circus show. Its creators, Cirque Alfonse, hail from rural Quebec, but often, as they indulge in jigs and reels, banjo and mandolin, amongst acrobatics and action, their antics recall the... Read more... |
Album of the Year: Leonard Cohen - Popular ProblemsWednesday, 24 December 2014
Leonard Cohen, grand rabbi of poetry and the blues, turned 80 this year, and like a perfectly matured brandy, he only gets better and better. On his most recent European tour, he managed to combine an atmosphere of deep and communal spiritual... Read more... |
