London
Matt Wolf
“She sang from her soul,” Judy Garland’s youngest daughter, Lorna Luft, once said of her world-renowned mum. So it’s right to give the role of this legendary entertainer to Renée Zellweger, an actress who, in the new biopic Judy, acts from her soul. There may be people out there (Tracie Bennett for one, who played Garland in the London and Broadway stage play by Peter Quilter on which this film is based), who approximate those singular vocals more precisely, but it’s difficult to imagine a more empathic meeting of modern-day screen star and ongoing icon. The early Oscar buzz in this instance Read more ...
joe.muggs
When he arrived on the scene in the mid Noughties Mika – yes his name is Michael Holbrook – flew the flag for grandiose pop classicism. He had The Feeling as fellow travellers, and to an extent The Killers in their first wave of success and Muse entering their imperial phase channelled these same impulses. Now, of course the songwriting and production values of ELO, Queen, Abba, Wings, Hall & Oates are all good and noble things to aspire to. The love of studio as instrument, the ability to cram whole concertos and movies into three minute pop songs is nothing to be sniffed Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Soaring some 40 feet up towards the ceiling of Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall, Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus looks ludicrously out of place – like a Victorian interloper within this cathedral to contemporary art. Resembling those monuments you walk past without giving a second’s thought to what they represent, this intruder isn’t just in the wrong place, it is broadcasting the wrong messages.If history is told by the victors and the function of public sculpture is to enshrine their version of events, the American artist turns the tradition on its head to expose some of the dirty dealings Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Putting a radical spin on a fish-out-of-water story, The Last Tree explores troubling aspects of the African diaspora experience in an England riddled with xenophobia and black-on-black racism. Shola Amoo’s semi-autobiographical second feature is distanced from Brexit by its early 2000s time frame, but its young protagonist’s identity issues speak to the current moment.The film begins with a sunlit idyll in the Lincolnshire countryside. An 11-year-old British Nigerian, Femi (Tai Golding) runs around outdoors and gets “all over mud” with his three schoolmates – but for the colour of his skin Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Kings Place Hall One is a slightly strange venue, its small stage size seeming out of proportion for the dimensions of the room. It means only a chamber orchestra can fit on stage – and even then they often look uncomfortably squashed, especially with a piano for company. But making a virtue of this constraint, Aurora Orchestra has presented a five-year survey of Mozart piano concertos as chamber pieces, accompanied by wide-ranging repertoire from Bach to Ligeti. But where the programming has been innovative, and the small forces provide an interesting perspective, the disappointment last Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The mid-1930s, when the Nazi government replaced the Weimar republic, was a bleak time for the composers featured in last night’s Philharmonia concert. Arnold Schoenberg was the first to leave for the US, followed by Paul Hindemith in 1938. Alban Berg avoided emigration only by the extreme measure of dying, suddenly, in 1935. But the music they were writing was not bleak, even when marking the death of a teenage "angel".The three composers shared something else apart from the disfavour of the Nazis: a veneration of J.S. Bach, and this was the thread that bound together the first half. Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Goethe’s Die Leiden des junges Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was a vital spark in the ignition of the German romantic movement. The story of a young man driven to kill himself for love of a woman, Charlotte, who loves him but marries someone else out of duty to her family, it was first published in 1774. It triggered a fever across Europe ranging from fashion trends (Werther wears blue with a yellow waistcoat) to a spate of copycat suicides. Among its admirers were Beethoven, Brahms, Napoleon and Frankenstein’s Monster. Strange that the only operatic version is by Jules Read more ...
Ellie Porter
You might think that being first on the bill with a half-hour slot at 1.15pm would be an affront to a band who’d had a 12-times platinum album and ruled the 90s airwaves, but if they are offended Simply Red aren’t showing it. A weatherbeaten Mick Hucknall and his beaming companions are kicking off BBC Radio 2’s annual "Festival in a Day", a highly civilised affair (you can pre-order 80-quid picnics and it finishes at 9.30pm) featuring sets from huge pop names and chatty links by cheerful Radio 2 presenters.Despite the early start, Simply Red have attracted a gigantic crowd, who lustily sing Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
While the Proms were ringing out the old season, the Wigmore Hall ushered in the big celebration of 2020: the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth. The venue’s year-long festival (actually longer – the actual birthday is December ‘20) kicked off with a Beethoven weekend with more than just Beethoven in it. What stood out was how astoundingly good Beethoven sounds compared to almost anybody else. I went to the first three concerts of the first day.To begin, the cellist Steven Isserlis and the fortepianist Robert Levin did give pure Beethoven such a run in the park that we could Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At first, the opening episode of Sky 1’s enticing new drama Temple looked like it was going to be mostly concerned with a heist gone wrong. A gang of bandits were busily stealing an enormous mountain of money when they were inadvertently locked inside the building they were robbing by their half-witted getaway driver. The sound of approaching police sirens indicated the way events were heading.This had been intercut with shots of Dr Daniel Milton (Mark Strong) making a furtive-looking late night visit to a hospital, ostensibly to retrieve his missing diary. In fact he was nicking a bag-full Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This is the kind of thing that the Proms does well – indeed, where else would it get an outing? A "big event" piece of massive scale in terms of size and duration, in many ways a modern Spem in Alium, but where Tallis’s 1570 piece demands 40 singers, In the Name of the Earth ups the ante to 700-plus voices, led by eight conductors and arrayed around the Royal Albert Hall. Both the title, with its nod towards the Christian sign of the cross, and the scheduling for Sunday morning, made this feel like a secular meditation with the natural environment substituting for a traditional God. As the Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Described as a "performer-led re-devising’"of Mozart’s 1787 opera Don Giovanni - a tale of an arrogant and ruthless lothario who seduced countess women - Don Jo certainly played around with many of the norms we encounter in both sexual relationships and in the operatic genre. Presented by Arcola Participation’s Queer Collective - a performance collective for LGBTQI+ people run as a strand of Arcola’s youth and community work - Don Jo aims to give a voice to those whose stories are often underrepresented on the stage.The piece illuminates many pertinent issues. Consent, power dynamics, Read more ...