Paris
Classical CDs: Soviet symphonies, popular classics and percussionSaturday, 14 August 2021
Louise Farrenc; Symphonies 1&3 Insula Orchestra/Laurence Equilbey (Erato)Louise Farrenc’s music is good as you’d expect from a precocious talent who’d studied piano with Hummel and composition with Reicha. Born in 1804, Farrenc’s... Read more... |
Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Tate Modern review - a creative talent that knew no boundsMonday, 09 August 2021
Sophie Taeuber-Arp gave her work titles like Movement of Lines, yet there’s nothing dull about her drawings and paintings. In her hands, the simplest compositions sizzle with tension and dance with implied motion. Animated Circles 1934 (main picture... Read more... |
French Exit review - Michelle Pfeiffer faces mortalitySunday, 04 July 2021
Michelle Pfeiffer all but purrs her way through French Exit, as befits a splendid actress who cut a memorable Catwoman onscreen nearly thirty years ago. Playing a New York grande dame who deals with bankruptcy by decamping with her son Malcolm (... Read more... |
Victoria Mas: The Mad Women's Ball review - compelling plot meets disquieting historyTuesday, 15 June 2021
To this day, if you take a stroll down Paris’ Boulevard de l’Hôpital, you’ll come across an imposing building: the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière. It’s one of Europe’s foremost hospitals. It’s the place where 20th-century icons Josephine Baker and Michel... Read more... |
Lupin, Part 2, Netflix review - master of disguise versus racists and liesSaturday, 12 June 2021
Lupin isn’t really about the fictional character it’s named after (the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc), but about Assane Diop, who’s an obsessive fan of the Lupin novels. He’s also a gentleman thief... Read more... |
La traviata, Opera Holland Park review – a revival in rude healthMonday, 07 June 2021
Loudly and painfully, the consumptive Violetta wheezes before we hear a single note. Her pitiful gasping for the breath that deserts her precedes the prelude to Opera Holland Park’s La traviata; the same effect ushers in Act Three. At first I... Read more... |
Blu-ray: CharadeTuesday, 16 March 2021
Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Paris in the summer: Charade was the last word in old Hollywood’s glamorous cool. It was almost the last word for Grant, feeling if not looking his age. Its tricksy, trapdoor plot, with a baffled Hepburn hunted for a... Read more... |
Album: LOUISAHHH - The Practice of Freedom (HE.SHE.THEY.)Thursday, 11 March 2021
Somewhere in dance culture or other, the Eighties revival has now been going on more than twice as long as the actual Eighties did. Starting around 1998, it reached an initial peak in the early 2000s as the dayglo-fashion led electroclash, but... Read more... |
Album: Mathieu Boogaerts - En AnglaisThursday, 18 February 2021
Mathieu Boogaerts has been recording since the mid 1990s, emerging from the nouvelle chanson scene in Paris, a chansonnier who’s performed at the likes of Cafe Oto over here, while establishing himself as a star turn on the Tôt ou Tard label in... Read more... |
Simple Passion review – a case of female amour fouSaturday, 06 February 2021
Pushing 40, Simple Passion’s Hélène (Laetitia Dosch) lectures Paris college students on poetry and is single mother to pre-adolescent Paul (Lou Teymour-Thion). Blessed with a bountiful Deneuve-ian mane, she’s a pale but unfallen bloom in her late... Read more... |
Spiral, Series 8 Finale, BBC Four review - justice is done in stormy climactic episodesSunday, 31 January 2021
If this had to be the end of Spiral, the final episodes of Series 8 (BBC Four) at least ensured that justice was done. We saw evidence that on occasion lawyers may be human after all, and there was even the somewhat disorientating semblance of a... Read more... |
Call My Agent!, Series 4, Netflix review - the final bow for the Parisian showbiz saga?Friday, 22 January 2021
Sad to report, this fourth series of Call My Agent! (Netflix) will be the final outing for this caustically addictive saga of actors and their agents. The show’s unique trademark has been its success in attracting an impressive roster of A-list... Read more... |
