London
Peter Quantrill
Be a soloist: take responsibility for yourself. These are not maxims often encountered in musical ensembles where unity of purpose and execution is valued, but they lie behind the philosophy and sheer style of Ensemble InterContemporain, which Pierre Boulez founded in his own image to show confidence in the necessity and vitality of a Modernism always under threat when an easy life and easy listening are so easily bought.The Barbican’s celebration of Boulez in his ninetieth year began last week with the solemn obsequies of his Rituel and continued here in a vein of remembrance with Mémoriale Read more ...
David Nice
Judge Judy meets The Only Way Is Essex: this endlessly resourceful production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s first (mini) masterpiece Trial by Jury is one that cries out to appear on TV. Which in a make-believe sense it does: we’re the audience in the studio where Court on Camera is about to air. A warm-up chappie who turns out to be the Usher (Wagnerian bass-baritone in training Martin Lamb) – on other Sundays it will be a lady – gauges our capacity to applaud and boo, and we’re off on a case of breach of promise of marriage as you never saw it before.The pleasure is doubled because in Charles Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Model for Murder sits at the polite end of Fifties British exploitation B-pictures, a stiff, washed-out world of bloodless Mayfair murder, and sexless fashion world intrigue. Strip Tease Murder, a still more salaciously titled, Soho-set near-contemporary of this 1959 curio is also released this month, getting its hands grubbier with some actual, heavily censor-snipped stripping. But in this imaginary Mayfair, the looming Sixties of kitchen-sink cinema, blazingly colourful pop music and clothes, Psycho and Peeping Tom are still unimaginable.The pot-boiler plot finds merchant seaman David ( Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Visits by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra are always an adrenaline boost for musical life in London, and yesterday evening was no exception. The first concert in their brief residency took in Finnish, French and German music (plus one Russian piece – the big Swan Lake waltz for an encore), all presented with a distinctly American accent. This is an orchestra that trades in big sounds, delivered with clarity and confidence. It is a seductive combination, and while subtleties were often overlooked, they were rarely lamented for long, as the sheer joy of the music-making swept you along.Esa- Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Conductor Robin Ticciati and pianist Javier Perianes are an odd couple. Ticciati is forthright and disciplined, while Perianes is reticent but erratic. But they demonstrated last night that Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto can accommodate those extremes, and even draw on the resulting tensions.Ticciati brought a decidedly Classical approach to Beethoven’s score. Phrases were carefully shaped, and balances finely judged. Which isn’t to say that the music-making was mechanical; there was plenty of ebb and flow here, and Ticciati was always keenly aware of the shape and direction each phrase. Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Garudio Studiage collective could scarcely be more archetypal of London's current generation of makers. Their work – more often than not produced for ordinary consumers as jewellery, accessories or home decor, using found objects as subject matter and often as materials – blurs the lines between pop art, documentary, comedy and occasionally political commentary.Over on the Bruichladdich Site, we meet them and find out about their work and how location inspires them.
Matt Wolf
"He's not evil, he's just young," we hear in passing in Noah Baumbach's wickedly funny film about the growing pains that affect us at every stage of life. That's to say that by any objective standard, the 40-something Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) aren't especially old, but they inhabit an entirely different sphere from Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), the deeply hip – and younger – New York couple who soon take over their lives. Will youth triumph over the seasoning of age, or will experience trump innocence? Such time-honoured questions are folded into a Read more ...
David Nice
Still they keep coming, 35 years on from the London premiere of Sondheim's "musical thriller": Sweeneys above pubs, in pie shops, concert halls and theatres of all sizes, on the big screen, Sweeneys with symphony orchestras, two pianos or a handful of instruments wielded by the singers, Sweeneys as musicals and as operas, the dumpy and the tall. Which type was this one? Not a vintage English National Opera production, that much seems clear.A year after this more than semi-staging's Lincoln Centre unveiling with the New York Philharmonic, the ENO Orchestra is very much centre stage, a huge Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Pierre Boulez sits in the back of a car as it drives across Westminster Bridge. He is talking about the audience appeal of his music, and he is characteristically direct. If the performance is good, and the situation is right, he insists, then audiences will come. That was back in 1968. The interview was featured in one of the documentaries that began today’s event, and it proved prescient. Boulez at 90, the day-long festival of music by the BBC Symphony Orchestra's former chief conductor, was well planned (by the BBCSO) and well performed. And the audiences came: every event was well Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Sam Lee launched his second album this week, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to his Mercury-nominated debut, A Ground of it Own. The Fade In Time has been garnering five-star reviews like poesies in May, and for good reason – Lee is a distinctly 21st-century artist, collecting new versions of old songs on his iPhone and laptop, while his repertoire is steeped in the reek and smoke of folk history and lore, its tales of love, parting, exile and murder bound by a sympathetic magic still resonant today, parting the veil on vivid scenes from our islands’ deep history.There had been concerts Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Naturally Sean Penn, earnest Hollywood liberal and hard-working humanitarian, didn't lightly undertake his role as professional hitman Jim Terrier in The Gunman. "The idea of making violence cute – I've never been interested as an actor in those things," Penn has commented. "But when I read this I thought there were a lot of real-world parallels to it."But let's face it, the fact that The Gunman is directed by Pierre Morel, who also helmed the irony-deficient revenge yarn Taken, doesn't augur well for anyone expecting nuanced dissection of moral conundrums, and the amount of promotional Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Nowadays, playwrights do their apprenticeships at university, studying drama. But, once upon a time, they had proper jobs before they started making theatre. Such is the case of the late Michael Hastings, who died in 2011 and whose most famous piece is Tom & Viv (about TS Eliot and his wife). Before becoming a playwright, he worked for three years as a tailor's apprentice. The Cutting of the Cloth, written in 1973 and accumulating dust in a bottom drawer ever since, is based on those early work experiences. But is it worth staging?This is a wintry play for a cold nightThe story is set in Read more ...