Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
There’s a masterful subtlety to Philippe Herreweghe’s interpretation of Bach’s last great choral work – it shuns blazing transcendence for a sense of serene contemplation that reveals every angle of the mass’s geometrical perfection. Listening to the multiple layers of sound is rather like appreciating the shifting colours in the inlaid mother of pearl on a harpsichord – nothing dazzles, but it draws you in with its meticulous polish and understated beauty.Herreweghe has now recorded the Mass in B Minor three times with the Collegium Vocale Gent, and by general consensus it has improved with Read more ...
Justine Elias
Islands off the coast of southern Chile, to the Spanish and German settlers of the 19th century, represented the edge of the world. To the Huilliche, the people who’ve lived there for centuries, the land and its isolation are only the beginning.In this colonial outpost, though, the newcomers rule. When sheep fall dead in a hacienda meadow, the master of the farm lashes out at one of his indigenous shepherds, setting vicious dogs upon him. The murdered-man’s daughter tries to put a homemade cross on her father’s grave, her employer plucks it out. “He wasn’t a Christian,” says the farmer’s wife Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
A number of films in recent years have added a distinctly local flavour to the folk-horror genre. Mark Jenkin was inspired by Cornish superstitions in the ghostly Enys Men and Kate Dolan’s underrated You Are Not My Mother was ripe with Irish pagan practices and folk tales. The Moor, the directorial debut of Yorkshire-native Chris Cronin, continues in this lineage of imagining local folklore through the eyes of genre cinema. Moorland is a distinctly British habitat and has been the swampy canvas we have projected fears onto for millenia. It’s the home of Grendel-like creatures, Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
The current trend for package tours with two headliners appears to be growing, and this jaunt presented somewhat unlikely bedfellows – the theatrical angst of Billy Corgan’s crew and Rivers Cuomo’s indie trendsetters united by a shared love for guitar histrionics, 90s nostalgia for those who remember MTV2 and not much else.Fitting both bands in required an early onstage time (pity support act Teen Mortgage, who trundled onstage at 6.30pm), while the night’s format presented a few quirks that resembled a festival, from the heavy turnover of people moving about between sets to a clear need for Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In Marie Amachoukeli’s Àma Gloria there’s a remarkable performance by a child actor, Louise Mauroy-Panzani. So key is her contribution that It’s fair to say the director couldn’t have delivered the film she had planned without her,.Mauroy-Panzani plays six-year-old Cléo, who lives in Paris with her widowed father (Arnaud Rebotini, pictured below with Mauroy-Panzani) in the care of Gloria, who, like the actress playing her, Ilça Moreno, is a nanny from the Cape Verde islands. And Cléo, very like the director herself, is short-sighted and already wears glasses. But Amachoukeli turns Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s a category of movies that are best seen having read nothing about them. Susquatch Sunset falls into that blood group as its main pleasure comes from working out quite what's going on. Free of any dialogue, it functions as an oddball parody of a nature documentary as it follows an elusive family of mysterious bipeds over the changing seasons.We first spot four shaggy-haired, naked figures outlined on the horizon as dawn breaks in the deep-forested landscape of North America. Settling into a woodland glade, it becomes clear we are looking at two adult males, a female and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jazz Emu bounds on to the stage, launching into a song that talks about the importance of team work and how he has no ego. But strangely enough, Knight Fever is all about him, a Jarvis Cocker-esque synthpop charmer.He tells us we are gathered not in the basement room of the Soho Theatre, but in an underground storage room of the Royal Albert Hall, where he will later perform at a royal variety show. The only star allowed to rehearse on the actual stage is his nemesis, the “pure evil” Kelly Clarkson.What follows is a wonderfully silly hour that ranges from the surreal to the bonkers. Through Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Imagine you’ve inherited a castle in West Sussex plus five square miles of farmland. You continue the family tradition of mixed arable and dairy farming, but the soil is so depleted that yields decrease, year on year. Even with the help of government subsidies, after 17 years you are £1.5 million in debt. So what to do?In 2000, faced with these dire circumstances, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell took a risky decision. Inspired by the nature reserve set up in Flevoland, Holland by Dutch ecologist Franz Vera, they abandoned farming, tore down the fences, introduced herds of Exmoor ponies, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You have to tiptoe around the edge of the set just to take your seat in the Park’s studio space for Lidless Theatre’s Miss Julie. There’s a plain wooden table, a few utensils on it, wooden chairs and a small cabinet – not much, but, we’re smack inside this 19th century country house kitchen, uncomfortably close to discomfiting passions. It may be the longest day outside, but we're in a dark, claustrophobic space in more senses than one.The cook, Christine, hair tied back ferociously, is cooking up poison to effect an abortion for the house dog, but there are sounds of revelry in the Read more ...
David Nice
It may be unusual to begin festival coverage with praise of the overseer rather than the artists. Yet Roger Wright, who quietly leaves his post at Britten Pears Arts this July after a momentous decade, is no ordinary Chief Executive. I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about him; he has been a beacon during difficult times for the arts in the UK, and especially during lockdown; and he leaves the Aldeburgh Festival in best ever shape, just as he did the BBC Proms before it.What was for me the deep heart and soul of the first Saturday and Sunday – and, alas, circumstances prevented my Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHAriel Sharratt & Matthias Kom Never Work (BB*Island) + Ella Ronen The Girl With No Skin (BB*Island)Two offbeat albums from the uncategorisable Hamburg label BB*Island. They are home to the literary indie outfit The Burning Hell. The central figures of that band are Canadian singers Mathias Kom and Ariel Sharratt (assuming the latter is Canadian as Google wouldn't tell me). Together, their second album is a concept affair loaded with brilliant, poignant freak-folk responses to contemporary capitalism, the gig economy and similar. These include the inspiring title track “ Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was a point in this pop revival jaunt where you could feel members of the crowd wince. Not for the performance, but because Nicola Roberts introduced a song by mentioning it was from “the Chemistry album, which came out 19 years ago”. You could almost feel some in the crowd recoil, as if expecting to crumble to dust at that confirmation of the passing of time.Reunion gigs can often carry that nostalgic air, and it was more pronounced than most at this show, part of the girl group’s first tour in 11 years. The sad passing of Sarah Harding due to breast cancer, here remembered through big Read more ...