Spain
Jasper Rees
So, if you’re reading this you probably trudged all the weary way to the very end of I Know Who You Are. Or you didn’t but still want to find out what the hell happened. After 20-plus hours of twisting, turning, overblown drama, long-service medals are in order for all who flopped over the line. We are probably all feeling as drained and battered as half the cast: black-and-blue Santi Mur, anaemic Ana, slapped-up Pol, smashed-to-smithereens Heredia.The bloated brace of concluding episodes took up three and a quarter hours of BBC Four’s Saturday night schedule. There was so much crime-solving Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Symphony No. 2, Tragic Overture, Academic Festival Overture Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen/Paavo Järvi (RCA)Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie’s scintillating Beethoven cycle hasn't received the acclaim it deserves in the UK. Seek it out forthwith, and you'll feel compelled to invest in this first installment of their Brahms cycle. The orchestral sound is still pretty rich, the strings numbering over 30. Wind details emerge without effort, with principal flautist Bettina Wild a stand-out. Flexible tempi allow Järvi to really engage with Brahms's long opening Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Here we go again then. The “first series”, as the BBC are calling it after the fact, of I Know Who You Are slammed the brakes on and juddered to a bewildering halt back in the middle of August. Almost everyone who’d sat through the plot dodgems of those 10 episodes will have had the same reaction: eh? With no information to indicate otherwise, it looked as if the hatchet-faced procedural melodrama featuring the Elias-Castro axis of evil had chosen to commit hara-kiri in the middle of an uncompleted plotline. It was like Schubert’s Unfinished or Edwin Drood all over again, only less so.In the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Pere Portabella’s remarkable Vampir Cuadecuc is almost impossible to classify. It may have been filmed on the set of Jesús Franco's 1970 Hammer horror film El Conde Dracula – with the obviously enthusiastic participation of a cast led by Christopher Lee – but it certainly isn’t a "making-of" film. In fact, it seems wrong to call it a documentary at all: so vivid is the Catalan director’s imagination that the result is best treated as its own original version of the Dracula story.But it’s the Bram Stoker novel as we have never seen it before, focused through the intoxicating prism of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Albert Hammond might not be a household name but he's still, undeniably, one of the world's greatest living songwriters. His songs have sold 360 million copies, ranging from Starship's soft-rock classic "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" to Julio Iglesias' "To All the Girls I've Loved Before". Hammond's own singing career includes "It Never Rains in Southern California", and last June he released In Symphony – a career retrospective arranged for voice and orchestra. On September 19 he will be performing these arrangements at London's Cadogan Hall.Hammond was born in London in 1944, his family Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The first thing to say is that this wasn’t the actual end. BBC Four scheduled I Know Who You Are to run two episodes a night over five Saturdays. The innocent punter might have assumed that after 10 x 70 minutes of the Spanish import, we’d arrive at some sort of terminus. With only a few minutes still to run, who wasn’t thinking, crikey, still quite a tick list of bows to tie up? Was Juan Elías, whom we now know is a killer (only not of Ana Saura), going to be shopped by Alicia, and would she secure immunity from prosecution beforehand? Or would Eva Durán get there first? Would someone spring Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The sixth in a series of crime novels that began in 2011 with Or the Bull Kills You and which introduced readers to Chief Inspector Max Cámara, Fatal Sunset opens with our anarchistic hero summoned to see Rita Hernández, newly installed Commissioner of Valencia’s Policia Nacional.Officious, devoutly Catholic and eager to make her mark, clearing up the financial and administrative mess bequeathed to her by her (male) predecessor, Hernández is determined to fix the “insolent” Cámara and his sidekick Torres once and for all, to belittle him sufficiently that he leaves the Jefatura. Sacking him Read more ...
Robert Beale
Clonter Opera is a finishing school for young opera performers, with its own well appointed theatre and professional administration and artistic direction, based on a farm in Cheshire near Jodrell Bank. It’s seen a succession of promising young post-conservatoire singers come to perform in fully staged productions for many years, and is also (from an audience point of view) the only countryside summer opera venue of any substance in the north of England. It even manages to accommodate the entire house capacity with proper, covered eating facilities under its roof – appropriate to the local Read more ...
Jasper Rees
All’s fair in love and law in I Know Who You Are. BBC Four’s latest Euro-import hails from Spain and, as per the channel’s practice, is coming at you in intense double doses, two 70-minute episodes every Saturday night. Already it’s hard to imagine how the drama can possibly be spun out to the end without viewers getting RSI from repeatedly bitten fingernails, mopped brows and also scratched heads. It might be helpful to construct your very own wall map to keep track of the cat’s cradle of conflicting loyalties and rivalries that seem to be standard in both family life and legal practice in Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Opera directors must, I suppose, direct. But one could wish that they kept their mouths shut, at least outside the rehearsal studio. The condescension in Longborough’s programme-book interview with the director (Orpha Phelan) and designer (Madeleine Boyd) of the festival’s new Fidelio beggars belief. And when the curtain goes up, or to be exact, when you enter the theatre and are confronted with the usual “back story” of a production line of white clad, masked hospital technicians packing drugs, filling syringes, and then – unbelievably – playing eurhythmics in time with Beethoven’s Overture Read more ...
graham.rickson
Falla: Nights in the Garden of Spain, Ravel: Piano Concertos Steven Osborne (piano), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Ludovic Morlot (Hyperion)Steven Osborne's solo Ravel anthology is among the best available, and it's good that he's now tackling the composer's two very different piano concertos. Not all pianists succeed in both. Osborne does, understanding each one's distinct character. His Concerto in G major is sharp-witted and joyous in the outer movements, the pounding Gershwinesque writing urging the music forward. Any hint of brittleness is offset by Osborne’s delight in Ravel’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Shepherd – original title El pastor – is a Spanish film which carried all before it at the Raindance Festival. It’s a very Raindance kind of movie. Shot on a low budget with a small cast, a single handheld camera shaking like a leaf, it sticks up for the little guy against a big bad corporate world. And it’s very much the vision of one sensibility: Jonathan Cenzual Burley wrote, shot, directed and produced it. It’s his third film - not bad for someone who only six years ago was a junior research on Never Mind the Buzzcocks.The shepherd of the title is Anselmo (Miguel Martín), a solitary Read more ...