Christmas
Tim Cumming
Kate’s no stranger to the Christmas collection – Sweet Bells from 2008, and While Mortals Sleep from 2011 both focused on South Yorkshire-inspired carols and seasonal songs, and the Kate Rusby at Christmas DVD from 2014, filmed at Harrogate Hall, put listeners firmly in the picture, with the Barnsley Nightingale supported by her excellent band, featuring partner and guitarist-singer Damien O’Kane, and a five-piece brass section.That soft northern brass sound features again on “Bradfield”, the mellifluous opener for The Frost Is All Over, a plump, pillowy arrangement that fits her voice very Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We can keep blaming Frank Capra for the lingering notion that Yuletide has magical powers which can turn Scrooges into yo-ho-hoing Santas and convert blood-spattered family feuds into tearful hug-ins by a roaring log fire. To prove it, this would-be seasonal sackful of joy from director Jessie Nelson doesn't shrink from quoting It's a Wonderful Life, both visually and verbally. It's more like an SOS than a homage, though.Prematurely doomed by the concrete overcoat of Steven Rogers's screenplay ("I keep hearing myself trying so hard to be funny," says Olivia Wilde's Eleanor – a struggling Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This new family musical, based on the popular 2003 Will Ferrell film, has rightly been censured for its extortionate seating prices, hosting the West End’s most expensive top-end tickets at £267.50 a pop – and that’s without the drinks, ice cream and £10 souvenir programme. So, is it worth it?In a word – no. This is a regifted hodgepodge, with Thomas Meehan and Bob Martin’s book brazenly name-checking its sources: Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Carol, White Christmas. There’s the workaholic who neglects his family and rejects Christmas celebration (Scrooge meets Hook, Mary Poppins et al Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Every Nutcracker has its day, and every day has its Nutcracker. But sometimes history repeats itself, and so it was that I found myself last night in Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, scene of my own childhood encounters with ballet, preparing to watch Peter Darrell’s Nutcracker, the very same production that I and thousands of other Scottish children were raised on between 1973 and winter 1996-7, when the (by then rather battered-looking) Christmas favourite by the company's founder was last performed.The company was Nutcracker-less for the next few years, a turbulent time in which it struggled Read more ...
David Nice
While the embers of the concert year are dying out around the country, you can be sure of a great blaze-up at St John’s Smith Square. The annual Christmas Festival of quality early-music groups and top choirs – this is the 29th – now traditionally culminates in two great works for chorus and orchestra. Over the past three years I’ve reeled at the best of Messiahs, four cantatas out of the six making up Bach’s Christmas Oratorio – and now that God of music’s ultimate demonstration of his omnipotent range.The B minor Mass may seem even less seasonal than two-thirds of Messiah, but it has its Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Attracting over one million visitors each year, Canterbury Cathedral is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country. With its picturesque location and very nice, very white staff, the cathedral offers an easy metaphor for the version of England that Ukip supporters apparently hanker after, the narrator Saskia Reeves describing it as “England in stone”. With traditions and routines that haven’t changed much in 1000 years – although one imagines the Reformation shook things up a little – the very idea of Canterbury must be balm to the soul for anyone given to bouts of flag- Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
For those who’ve seen one too many Nutcrackers, nothing says Christmas better than a Matthew Bourne production at Sadler’s Wells. A man whose mantelpiece is overflowing with Tony and Olivier awards is a safe bet for entertainrment – even when the production in question looks at first glance unlikely: Bourne’s 2005 danced version of Edward Scissorhands, the 1990 Tim Burton movie which is part Gothic fairy tale, part moral fable, part 1950s soap opera.From the first moments that the small pit orchestra strikes up, amplified to the max through huge banks of speakers and accompanied by Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Can Christmas spirit be bottled? Well, there are certainly some songs that can effectively make us drunk on goodwill rather than gin and sherry. Paul McCartney’s “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” and the whole of A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector are two fine examples. Earth, Wind & Fire are the latest to try to distil the essence of Christmas, and it seems to have been a success. In fact, they must have identified the exact genetic code of festive cheer in order to remove it from nearly every track in this collection of holiday songs with the ruthless efficiency Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What ought to be a featherweight holiday confection emerges as a charmless slog in the belated West End bow of White Christmas, a title that at this point in November may induce panic in those playgoers who haven't begun to think about holiday shopping. But even the more industrious gift-givers out there will have a hard time stomaching a hefty slab of seasonal treacle, which is nicely designed (and brilliantly played by musical director Andrew Corchoran's ace orchestra) but suffers from a hole at its very centre. Make that two holes, in fact, where a pair of galvanic, charismatic leading men Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A year ago it was all so different. Lady Mary gave birth and on his way home from the delivery suite Cousin Matthew steered his vintage soft-top into a tree trunk. There's rather less to report from Downton Abbey (***) this Christmas and the Daily Telegraph is free to devote its Boxing Day front page to something else. No actor has asked to be written out of the series, no one got engaged or even kissed, no one ended up in prison or even tears. His Lordship came dressed as Santa Claus, although he claimed to be wearing the uniform of a Lord Lieutenant.The yawning sense that there is nothing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was the fate of Benozzo Gozzoli (c 1422-1497) to be a contemporary of the immortals. A merry journeyman dauber, his talents were overshadowed in his lifetime and are overlooked now. He had a good start in life, working for both Fra Angelico and Ghiberti, but his beautiful frescoes are to be found tucked away in hill towns, innocently crumbling in wayside Tuscan chapels, or locked in the basements of the great museums. In the last 30 years of his life, Gozzoli painted a vast cycle of Old Testament scenes in Pisa's Camposanto. Allied firebombs destroyed all but the odd fragment. Art Read more ...
David Nice
Not every Yuletide fixture need be commercial and routine. Certainly St John’s annual Christmas Festival packs them in, but why wouldn’t it when the voices for the last two events, backed up by no less than the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, are the best you could possibly find for the great monuments of Handel and Bach?Admittedly, Bach’s cornucopia of celebration isn’t an oratorio like Handel’s Messiah, rather a sequence of six self-contained cantatas, of which last night’s team omitted two which are in no way inferior to the others (indeed, Part Four, with its horns adorning two Read more ...