London
Adam Sweeting
Not having read Mike Carey's source novel, I enjoyed the luxury of settling down with my bag of Warner Bros promotional popcorn having no idea where this story was headed. And for the first third of the movie, this was a real bonus.Who were these mysterious young children in rust-coloured prison-style jumpsuits, strapped into wheelchairs and being ordered around under the guns of clearly nervous soldiers? Were they telepaths or aliens, or being weaponised in some way? What were they being taught by the diligent, simpatico Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton)? What was extra-special about Melanie Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The wilder shores of contemporary visual art are now ephemeral or time-based: performance, installation, general carry-on and hubbub. But once upon a time – say, the 1960s – it was the nature of objects, pared down to essentials, and often made from real materials sourced from the streets, builders’ yards and shops, that startled: the idea made manifest without old-fashioned notions of the hand-made, craft or manual skill.The making could even be outsourced, and one critic called minimalism “ABC art”, reduced almost literally to building-block art: form or colour representing nothing but Read more ...
Helen Wallace
Papa Haydn might have been tickled to see his early intermezzo, La Canterina, pack out the Wigmore Hall on a Monday night. A night for connoisseurs, then, but Classical Opera has form when it comes to refreshing classical repertoire with the elixir of vocal youth. And with a line-up boasting Susanna Hurrell, Rachel Kelly, Kitty Whately and Robert Murray, this was no exception.Each was neatly introduced through solo arias by Haydn’s Czech contemporary, Josef Mysliveček (b 1737). Prised from his opera Semiramide, with its bewilderingly convoluted backstory, they revealed a composer of Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Medieval to Modern – Jeremy Denk’s Wigmore Hall recital took us on a whistle-stop tour of Western music, beginning with Machaut in the mid-14th century and ending with Ligeti at the end of the 20th. The programme was made up of 25 short works, each by a different composer and arranged in broadly chronological order, resulting in a series of startling contrasts, but punctuated with equally surprising, and often very revealing, continuities.Nothing in the first half, which spanned Machaut to Bach, was actually written for the piano, but Denk was unapologetic, applying a broad, and thoroughly Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Australian stand-up Tom Ballard was nominated for best newcomer in last year's Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Taxis & Rainbows & Hatred; last month he went one better with The World Keeps Happening, which gained him a nomination for the main award.It's a loose follow-up to the 2015 show – more political observational comedy with a strong social conscience, but with rather less about him being gay. The blokey-looking 26-year-old mentions it early on with a gag about Grindr, but it's a minor element among the political and social comment.He starts with some easygoing gags about his Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Tradition – a choral spectacular for the penultimate night of the Proms – but with a twist – a youth choir and period instruments. Marin Alsop this evening led a spectacular Verdi Requiem, not least for the sheer scale of the chorus, the BBC Proms Youth Choir some 200 strong. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment provided chacterful accompaniment, though sometimes struggled to compete, and the four soloists all delivered, particularly Tamara Wilson, here confirming her reputation as one of today’s leading Verdi sopranos.The BBC Proms Youth Choir brings together four youth choruses from Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Daniel Barenboim is as distinctive as he is unpredictable. His considerable strengths – dynamism, passion, keen intellectual engagement – are balanced by some notable weaknesses – clunky tempo changes, lack of detail – but all configure differently in each performance. This Prom was a success largely for the fresh perspectives he brought to Mozart and Bruckner, both composers prone to stiffness and formality from less adventurous performers.If the Mozart was the less successful, it was because Barenboim seemed to take his ideas too far, always working just outside the bounds of classical Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is not a standard dance music story. Marquis Hawkes is one of the club music success stories of the past couple of years – since the first release in 2012 on Glasgow's revered Dixon Avenue Basement Jams, there've been many 12" club hits on multiple connoisseurs' labels, and his album Social Housing on the Fabric club's Houndstooth label has soundtracked many people's summer this year, with the artist all the while remaining anonymous. But the reason for that anonymity is that he's a long, long way from the usual neatly-coiffed 20-something house producer you usually see in “breakthrough Read more ...
Helen Wallace
He still looks every inch the golden boy, but Vasily Petrenko has just turned 40, and next month celebrates a decade with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Time well spent, as this impressive evening revealed: after years of Russian immersion under his crisp command, here’s a band who can conjure Shostakovich’s smoudering darkness, and all the glitter and the grit in Rachmaninov’s third symphony.If the concert belonged to Petrenko, it was probably the promise of Truls Mørk playing Shostakovich’s first cello concerto that had packed the hall. Young Russian Alexey Stadler (pictured below) had Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
H Division has a new home in Whitechapel that basks in the white heat of the technological revolution. The police station not only has a telephone but a “microreader” that allows the user to check thousands of miniaturised card indexes. Alas, a wry smile is all the viewer is likely to get from this opening episode of the fourth season. Nothing happens until the last ten minutes.When it was originally broadcast on Amazon Prime, Ripper Street 4 began with a two-hour episode. Terrestrial viewers on BBC Two have to make do with 60 minutes of scene-setting, throat-clearing and explanation. Three Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
If you go down to the woods today, to be sure of a big surprise is a contradiction in terms, but this pair of sylvan adventures by Matthias Pintscher and Mendelssohn was another example of the discreetly sensitive programme-building which has distinguished the present season of BBC Proms.Cello concertos have been a theme. Two in the last week alone (from Charlotte Bray and Colin Matthews) alongside classics by Elgar (at the First Night) and Haydn, played in yesterday’s matinee Prom by Narek Hakhnazaryan and the Ulster Orchestra. Pintscher's Reflections on Narcissus falls between them: written Read more ...
Helen Wallace
Some enchanted afternoon in Camden Town… the Proms returned to the Roundhouse after four decades with a dreamlike fusion of sound, space and light. Ron Arad’s Curtain Call – a 360° installation of 5,600 sillicon rods – encircled the London Sinfonietta and audience in its luminescent embrace, a haze of microtonal music slinking through a sequence of glimmering projections.The programme built towards György Ligeti’s Ramifications, an indelible masterpiece of the gauziest microtonal weave, and part-inspiration for Georg Friedrich Haas’s Open Spaces II (2007). In this ravishing work Haas also Read more ...