Scotland
David Nice
Fast is fine in Beethoven, so long as you find breathing-spaces, expressive lines and crisp articulation within it. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra's febrile new chief conductor, Maxim Emelyanychev, started the "Pastoral" Symphony last night with a brisk but detailed walk which was interesting in itself, especially given the level of commitment from the players, but a breathless rapidity saw diminishing returns even in a symphony which ought to be able to take it, the Seventh. There's clearly an excitement about what's going on in the new partnership, but is it enough?It should have been a joy Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Scotland was at the cutting edge of culture in 1988, when the Edinburgh International Festival hosted the UK premiere of Nixon in China in the Houston Grand Opera production at the cavernous Playhouse. John Adams’ first opera, documenting the historic meeting between Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung in 1972, was about as hot off the press as you can get, having been premiered in the USA only the year before, and came to Scotland with most of the original cast in the now iconic production directed by Peter Sellars.Over 30 years later, for Scottish Opera to mount its first production of Nixon is Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
No matter how much the Jonas Brothers try, they can’t totally escape the mouse. Commercials for new Disney TV shows flashed up onscreen not long before the siblings took to the stage, and although the trio’s days of appearing in such fare are long gone, it offered a brief reminder of where they began. Ironically though, this was a forward thinking pop show that worked best when focused on the future, rather than indulging in nostalgia.It was also a performance that spared no expense. If the trappings were familiar, from the group appearing on a platform being lowered from the ceiling before Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While there’s usually something for everybody on the Celtic Connections festival programme, where Glasgow’s midwinter festival tends to shine is in its collaborations and special events. Over the past 18 days the city has hosted folk icon Peggy Seeger on a cross-generational bill with her songs Calum and Neill MacColll; Glasgow singer-songwriter Beerjacket performing with the Cairn String Quartet; a new orchestral symphony inspired by the Declaration of Arbroath in its 700th anniversary year; and the annual Transatlantic Sessions shows, featuring lovingly curated lineups of musicians from Read more ...
graham.rickson
William Mathias: Choral Music St John’s Voices, The Gentlemen of St John’s, Graham Walker (director) (Naxos)I've a soft spot for neglected instruments, so any CD which includes a credit for chime bars is all right with me. Here they're deployed by percussionist David Ellis in William Mathias’s sublime A May Magnificat, scored for double chorus. Mathias requested that the choirs be of equal size and placed apart, and this Naxos recording really lets the antiphonal effects register. Feeling a little deflated this morning? Buy or download this disc now; it's kept me smiling for weeks. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Supernatural and Gothic stories have always haunted the misty borderlands between high and popular culture. The finest manage to hover between page-turning genre tales and what counts as respectable or “literary” fiction. This place in a perpetual limbo can offer the authors of yarns about borderline beings and in-between states an exhilarating kind of freedom. Their readers will know and recognise the usual weird or uncanny signposts, but writers can then point them towards almost any destination, thematic or emotional, that they desire. In Britain, the most recent wave of neo-Gothic Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
An idyllic Scottish classroom full of happy children making sponge paintings of flowers with two enthusiastic young teachers – clearly, doom is in the air. Here comes that sense of dread again a little later at a ceilidh in a village hall, with everyone trying a little too hard to look happy. And it’s soon confirmed in a flash-forward to a pathologist wiping down an autopsy table.The first of the four episodes of C4's Deadwater Fell, written and created by Daisy Coulam (Humans, Grantchester) and directed by Lynsey Miller, is gripping and disturbing, with a strong cast, though some of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alibi is usually your one-stop shop for re-runs of Father Brown or Death in Paradise, so well done them for commissioning this new murder mystery. It comes with a glittering pedigree, having been created by actor-turned-writer Amelia Bullmore (Scott & Bailey etc) and bestselling crime novelist Val McDermid, but despite a cracking cast it struggles to pass the credibility test.Emma Hedges (Molly Windsor) is an aspiring young lab technician who’s landed herself a prestigious job with the Scottish Institute for Forensic Science and Anatomy (SIFA) in Dundee, where she works under the auspices Read more ...
Owen Richards
For an actor, there are few bigger risks than writing and directing your own film. Securing funding is pretty easy if you’re a household name, like Karen Gillan is, but that doesn’t mean your script is any good or your vision holds water. At their worst, these films can be vain and embarrassing affairs. At their best, you’re left wondering if there’s anything their star can’t do. The Party’s Just Beginning puts Gillan very firmly in the latter camp.Set in her hometown of Inverness, Gillan stars as Liusaidh (pronounced Lucy for the non-Gaelic readers), a supermarket cheesemonger haunted by Read more ...
Tom Baily
A documentary about celebration, fellowship, and the comforting afterglow of cherished memories. What better way to spend a cold late-Autumn evening? Such is the effect of this charming, low-key investigation into the story of Scotch. Rich with personal stories, The Amber Light studies whisky via social history: how and why the golden dram has brought people together.Water, barley, yeast, a boiler and a barrel. Most of us know the basics of how whisky is made (the film devotes about 30 seconds to reminding us), but how and why did it originate? Director Adam Park teams with writer Dave Broom Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was something fitting about the Lumineers entrance in Glasgow. As “Gimme Shelter” blared around the SSE Hydro, lights pulsating over the crowd, it was drummer Jeremiah Fraites who took the stage and started the opening beat of “Sleep On The Floor”, an array of phones quickly whipped out to act as a welcoming committee from the crowd. The rest of the band followed in due course, but this is a group for whom the drums are at the heart of their stomping songs, no matter what.The other key element is, of course, the voice of Wesley Schultz , an unassuming and laid back frontman, who Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Time moves fast in the music business. It has only been a matter of months since Fontaines DC were playing the far smaller confines of King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow, and here they were at a sold out SWG3, celebrating the success of debut album “Dogrel”. If that record is one of the finest released this year, then this gig was not quite the victory lap hoped for, albeit still a show that displayed evidence of their quality.The record itself is rich in thoughtful lyricism, the nuances of which were somewhat lost in a live setting. That was not particularly problematic, because the sheer Read more ...