London
Tim Cumming
It's the first night of The Fall's four-night residency at The Garage in Highbury, north London, a suitably small venue to get the full visceral rub of the current group – Elena Poulou on keyboards, guitarist Peter Greenaway, drummer Keiron Melling, and bassist Dave Spurr. It’s the longest-lasting Fall line-up Mark E Smith has permitted in the group’s 40-year history, and they have a fabulous, wildly experimental and rough-at-the-edges new EP, Wise Ol' Man, and one of the best albums of The Fall’s latterday career – one of the best, full-stop – in Sublingual Tablet behind them.Much of the 75- Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Set in the grounds and rooms of the Master Shipwright’s Palace on the Thames at Deptford, Unamplifire brought together more than 30 artists over eight hours, with new and ancient folk and world music stirring from the riverside wing of the building – a stripped-to-the-plaster-and-floorboards palace, one you might find yourself in after a revolution. Built by master shipwright Joseph Allin in 1708, it’s a rich historical anomaly bordering the bleak remains of what was once the King's Wharf, established by Henry VIII in 1513, and about to be redeveloped by a Hong Kong investment company. The Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
It’s always fun to watch the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. As members of a self-governing orchestra, and often soloists in their own right, the players like to do things their way. Come the ripe second theme of the Bruckner Adagio and the cellos were giving it lashings of vibrato; muesli-wearing adherents to pure tone be damned. So were six of the eight basses ranged across the back of the Royal Festival Hall stage. That just left two basses, left-hand fingers resolutely unmoved. They weren’t going to vibrate for Bruckner, for Sir Simon Rattle or for anybody.There are many positive Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So just how grey were the 1950s? "It was grey," said Bruce Welch of The Shadows. Au contraire, said Joan Bakewell, the Fifties were "giddy and full of optimism." Veteran journalist Katharine Whitehorn added that not only were the Fifties not boring, but that even then people had already heard of sex.But this was Tom Jones's film, and in his view "the early Fifties were grey and boring and flat." Born in June 1940, the then Thomas Woodward spent his formative years in Pontypridd, and in the foggy old films and photos of it included here the town resembled some ghastly failed experiment in Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The last time I spent hours on end listening to Xavier Rudd I was giving birth to my daughter. Weirdly, the anaesthetist had seen him perform in Australia a few weeks previously (this was a few years ago when Rudd wasn’t as heard of as he is now) and we bro’d about the magical coincidence pretty hard, in between contractions.To see him live was therefore a pretty big deal, seeing as what he essentially (musically) birthed my baby. There was a lot to live up to. I am thankful in life for many things – the fact that seeing him in the flesh did not disappoint, is one of them. The Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It can be given to few commercial galleries to have sustained a relationship with the same artist for over 130 years, but such is the link between The Fine Art Society and James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903).The FAS was founded in 1876, and is still in its purpose-built original home in New Bond Street. The frontage was designed by EW Godwin, who also designed Whistler’s White House in Chelsea. It has many firsts to its credit, including commissioning Whistler to produce his superbly atmospheric etchings of Venice, which were published by the gallery in 1880. In 1883 Whistler’s monographic Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Contemporary London life in all its forbidding, faceless swirl makes for a visually busy evening at Boy, the Leo Butler play that finally isn't as fully arresting as one keeps wanting it to be. An admirably kaleidoscopic view of the capital as filtered through 17-year-old Liam (Frankie Fox), aka the "boy" of the title, Sacha Wares' production utilises a 26-strong cast to address the notion of aimlessness in our age of austerity – the sheer volume of actors in our midst constituting a welcome rebuke to the pinched economic landscape all its own. But once you've clocked the populous Read more ...
Ed Owen
Spying is not what it used to be. Old-schoolers beat the baddie, beat the house at roulette and then beat someone to death without even creasing their shirt. Today’s spy seems ill-equipped. Take Ryan Reynolds’s Bill Pope. We know he’s in the CIA because he’s dodging around the City of London looking conspicuous. Anarchist hacker Heimbahl (Jordi Molla) easily hookwinks and kills him.This is bad news because Pope knows where The Wormhole is. This is the ultimate hacking device, allowing the user to control anything – launch a nuclear missile, turn off your central heating – anything. Heimbahl, Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Masaaki Suzuki’s reputation precedes him. His recordings of Bach’s choral works with Bach Collegium Japan, the group he founded in 1990, have been arguably the finest of recent decades. But visits to the West, and especially to London, are rare, so this evening’s concert offered a valuable opportunity to find out what the dynamics are within the ensemble, and how they achieve such impressive results on disc.Unlike many Bach interpreters, Suzuki is a real conductor. He doesn’t play violin or harpsichord when he leads, he actually conducts. He takes an interest in every detail of the music, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Stones may have got the free festival thing right at last, returning triumphant from playing to around a million Cubans in Havana on Good Friday, and the world generally marvels more and mocks less the longevity of the band and the age of its original inhabitants. With a fresh batch of sold-out tours and new music apparently in the can, it would be churlish to deny them the self-pleasuring they reward themselves by mounting Exhibitionism at the Saatchi Gallery.Unlike any other group, the Stones stand as a cohesive motley of survivors from a world long lost, and when they go, rock'n'roll Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Can't get enough Scandi Noir? Then why not make your own? With the aid of Hans Rosenfeldt, creator of The Bridge and installed here as screenwriter, ITV has.Take one disturbed anti-heroine suffering from hallucinations and a disintegrating marriage, exhume a serial killer from the past who has apparently resumed his grisly activities, add a murky property development company happy to ride roughshod over planning regulations in pursuit of obscene profits, and season with gruesomely murdered corpses with plastic bags tied over their heads. Throw in a few shots of Blackfriars bridge and make a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The B Minor Mass comes in many shapes and sizes. Martin Feinstein opts for a bright and bijou approach, with period instruments, one to a part, and a choir of ten. The small ensemble sometimes lacks finesse, but makes up for it in dynamism, passion, and sheer joy. There was nothing chamber-scaled about this reading: it was all big gestures and direct emotions.Feinstein leads his eponymous ensemble from the flute. That can lead to curious ensemble dynamics, with many of the movements being led from the (essentially decorative) obbligato flute line. Generally, though, the ensemble is small Read more ...