Wales
K-Music 2021: striking the right note for musical fusionWednesday, 06 October 2021
It’s been eight years since the first K-Music landed in London, courtesy the Korean Cultural Centre UK, along with world, folk and jazz concert producers Serious. Since then it has brought an eclectic range of bands and musicians from Korea to the... Read more... |
The Ballad of Billy McCrae review - beware the quarryman's beautiful daughterFriday, 24 September 2021
An entertaining but undernourished industrial-domestic neo-noir set in South Wales,The Ballad of Billy McCrae depicts the power struggle between bent quarrying company boss Billy (David Hayman) and gullible failed businessman Chris Blythe (Ian Virgo... Read more... |
The Barber of Seville, Welsh National Opera review - back to work in an old bangerFriday, 10 September 2021
Welcome back, WNO! Yes, emphatically, and with a loud hurrah, which is precisely what the company received, and rightly received, from the somewhat arbitrarily scattered first night Millennium Centre audience for their opening revival of The Barber... Read more... |
The Toll review - once upon a time in west WalesSaturday, 28 August 2021
Budget constraints. In the hands of the right filmmakers, they can be a blessing in disguise, forcing creativity from simplicity. That’s exactly what works for The Toll, a dark comedy set in the wild west of these isles: Pembrokeshire.Michael Smiley... Read more... |
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... |
Under Milk Wood, National Theatre review - Michael Sheen at his most magneticThursday, 24 June 2021
There's commanding, and then there's Michael Sheen, who sweeps on to the Olivier stage 15 minutes or so into the new National Theatre revival of Under Milk Wood and scoops up the entire production with it. Inheriting a role made to order for this... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Sunshine TheatreSunday, 23 May 2021
Sunshine Theatre were based around Aberdare in South Wales. In 1971, they recorded their only single. Fifty copies of “Mountain” / “I Want” were pressed. The quartet also used the name Albert and gigged with fellow Welsh outfits Budgie and Man. In... Read more... |
Album: Tom Jones - Surrounded by TimeThursday, 22 April 2021
“I'm growing old,” laments Tom Jones as his 40th studio album draws to a close. Sir Tom is “growing dimmer in the eyes” and “drowsy in my chair”. These blunt observations are not sugared with the mordant humour that, say, Randy Newman or the late... Read more... |
Keeping Faith, Series 3, BBC One review - is the drama turning to melodrama?Sunday, 28 March 2021
After arriving with a bang in 2018, Keeping Faith (BBC One) disappointed many (though not all) of its fans with 2019’s second series. It’s had a bit of a breather before this third – and final – series, first seen in its Welsh version Un Bore... Read more... |
Roald and Beatrix: The Tail of the Curious Mouse, Sky One review – twinkly tale for troubled timesFriday, 25 December 2020
They say "never meet your heroes". That may be true, but it forms the premise of a new TV drama concerning two of the world’s most famous children’s authors – Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl – who encounter each other at opposite ends of their life.... Read more... |
Brecon Baroque, Podger, Brecon Cathedral online review - Bach recolouredMonday, 26 October 2020
Bach’s Goldberg Variations, written for harpsichord in about 1741 supposedly (or perhaps not) for a certain Johann Goldberg to play to the insomniac Count Keyserlingk, have enjoyed – or suffered – countless arrangements for other instruments,... Read more... |
First Person: harpsichordist Chad Kelly on reimagining Bach's Goldberg VariationsThursday, 15 October 2020
As musicians took tentative steps into the unfamiliar world of PPE, socially-distanced rehearsals and audiences watching from home on a computer screen, a common water-cooler question was, “What did you do during lockdown?”. I am grateful to... Read more... |
