London
Tom Birchenough
There’s a lovely feel of folk freedom to Carlos Marques-Marcet’s second film, which sees the Spanish writer-director setting up creative shop resoundingly in London – or rather, on the waters of the city’s canals that provide the backdrop for Anchor & Hope. It’s there right from the film’s opening song “Dirty Old Town”, in the Ewan MacColl original, rather than the better-known, and far grittier Pogues version: these London waterscapes are lived-in and naturalistic but they’re also photogenic (and beautifully shot by Dagmar Weaver-Madsen).The gist of the action is nicely caught in MacColl Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The latest instalment of the Americana ’18 series at St John’s Smith Square last Friday saw the Dmitri Ensemble and conductor Graham Ross present a survey of American minimalist music for string ensemble. In a brilliantly conceived programme, the ensemble found fresh energy and propulsion in these classic works, but also a subtlety and humanity in a style that can be mechanistic.The ensemble of young players, sitting on the floor in the middle of St John’s rather than elevated on the stage, was 13-strong, placing it between a genuine chamber group and a "proper" string orchestra. It allowed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thanks heavens not all police officers spend their time trying to find “hate crime” on Twitter, or not going to the assistance of colleagues in peril. Take Gabe Waters, for instance, the central character in BBC One’s new undercover-policier.Gabe (played with grey-whiskered world-weariness by Paddy Considine) is an anti-terrorist officer, and spends long hours driving round greater London, squeezing his network of shadowy contacts and informers for tips and clues, and ceaselessly trying to recruit new ones. One of these turns out to be Raza Shar, who lives on a council estate with his Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
You had to keep your eyes skinned. Was that Iris Murdoch or AS Byatt, Kingsley Amis or John Banville, Margaret Atwood or Val McDermid – maybe, even, Joanna Lumley? Tables as far as the eye can see, dressed with white tablecloths and crowded with wine glasses. A glittering banquet with oceans of booze, it seems, mostly champagne, lots of hugging, kissing, shouting and clouds of gossip, all accompanied by television cameras.Barneys, Books and Bust Ups was a vastly entertaining documentary of the (Man) Booker Prize’s first 50 years, narrated in the soothing tones of Kirsty Wark. We witnessed Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What better way to celebrate a homecoming than with a party? That is the capacious-hearted thinking behind this new musical version of Twelfth Night, which additionally marks Kwame Kwei-Armah's debut production at the helm of that undeniable dynamo otherwise known as the Young Vic. Resident of late Stateside where he was running Baltimore's Center Stage, Kwei-Armah has posited as his opening production a show that celebrates London in a giddy spirit of inclusion that seems a necessary antidote to our mean-spirited times.And if Kwei-Armah's production, credited to him and the powerhouse Read more ...
mark.kidel
Rod Stewart continues to hit the spot: he never fails to deliver well-crafted music that draws from the wide range of styles that he clearly loves. Apart from being a megastar and a lovable performer, he has always been a musician with a great deal of taste – as was clear at the very start with his two remarkable solo albums, An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down (1969) and Gasoline Alley (1970).His latest is true to form, and ranges from smooth and danceable Philly Sound-inspired tracks such as “Give Me Love” to the gutsy country blues of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”, originally a hit with black Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Iris is a museum conservator with a pair of pre-adolescent daughters and a failing marriage. Raif is a widower and an academic who, since writing a book on curiosity cabinets a decade ago, has quietly sunk into a kind of irrelevance. Both have established lives that are slowly and undramatically falling apart; both are well into middle age. They meet by chance at an evening event at Iris’s museum. Nothing out of the ordinary happens, but something more than words is exchanged. Together, separately, they experience “a turning towards one another as natural as waking,” a sensation as familiar Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Chas Hodges has died at the age of 74, bringing to an end a career that reaches back to the very beginnings of British pop music. He was best known as one half of Chas and Dave. The duo he formed with Dave Peacock were the poster boys of rockney, a chirpy fusion of three-chord rock'n'roll and rollicking Cockney wit.They weren’t quite bona fide Cockneys: Chas hails from Edmonton and Dave from Ponders End. But they were genuine rock'n'rollers who served a long apprenticeship in the Sixties. Hodges in particular was a session guitarist for the pioneering producer Joe Meek, and crops up as a Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The LSO and Sir Simon Rattle have been launching their new season with a mini-festival, if not so-called, mixing and matching some delectable repertoire. This was their third concert in four days – and its programme was wonderfully shaped, bringing together three works written within 11 years of each other, each from a composer with a unique voice that spoke for his whole nation in one way or another.Janáček’s Sinfonietta, which the same team also featured recently at the Edinburgh Festival, makes a near-perfect concert opener, with its grand fanfares and tough-hewn, close-harmony blocks of Read more ...
mark.kidel
Formats are second nature to TV: the BBC and Eagle Rock’s Classic Albums will run and run. Like all formats, there’s always the risk that the medium becomes the message, and content suffers under the weight of form. But Classic Albums at least avoids the BBC’s slavish reliance on presenters, and makes possible programmes that draw the viewer in closer than when everything is mediated by the wall-to wall ego of an expert or celeb.Although we have the trademark moments when the album’s different tracks are teased apart at the mixing desk to reveal the architecture of a recorded song, the Read more ...
David Nice
So it's been sellouts for half-baked if well-cast productions of The Rake's Progress and now Britten's Paul Bunyan at Wilton's Music Hall, while British Youth Opera's classy Stravinsky in the admittedly larger Peacock Theatre, several hundred yards away from the Hogarth Rake paintings in Sir John Soane's Museum, played to a half-empty house, last night, at least. Why is this, as Auden and Kallman's great creation Baba the Turk, bearded lady of St Giles' Fair, asks of her feckless husband Tom Rakewell? No idea, but I urge you to catch the last performance on Saturday to see what youth and Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Emcee Michael Palin, as William Makepeace Thackeray himself, introduces us to the show: “Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.” All his major characters – or “puppets” – are riding a fairground carousel. They – and very soon, we – are having a great time.Vanity Fair – the title comes from The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the town of Vanity holds a year-round fair – charts the uncertain progress of a minx called Becky Sharp (Olivia Cooke, pert and pretty in equal measure, main picture). First seen giving lip to her elder and better Miss Read more ...