Reviews
Robert Beale
The Northern Chamber Orchestra is unusual in that it plays almost always without a conductor. It’s been doing that for nearly 60 years, and there’s a unique frisson to be had from experiencing orchestral music-making done almost entirely through eye contact, careful listening and telepathy, as real chamber music always is.At the same time, with larger numbers of players and complicated scores, it’s a bit of a high-wire act. Its concert at King’s School Macclesfield was a demonstration of how well it can work and how testing the concept can be.A Haydn symphony is sure ground for the NCO: in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Do You Believe in Magic.” “You Didn't Have to be so Nice”. “Daydream.” “Did You Ever Have to Make up Your Mind?” “Summer in the City.” “Rain on the Roof.” “Nashville Cats.”The first seven singles by The Lovin’ Spoonful are all great, really great, and all were hits. Top Ten in the band’s US home. International hits too. Arriving in a torrent over July 1965 to November 1966, they help define Steve Boone, Joe Butler, John Sebastian, and Zal Yanovsky as integral to America’s riposte to the Beatles-kindled British Invasion of the US charts. The Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” had been released in Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that Tori Amos might inhabit a music genre populated by one artist. That doesn’t make her tunes indescribable though. There’s the mezzo-soprano vocal range backed by neo-classical piano, a bit of a jazzy groove and a light sprinkling of Kate Bush vibes. However, once Amos’ music has been experienced, any and all of her songs are instantly recognisable as coming from her canon, no matter whether they’ve been heard before or not.This has built Tori Amos a significant international following and the auditorium of Birmingham’s Symphony Hall was all but Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As a reviewer, if you’re lucky, you get a tingle down the spine – rarely, but you know it when you feel it. It’s the sensation of seeing theatre anew, not just something good or something innovative, but something you just haven’t seen before at all.Then, you line up the pieces and, though they still don’t fit snugly into the expected picture on the jigsaw puzzle box, you find comparators, parallels, signposts to help navigate this unfamiliar landscape. Often that tempers your initial reaction, the nuts and bolts reveal themselves and you fit it the production into a matrix of shows past and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hidden among rampant foliage, a couple makes out with an urgency transmitted through Cecily Brown’s vigorous brush marks (pictured below right: Couple 2003-4). Their passion seems to have infected the whole woodland scene. The magenta flowers in the foreground are clearly defined, but as one’s eye travels back through the undergrowth, it’s as if feeling takes over from observation. Clarity is swept away by a gestural frenzy of greens and browns punctured by a patch of violet that breaks through the trees like an intense moment of orgasm.
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Sarah Kent
“Welcome” reads a sign hidden behind a metal screen whose spider-web of bars is designed to keep out unwelcome visitors (pictured below: Welcome: Carib, 2005). Through the grille one can see an exhibition of paintings to which, despite the apparently friendly invitation, access is emphatically denied. The Country Club is similarly protected by a high, chicken wire fence through which the tennis court and club house are tantalisingly visible (pictured below: Country Club: Chicken Wire, 2008). In these paintings, Hurvin Anderson treats both subjects with exquisite wit. The offending wire Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The new version of Ibsen’s classic by Anya Reiss at the Almeida prompted me to wonder at times whether wrenching a play out of its era and transposing it to a contemporary setting is worth doing.The Almeida has fielded a strong cast for this updating, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, in a set by Hyemi Shin that cleverly uses the theatre’s unadorned brick walls as a contemporary design feature, along with a giant square skylight overhead like a James Turrell light sculpture. The place reeks of an empty kind of affluence – partly because the Helmers have just moved in and haven’t finished Read more ...
Robert Beale
A concert by the National Youth Orchestra is like no other. For one thing, there are 160 of them – you simply don’t get the kind of power and intensity they can create from a normal-sized orchestra. For another, they play with an enthusiasm and eagerness that even the most committed and devoted professionals would find hard to emulate. They want to share their music: they want you to feel it as they do. And the skill levels are right up there with the best of them, too.It’s a fact that in theatre or dance those whose bodies are still approaching maturity are necessarily unable to Read more ...
Saskia Baron
When Jim Jarmusch won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice film festival, it came as something of a surprise. The best film award had been widely expected to go to the emotionally demanding The Voice of Hind Rajab, not to the mannered ensemble piece that is Father Mother Sister Brother. Perhaps the jury, led by Alexander Payne, a fellow American auteur, felt that it was time to honour another veteran indie film-maker, or that it was just too politically fraught to award a docudrama set in Gaza.Either way, the Venice prize cued a cascade of positive reviews from critics, which judging by the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“He’s got a brother who’s a brotha!” exclaims an ecstatic Anna (Halle Bailey; The Little Mermaid; The Colour Purple) to her bestie (Aziza Scott) back in New York. She’s just arrived in Tuscany, where she’s trying to pass herself off as the fiancée of Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), who she’s only met once, briefly.Matteo has a British-accented cousin, Michael (not his brother, and maybe he’s adopted, but never mind) who’s played by Regé-Jean Page (Bridgerton). Cue shirts off in a vineyard, swoon, screams of excitement from the audience.This rom-com, directed by Kat Coiro (Marry Me; Matlock) and Read more ...
James Saynor
Communication devices have long been taken over by unwelcome entities in scary movies. Maybe it was the bedevilled TVs in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) that started it. It’s not so much that we believe our phones and gadgets and media might actually be haunted – more that we hate them so much that we want them to be.We’re still waiting for the first great haunted-chatbot movie, but in the meantime this tidy Canadian chiller offers a bit of a throwback, courtesy of a possessed podcast. A woman called Evy (Nina Kiri) is staying in her mother’s dowdy antique home to nurse this comatose Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It feels fitting that this latest revival of Copenhagen should open so soon after Arcadia at the Old Vic. These masterworks by, respectively, Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard have much in common, as highly sophisticated marriages of ideas, moral inquiry and human drama, wrapped in mystery.With wars currently waging around the globe, and the threat of greater escalation, this production of the nuclear-themed Copenhagen, which plays around the decisions and tricks of the mind that can determine mass destruction, or not, is an apt reminder of the play’s calibre and resonance. It really is a Read more ...