Canada
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... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Native North AmericaSunday, 30 November 2014
Various Artists: Native North America (Vol. 1) – Aboriginal Folk, Rock and Country 1966–1985America’s music could be jazz, gospel, blues or rock ’n’ roll. Or all of them. Each has black roots. Then there’s the white-rooted country, which also... Read more... |
Emily Carr, Dulwich Picture GalleryWednesday, 12 November 2014
Walking into this exhibition is a bit like walking into a great forest. The dark green walls are hung all around with paintings of trees; we look up through branches that spiral dizzyingly skyward, while the upwards sweep of vast trunks seem... Read more... |
RPO, National Arts Centre Orchestra, Zukerman, Royal Festival HallTuesday, 28 October 2014
This concert was part of a tour of Canada’s National Arts Centre orchestra to five cities in the UK themed around the anniversary of the start of World War One. The Ottawa-based orchestra joined forces with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the... Read more... |
The CallingMonday, 06 October 2014
Jason Stone’s directorial debut is chock-full of killer-thriller tropes. Serial killer with a religious bent; cop with a drink and drugs problem; smalltown investigator butts heads with intransigent chief of police in the big city; a lightbulb... Read more... |
