London
Adam Sweeting
For some reason this year's telly-Baftas felt a bit flat and weary. Host Graham Norton seemed to labouring for laughs (when he wasn't moaning about his own show not winning anything), and anything resembling a surprise was thin on the ground. When Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad's Jesse Pinkman, stepped onstage to present the Comedy and Comedy Entertainment award (one of the ones Graham Norton didn't win, since it went to A League of Their Own), at least you knew B Bad was going to win something. This turned out to be the International award, which was by far the strongest category of the night Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The literal miracle in this earthily comic 1956 romance happens at the end. The deeper magic for producer-screenwriter Emeric Pressburger was the “small daily miracles” he found in its “extraordinary” Soho setting. He wrote the script in 1934, at the start of life in England as a Hungarian Jewish refugee, via France, from Germany’s newly Nazi film industry. In the two decades it took to make it, Pressburger wrote, produced and edited one of the greatest sequences in British cinema with director Michael Powell - A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes, Read more ...
Aimee Cliff
Before Janelle Monáe even materialises at Brixton’s O2 Academy, her presence is already felt in the stagecraft. Lab-coated, bow-tied techies unsheath the instruments from their black covers, revealing a glimmering monochrome set-up in the centre of a giant white cube reminiscent of the "Q.U.E.E.N." video. Three - count ‘em, three - men see to the polishing of Monáe’s microphone. The build-up is every bit as meticulous as the stunning 90 minute set that’s to follow.When Monáe does appear, she’s wheeled onstage in a straightjacket. Across her early EPs and albums The ArchAndroid and The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It wasn't a bad idea to change the scenery by locating the belated ninth season of 24 in London, even if they probably nicked the idea from The Bourne Ultimatum, and episode one opened with a passing shot of an East End mosque just to set the paranoia clock ticking. Nonetheless, despite scenes of grimy railway viaducts, derelict warehouses and traffic-choked streets, large stretches of this curtain-raising pair of episodes still took place inside the kind of dimly-lit operations rooms which have become the show's trademarks. The CIA's London HQ is full of tight-lipped operatives wearing Read more ...
theartsdesk
The first bit of the annual Proms ritual is now out of the way, with the publication of the brochure. The next step is at 9am on Saturday 17 May when thousands of people prepare to do simultaneous battle with the Royal Albert Hall's online booking system. We can't help you jump the queue but we can help you make your mind up. Avoiding the events which are mainly there to grab headlines and which will sell out all too easily anyway – the War Horse Prom, announced a week after the National Theatre sacked the musicians who had been playing the theatre show, the Military Wives Choir and the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Miklós Perényi makes the listener re-think how a cello should sound. Forget the huge tone of the Russians - think Rostropovich or Natalia Gutman, or the attention-grabbing of Americans or even the flamboyance of the French. No floppy hair, no vanity or mannerisms here. Perényi plays with simplicity and accuracy, but with phenomenal craft and musicality. He dosn't force the tone, yet knows exactly how to project right to the back row of the hall. Technique, which is there in abundance, always seems to serve musical ends.Perényi has been a cello teacher at the Liszt Academy in Budapest since Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The last time the BBC dramatised the creation of a great musical work, it didn’t quite hit the spot. Eroica starred Ian Hart as Beethoven glowering at the heart of a drama which had rather less of a narrative through-line than the symphony it honoured. For Messiah at the Foundling Hospital, the BBC have gone to the other extreme and kept eggs out of the one basket. There was a bit of drama, a bit of documentary, some costumed musical performance and there were even two presenters to come at the story from opposite angles. The potential for hodge-podgery was considerable.The story of Coram’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Gyles Brandreth pointed out, before the advent of breakfast television in 1983, Britain was a civilised country in which people ate breakfast while browsing through a newspaper. Then the BBC cheekily nipped in with its new Breakfast Time programme, a fortnight ahead of the much-hyped all-star TV-am project, and the nation has been going to hell in a handbasket ever since.This often hilarious account of the breakfast TV wars of the 1980s ladled on the military metaphors a little too eagerly, but it was propelled swiftly forwards by a droll voice-over from Peter Snow as it unravelled a lurid Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In the 1960s and early 70s drummer Jack DeJohnette, now 71, was learning his craft with nearly everyone who was anyone, including Coltrane, Monk, Keith Jarrett and Miles Davis. Last night at the Barbican, he was the presiding spirit (if not, technically, leader) in a new multi-generational “supergroup”, the Spring Quartet, alongside Blue Note’s star saxophonist Joe Lovano (61), and two thirtysomethings, pianist Leo Genovese, and the winner of the 2011 best new artist Grammy Esperanza Spalding. It was like watching spring in slow motion: the new shoots are vigorous, but there’s still plenty of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Can there be a conductor with a clearer and more affirming beat than Mariss Jansons with the Concertgebouw Orchestra when they're at their best? The listener can just marvel at his capacity to work in partnership with this fine orchestra, to underline and reinforce everything they do, to enable them to land cleanly, decisively and unanimously, to introduce new ideas with care, precision and beauty, to treat the end of phrases with respect, love and punctiliousnes.Jansons can make the Concertgebouw sound in every respect and in every department a marvellous orchestra, even in a hall like the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps the BBC didn't need to make W1A, its new self-satirising sitcom. In the clerical comedy Rev, the Church of England could be considered a very serviceable metaphor for the Corporation, with its unfathomable layers of bureaucracy, well-meaning but slightly pitiable niceness, a self-image that belongs to a forgotten century, and self-flagellation before other cultures. Though the BBC does have rather more money to spend.In this series three opener, the Rev Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander) became a new father, after his wife Alex (Olivia Colman) had very nearly given birth in the back of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the same week that ITV was rounding up Britain's dangerous dogs, the Beeb aired Louis Theroux's report [****] on the unwanted canines roaming the streets of gang-infested South Los Angeles. LA has six dog pounds (we learned), through which 35,000 ownerless dogs pass annually. A lot of them, even healthy ones, end up being euthanised because it's impossible to find homes for them all.However, Theroux's film suggested that this wasn't for lack of trying on the part of the city's dog-lovers, who appeared in many colourful guises. Louis spent some time riding around the sullen, menacing Read more ...