London
Charlie Stone
William Boyd’s fiction is populated by all manner of artists. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians and film-makers, drawn from real life or entirely fictional, are regular patrons of his stories. Boyd’s latest novel, Trio, is no different. Taking place on a film set in Brighton during the summer of 1968, Trio follows the lives of its three protagonists as they encounter the usual – and unusual – challenges of life in showbusiness. Artistic creation is the watchword both for the setting and its inhabitants. Talbot, the film’s producer, Anny, its star, and Elfrida, a struggling Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Like many musicians, Danny Driver had not given a recital since the pandemic took hold in March. His return to the platform took place in the intense spotlight of the Wigmore Hall, broadcast live in BBC Radio 3’s Lunchtime Concert and webcast to the world - for which he chose a programme that was demanding, exposed and imaginative and rose to its ferocious challenges as if butter wouldn’t melt. Driver’s selection focused on the idea of études, which the best composers can make into far more than technical exercises. First, an unusual choice: a sonata by C P E Bach, the ground-breaking Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When the history of British theatre’s response to COVID-19 comes to be written, the names of two men will feature prominently: Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr. The “two Nicks” were the creative force behind the National Theatre’s pioneering NT Live broadcasts, which then dominated the digital streaming landscape during lockdown, and now, as the chiefs of the Bridge Theatre, they have led the move to safe indoor theatre performances. Their season started with Beat the Devil, David Hare’s COVID monologue, blossomed out with Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, and now continues with a revival of Inua Read more ...
Sarah Kent
September 18th is the 50th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, an appropriate moment to release Hendrix and the Spook, a documentary exploring the vexed question: was it murder, suicide or a tragic accident? Trying to unravel this conundrum, director Tim Conrad sifts through the evidence, speculates about the crucial unknowns and, rather unconvincingly, creates possible end game scenarios. But groping around in such murky waters only stirs up a lot of mud and the death of the world’s greatest guitarist remains stubbornly obscure.The post-mortem found that Hendrix drowned in his own vomit Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Unlike the other two Proms I’ve reviewed this season, last night’s by the Philharmonia did not have any bells and whistles when it came to the staging, nor did it explore the edges of the repertoire. But the repertoire choices were good: progressing from the chamber orchestra forces of the first two pieces to finish with Mozart’s last and beefiest symphony, although Mozart at his beefiest is still no Bruckner.The originally-billed Esa-Pekka Salonen withdrew from the concert and his late replacement was Paavo Järvi (pictured below). He clearly enjoyed himself, conducting with a wry smile Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
A woman sits on a bench. She’s got a song stuck in her head – she can’t remember how one of the lines ends, so it keeps going round and round. It mingles with birdsong, idle musings on whether birds look down on us (figuratively as well as literally), and worries about the strange pain in her chest. The woman’s name is Sarah (Laura White), and she’s not speaking out loud. Luckily, all of us audience members can hear what she’s thinking.This is the conceit of the beautifully, gently bonkers C-o-n-t-a-c-t, a new promenade show from Musidrama that ran in France earlier in the year. It’s entirely Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In reviewing Sunday night’s LSO Prom I was impressed by the innovative and exciting programming and that was also a hallmark of Tuesday’s Prom, although this was more true to form for the London Sinfonietta. Since its inception the Sinfonietta has sampled both ends of the contemporary spectrum and everything in between, and that was the case here. The theme was “city life” but the music was also united, as the conductor Geoffrey Paterson said, by having pulse – and sometimes more than one at the same time.The most pulsing – if not pulsating – piece was Philip Glass’s Façades and actually the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If two dozen DJs spin tunes and no one’s there, did a rave really happen? There is plenty of time for such questions during the 25 hours of livestreams substituting for SW4’s annual bank holiday party on Clapham Common. It’s a benefit for the Mind mental health charity, and the illegal raves springing up unstoppably across the country show visceral physical and mental needs social distancing can’t meet. Feeling your sweaty body and breath move close with others in fuggy air is potentially dangerous, but an unforgettable frisson. More than most Covid-crippled activities, it’s also digitally Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Batman’s cartoonists cribbed the Joker’s face from Conrad Veidt’s rictus grin, backswept hair and crazed stare in this 1928 silent classic. Director Paul Leni’s film can’t though be reduced to either a supervillain’s footnote, or a prelude to Universal’s Thirties horror cycle, whose makeup artist Jack Pierce and art director Jack Hall partner here. It’s assembled instead from three earlier traditions: the masochistic grotesquerie of Man of a Thousand Faces Lon Chaney, who turned this down for Phantom of the Opera; German Impressionist cinema, imported to Hollywood via talent such as Leni and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Music awards shows are a strange beast: part window display, part industry conference and part party. Especially if you don’t have Brit Awards or Mercury Prize budget to create a whizz-bang spectacle, the ceremonies can be an interminable pileup of attempts to earnestly celebrate both musicians and behind-the-scenes figures, in front of a room full of increasingly drunk and impatient people.The pandemic, though, requires something different. With the announcements and performances on a live video stream, and extra interviews and video clips on an app, the Association of Independent Music had Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This quirky little film about the Isle of Dogs (Channel 4), a vanishing fragment of the old London docklands overshadowed by the Canary Wharf skyscrapers while its traditional homes are usurped by new and unloveable tower blocks, presented a flavoursome line-up of rogues, jokers and eccentrics. Some families have lived there for 150 years, but now the community's future is under threat from property developers and big business.Local songwriter Hak Baker (pictured below), a rare Caribbean face in this white working-class world, helped the story along with his acoustic guitar ballads as he Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Presenting online concerts has been a Matterhorn-steep learning curve for the music sector. Now, after a few months in which imaginations have been tested to the limit, it’s becoming clear what works and what doesn’t. All the more power, then, to the Philharmonia’s many elbows: in yesterday’s webcast, the first of three for their Summer Sessions series, they showed exactly what is possible once one dives into the chilly water. In a programme slightly under one hour long, conducted by John Wilson (who has grown a lockdown beard), Sheku Kanneh-Mason, justifiably British music’s man-of-the- Read more ...