awards
David Nice
It's just been crowned the BBC Music Magazine Awards' CD of the Year. But is Valery Gergiev's second complete recording of the 20th century's greatest ballet score, captured live at the Barbican for the LSO's own label, right at the top? In my Building a Library survey for BBC Radio 3, condensed in print for the BBCMM, I suggested it might be the best in state-of-the-art sound - but not the finest overall version of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. That palm went to Rozhdestvensky's much more impeccably paced old Melodiya version, in mono and dating from 1959.There's enough ravishingly beautiful Read more ...
peter.quinn
The last time I saw Esperanza Spalding live, at Ronnie Scott's towards the end of 2009, the mention of her name would largely have been greeted with quizzical looks. Now, thanks to that astounding Grammy win for Best New Artist and a gazillion disgruntled Justin Bieber fans – seriously, you do not want to mess with those pesky Beliebers - her profile has soared exponentially.Performing songs from her 2010 release, Chamber Music Society, in a single continuous set, Spalding did her utmost to recreate the album's singularly intimate atmosphere – no easy feat in the Barbican. To give some Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Reports of ballet’s death are greatly exaggerated, but I’m not equally sanguine about the craft of choreography. Having sat dumbstruck through the four limping dogs masquerading as finalists in The Place’s prize “for dance” [sic] on Tuesday, I found myself amazed, simply amazed, all over again at the fecundity and sheer knowledge of Ashton’s Cinderella, having its umpteenth revival last night at the Royal Ballet.The point is not that these are apples and pears: the point is that it’s visible in premieres at The Place, Sadler’s Wells, and yes ballet too, that the knowledge, the curiosity, Read more ...
mark.hudson
You hardly expect to turn out for an exhibition of cutting-edge photography because of what the images are of. You go for the style, for the technique, for what’s being said about the medium and the, er, beauty. Yet at least one of the nominees for this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize – an event that seems to be emerging as a kind of Turner Prize for photography – belongs to the old, subject-oriented approach to the lens. A member of the legendary Magnum agency, American Jim Goldberg is a photojournalist, who travels the world looking for bad stuff – torture, refugees, human Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Yes, we’ve always claimed her as one of ours, even though her parents were both American and they moved her back to the States as war loomed. She appeared in her first film, There’s One Born Every Minute, with Universal Pictures, with whom she signed her first contract for $100 a week. It wasn’t renewed. Her production chief famously suggested that: “She can't sing, she can't dance, she can't perform.” Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer snapped her up and by 1942 she had appeared in Lassie Come Home (1943) opposite Roddy McDowall and a canine co-star who stole every scene. But her real elevation came the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Zut alors! A gifted English theatre artist, Emma Rice, comes a serious Gallic cropper with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a stage musical adaptation of the through-sung 1964 movie that only succeeds in making the recent, prematurely departed Love Story look by comparison like Sweeney Todd. Telling a tale of stupefying banality with po-faced ponderousness and little wit, Rice throws at the material all manner of visual fillips and idiosyncrasies, adding in a narrator (Meow Meow's commendably game Maitresse) for good measure. But the danger with making much ado about nothing is that you risk more Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Love Never Dies emerged empty-handed at the 35th Laurence Olivier Awards, despite seven nominations, but it was a good night for Legally Blonde, Stephen Sondheim, and, so it seemed, pretty well any production lucky enough to play the National's Lyttelton auditorium. And for American playwriting, too, with Clybourne Park following last year's The Mountaintop as a States-side effort that was named Best Play Sunday night at London's equivalent of the Tony Awards.Indeed, Broadway's annual June pow-wow set a higher-than-usual bar for London's comparatively becalmed Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The tiny theatre where the Oscar-vanquishing film The King’s Speech was spotted as a potential film project is working on a new script with the play’s author, and the film’s Oscar-winning scriptwriter, David Seidler.Last night at the Oscars, The King’s Speech director, Tom Hooper, taking his own Oscar for best director, told how his mother was at the 54-seat Pleasance theatre, Islington, North London (pictured below), in 2007 listening to a readthrough of the play. She rang her son and told him she thought she had found his next film project.
David Seidler, the playwright, had waited 30 Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The King’s Speech survived a faltering start at the 83rd annual Academy Awards – think of it as an Oscar-night stammer – to emerge victorious with four trophies, three of them in the last 30 minutes of the (seemingly endless) ceremony. But long after this cinematic Cinderella’s final domination of the gong-giving season just gone is forgotten, 2011 will be remembered as the year that the Oscars dropped the F-bomb.The perpetrator of the above was not the British Christian Bale, though he made a joke about his familiarity with that very word when stepping to the podium to receive his Best Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Another of Mike Leigh’s finely nuanced ensemble pieces features some of his repertory players - including Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville and Ruth Sheen - who have developed their roles and dialogue in collaboration with the director. Those who, like me, find Leigh’s representations of working-class people in his films rather annoying will have no such qualms here as he is on home territory with a story about middle-class lives, for which he has deservedly been nominated at the upcoming Oscars for best original screenplay.Another Year is about a group of family and friends and spans four Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sorry if I haven’t seen you since New Year, darling, but I've been non-stop. Last night it was the whatsonstage.com awards, I’m in LA next weekend for the Oscars of course, and I ruined my Jimmy Choos at the Globes - such a riot! I had to pop into a couple of dull old Critics Circle awards, but there's only wine, lovey, and at least Melvyn's South Bank do gives you a decent dinner. Was so hungover I had to positively skulk at the National Television Awards the next night. God knows how I stitched myself together for the BAFTAs last week. At least the Brits were less starchy, but they drink so Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In some ways it’s been an odd career. Everyone else in Another Country (1982), the stage play by Julian Mitchell about gays and Marxists in a 1930s English public school, shot out of the blocks. Colin Firth was the only actor to play both lead parts, one onstage, the other on film (1984), but he took the slower road to outright stardom and only now is he clearly the bigger cheese than Rupert Everett, Kenneth Branagh and possibly even Daniel Day-Lewis. For years as a young actor he laboured somewhat in their shadow. He was in a film adaptation of Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangéreuses, but not the Read more ...