Glasgow
David Kettle
The Cottier Chamber Project is coming to feel increasingly like Glasgow’s answer to the Proms. If the Proms took place in a former church high on shabby-chic charm, that is. And if they ran for just three weeks. And only covered chamber music.Okay, the comparison might not bear much scrutiny. But from a viewpoint near the beginning of the Cottier festival, with its profusion of events – two, three or more a day – stretching off seemingly into the distant future, plus its all-encompassing ensembles, performers and repertoire (Baroque, contemporary, opera, jazz, folk, even film and dance), it’s Read more ...
David Nice
Shock and Shakespeare were the two forces that powered a typically thoughtful programme from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. I said as much in a pre-performance talk where the links weren’t hard to find: that also means coming clean at the start about my involvement. But the world needs to know about this one. With no intention to write about the event, I found myself too astonished to keep quiet by the brilliant work of Brazilian Carlos Miguel Prieto, a conductor I haven’t encountered before, and struck afresh by the top-notch invention in James MacMillan’s The Berserking, now 25 years Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Glasgow International Comedy Festival was launched last night (the day after Burns Night) at the Leicester Square Theatre in London, with Stewart Lee, Rob Deering, Simon Munnery, Janey Godley and others giving a taster of what's to come in Scotland's second city 12-29 March.The festival – the biggest of its kind in Europe – is now in its 13th year and goes from strength to strength; this year there are 400 shows in 46 venues over 18 days. The strong line-up features both big names in comedy as well as those starting out in their careers; of the former, Jimmy Carr, Dylan Moran, Frankie Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
It takes a brave man to programme a single performance of Berg’s Wozzeck on a damp Thursday evening in Glasgow. But Donald Runnicles is such a man. In his five years at the helm of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra he has proved adept at making the implausible possible, and turning the ordinary into something extraordinary. With the BBC in support, and its renewed commitment to recording and broadcasting from all corners of the UK, Runnicles (pictured in rehearsal below) is maybe not so much brave as canny – he has a showman’s eye for a concert programme that will challenge and entertain; Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What is an opening ceremony for? For the taste gendarmerie on Twitter, it’s a juicy chance to fall on the festivities like a pack of wolves and tear the thing to shreds. For homegrown celebrities now domiciled far from the host country, it’s a chance to reaffirm vows of patriotism in public. For everyone else, it’s a party attended by some ridiculously beautiful athletes, plus the codgers of the bowls team.Bombastic? Certainly. Bloated? For sure. Tacky? Hell yes. Any ceremony featuring John Barrowman and Susan Boyle is hardly calculated to score maximum points for artistic impression. Even Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
A few months ago, Glasgow Girls - Cora Bissett and David Greig’s 2013 musical based on the true story of seven teenage girls from Drumchapel, Glasgow and their campaign to end the forced removal of school-age asylum seekers - returned to the city’s Citizens Theatre for another sell-out run. It makes the timing of this all-new reinterpretation of a story that has already been the subject of two TV documentaries a little strange, particularly as it too was billed as a “musical drama”: surely a more effective approach, I thought, would have been to adapt the existing critically acclaimed show, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Right from their lo-fi beginnings, Glasgow’s Honeyblood have always been able to deliver the perfect kiss-off. It’s why it’s a relief to see that the duo’s self-titled debut album retains a fair slice of that crackle and hiss, Stina Tweeddale’s candy-coated vocals still providing a deceptive delivery method for her often venomous lyrics.It’s not always big and it’s certainly not always clever - new single “Super Rat”, for example, combines three minutes of likening a cheating ex-boyfriend to the titular rodent with a playground chant of “scumbag, sleaze, slimeball, grease” - but Honeyblood Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Saturday commuters sprinting for the 17.33 to Ardrossan find themselves dodging an obstacle course of swing-dancing young couples, soundtracked by a pensionable trad jazz band. A shifting crowd of about 100 pause in their journeys at Glasgow Central station to enjoy Penman’s Jazzmen, skilful Scottish veterans comfortable with each other and the demands of this century-old New Orleans music.Four days into 2014’s Glasgow Jazz Festival, its existence will have been news to many of the Glaswegians entertained by this enterprising street gig. More obviously momentous events are signposted around Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You'll recall the scene where the title comes true in Gregory’s Girl. Gregory, a gawky, puzzled teenager played by John Gordon Sinclair, has finally hooked up with a girl. They spend a long evening dreamily kissing and listing their favourite numbers. “A million and nine," suggests Susan, played by Clare Grogan, after a long last smooch on his doorstep. "How come you know all the good numbers?" says Gregory, and you can hear the witty and the quizzical mingling in his voice, as inextricable as jam stirred into rice pudding.The exchange captures all the sweetness and mystery of teenage Read more ...
graham.rickson
That Bill Forsyth’s 1979 debut feature is so polished shouldn’t be a surprise; he’d been working on documentaries and short films since the 1960s. Several of these are included as generous bonuses on this disc. KH-4 and Mirror are offbeat mini-dramas, but more pertinent is Oscar Marzaroli's Glasgow 1980, an upbeat short edited by Forsyth in 1970, outlining in optimistic fashion how the city would soon be transformed for the better. The depressing gap between aspiration and reality is clear in That Sinking Feeling. Glasgow remains grubby and congested, its pasty-faced denizens negotiating a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There are more bizarre, horrific and unnervingly beautiful moments in Jonathan Glazer’s much delayed third film than in the rest of his star Scarlett Johansson’s career. The strap-line - Scarlett as an alien fatally seducing Scottish men - suggests bonkers B-movie elements which Under the Skin has its share of. But by abandoning the hoary s.f. back-story of the Michel Faber novel this adapts, Glazer has made a film which teeters on the edge of pretentious absurdity, and to its detractors falls in headlong; which is broken-backed, losing its way for crucial periods; but which is also memorably Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When he became Artistic Director of Scottish Ballet in 2002, Ashley Page’s first creation for the company was a witty, pacy, Nutcracker, the kind of box-office friendly production all companies need to win the hearts of the public and stabilise the finances. The present bad blood between the company board and Page (whose contract was not renewed in 2012 despite a very happy and successful decade at the helm) has now led to the icing of his Nutcracker: Christmas 2014 will instead see a revival of the old 1990s Peter Darrell production. But the legacy of the Page years cannot be erased as Read more ...