Scotland
igor.toronyilalic
Who's the greatest living British exponent of the late Romantic repertoire? Many would say Edinburgh-born conductor Donald Runnicles (b. 1954). Runnicles has spent the last 30 years quietly forging a formidable name for himself abroad, first, as a repetiteur in Mannheim, then as an assistant to Sir Georg Solti at Bayreuth, as guest conductor at the Vienna State Opera and, for the past two decades, musical director of San Francisco Opera. In 2007 the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra announced that Runnicles would return home to become their new chief conductor. This week he performs Strauss, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
If ever there was a classic case of artist and audience meeting on terribly comfortable ground, Karine Polwart's performance at last night’s fundraiser for the Green Party was it. Held in a beautiful converted church, there was more than a trace of the Vicar of Dibley lurking around the edge of the proceedings. Whatever your political affiliations, the Greens undeniably put on a good spread: it was organic beer, home bakes and Curious Colas all round, a repast matched only in its wholesomeness by a lot of thoroughly fine if sometimes overly polite musical manoeuvres.A gifted singer and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Scottish playwright David Greig’s new play, for the Royal Shakespeare Company in their London season at Hampstead, picks up where Shakespeare’s Macbeth left off (almost). We are in 11th-century Dunsinane, the seat of power in Scotland. Macbeth (referred to here as simply “the tyrant”) is dead, his queen (Gruach) is very much alive, and Malcolm and Macduff are poised for power as the invading English army under Lord Siward attempts to install Malcolm as puppet king over a newly united Scotland. But really we could be in Whitehall discussing Iraq or Afghanistan as, historical drama aside, Greig Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Fife, like Scotland itself, is a mass of contradictions compressed into a relatively small space: beautiful beaches lie in the shadow of lowering tower blocks; the pink, plump prosperity of St Andrews rubs against the scar tissue of former mining towns like Methil; tourism nestles uncomfortably close to despair. Fife provided Jonathan Meades with the location of his third and final instalment of the immensely enjoyable Off Kilter series on BBC Two, but the state of the entire nation was his theme.With Meades, you expect shameless partiality, skewed perspectives and a tendency towards hammy Read more ...
hilary.whitney
A new play by David Greig opens at the Hampstead Theatre for the Royal Shakespeare Company next week. A theatre director as well as playwright, Greig (b. 1969) is one of the most prolific and artistically ambitious playwrights of his generation and a key figure in the current burgeoning of Scottish theatre. In addition to an extraordinarily diverse range of plays such as Europe (Traverse Theatre, 1994), The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (Tron Theatre, 1999) and Damascus (Edinburgh International Festival, 2009), his work includes Read more ...
David Nice
Is Donizetti's fustian operatic mash-up of Sir Walter Scott worth staging seriously? On CD, stupenda Sutherland and divina Callas continue to give us goosebumps with their darting, florid stabs at poor mad Lucia. If the difficult-to-achieve match of bel canto and dramatic intensity rests only with the lead tenor, as it did last night, what's left? Well, this revival of David Alden's 2008 production still looks stunning, well in line with ENO's high visual style so far this season. The expressionist mania bursting out of those sets and costumes, though, can't often be supported by a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In his forbidding dark suit and heavy-framed sunglasses, declaiming his artfully wrought texts to camera with the ominous certainty of a hanging judge, Jonathan Meades is one of TV’s most unmistakable presences. While it may be lamentable that we don’t see him more often, it’s miraculous, in the current climate, that we see him at all.His films are densely layered brain-twisters where history, architecture and folklore collide, ripe with allusion, metaphor and facts carefully selected for their provocative value. His best-known series include Abroad In Britain, Further Abroad with Jonathan Read more ...
David Nice
Two hundred costumes, over 60 solo roles and the world premiere of a great operatic composer's first thoughts: it's a task which would daunt the best-resourced opera company in the world. The fact that Prokofiev's initial, 11-scene meditation on Tolstoy's War and Peace was launched last night by students with slow-burn but ultimately total confidence, an orchestral collaboration with established professionals and a fusion of production with design at the very highest level could only send us out in to the streets of Glasgow echoing the Russian soldiers' final cries of "Ura!"The most Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
"Welcome to the second night of my depressing acoustic tour," said Malcolm Middleton by way of introducing his set. The statement plays on his well-established reputation for miserabilism. Later on he asked the audience, "Enjoying yourselves?" to which a smattering of "yeahs" could be heard. "Then I'm not doing my job properly," deadpanned Middleton. The Glaswegian singer-songwriter, who was one half of boozy alt-folk rabble-rousers Arab Strap until 2006, sat alone in a spotlight, his sole instrument an acoustic guitar, and continually dropped downbeat comments, but his pithy songs of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You can only assume they decided to confront the, er, generously proportioned mammal in the room. ITV launches a new police procedural starring the star of an old police procedural. Said star is a sizeable Scot with an old Toby jug of a face and, oh sod it, let’s just admit we’ve cast him because of the baggage. Yes, Cracker is back. OK, not Cracker, nor even Fitz, but a lived-in Glaswegian high-rise of a man who cracks murder cases on primetime, pausing only for the commercial breaks. It’s almost as if the young witness already knows all about Robbie Coltrane. “I’ve seen you before,” she Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There is no more extraordinary musical journey than that of Britain's leading living composer, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (b.1934). In the 1960s, he was Britain's Stravinsky, at the heart and head of the modernist musical rebellion, provoking audience walkouts, outraging the musical powers that be and occasionally even hitting the news headlines. Today, as a Knight of the realm and a Master of the Queen’s Music, he finds himself in the very bosom of the British establishment.In his 75th anniversary year, on the eve of a celebration of his career at the South Bank, where a complete cycle of his Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Rubies is a ballet for a girl comfortable with her curves, who can slink her hips and tip her bottom and relish seeing the men’s eyes widen. That the said girl is a ballerina, for whom curves are usually anathema, shows the personality challenge that this snazzy, jazzy George Balanchine ballet sets to its leading lady.That Sophie Martin, Scottish Ballet’s French leading lady, had enough personality to suggest Bette Midler curves, despite her refined build, is a measure of what fun she was to watch when the company hit Sadler’s Wells last night.Musical values were good, with Stravinsky, Berio Read more ...