Reviews
Robert Beale
There are three aspects of English National Opera’s most ambitious project to date in Manchester that demand attention.One is the work itself: Royce Vavrek and Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize winning Angel’s Bone, seen as an outstanding creative work of 10 years ago, now getting its UK premiere. The second is the artistic achievement of inter-city musical collaboration bringing it to life in Aviva Studios’ “warehouse” space, where boundary-breaking comes as standard. The third is the approach of director Kip Williams (whose UK opera debut this is), designer Marg Horwell and their team, offering it as Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In a notable case of nominative determinism, the 2025 film about a kabuki star, Kokuho – meaning “national treasure” – became just that in Japan, a box-office smash. The keening voices and ultra-stylised mannerisms of the genre are not staples of Western entertainment, so a three-hour feature film about a kabuki actor sounds like a tough proposition here. But the time is well spent and flies past.Kokuho’s storyline is the familiar one of the isolating life that supremely gifted artists face and the people they sacrifice along the way in their pursuit of perfection. Think virtually any biopic Read more ...
Liz Thomson
First date, last dance: Emmylou Harris, possessor of one of country-rock’s most beautiful and evocative voices, opened the British leg of her farewell tour on Monday with a generous show at Liverpool's Philharmonic Hall. It was, of course, sold out, the audience on the older side (it was notable how many guys needed to take a comfort break as time wore on!) and Emmylou herself acknowledging, as she briefly massaged her left wrist, that “I’m 79… arthritis.” But she stood – in her customary cowboy boots, shoulder-length silver hair glinting in the spotlight, and playing her signature Gibson Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTH 1Simo Cell & Abdullah Diawy Dying is the Internet EP (Dekmantel) + Simo Cell FL Louis (TEMƎT)
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Where house music has drifted to conservatism, becoming predictable and dull, some electronic producers are still creating dancefloor-adjacent music that rips. One of the very best is French machine-freak Simo Cell. His wonked-out bangers defy definition. He’s been Vinyl of the Month before, with his Yes. DJ EP, back in 2021. These two new releases are also essential. The first, via Amsterdam’s Dekmantel organization, is Read more ...
johncarvill
Books about The Beatles are apt to prompt questions on whether there is anything left to say about them. Depends who’s doing the saying. We will each of us have had The Beatles seep into the fabric of our lives in a way that feels unique to us; but only a minority will be able to turn that into a story that’s compelling to others. Samira Ahmed achieves this rare feat by dint of being something of an outsider, but also in many ways an insider.As the child of immigrants, Ahmed’s assimilation of The Beatles was inflected by a certain “outsider status”. For her, The Beatles “existed as a kind of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Billie Eilish’s second concert film joins a newly lucrative genre, following Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’s $267 million box-office. Both are marketed as participatory filmgoing, turning cinemas into cut-price venues where fans can relive or imagine communing with their heroes. James Cameron’s co-direction with Eilish in his favoured 3D format adds supposed stature, but this remains incurious star-sanctioned product. Eilish is the visual opposite of Swift’s traditionally glamorous feminine persona. The latter’s arch, “Oh, hi!” as she opened her Eras act in silver and red showgirl finery Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Quicksilver Messenger Service were central to what emerged from San Francisco as 1966 unfolded – the psychedelic-dance-ballroom scene. They first played the city’s Avalon Ballroom on 13 May 1966, and were there a further 74 times. Before this, the band had been on stage at the also-Family Dog-promoted Fillmore on 26 February, and over 25 to 27 March. Their initial booking for the city’s other main promoter Bill Graham was also at the Fillmore, on 19 March.These early shows – of a band which debuted live in December 1965 – ensured that QMS was moving fast, seemingly as much so as their the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Carla Simón’s latest autofiction disinters the post-Franco plague of heroin and AIDS which killed her parents and that of Marina (Llúcia Garcia), her indefatigable 18-year-old surrogate in this lyrical story of shame, memory and love.Simón was orphaned by AIDS contracted from sharing needles by the time she was six, and Marina shares this biography, being raised in Barcelona by her mum’s family. Discovering a document she requires for a scholarship to study cinema states her dad had no child, she contacts his Galician family for the first time since his death. The quest to correct the legal Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Concertos where the soloist is a member of the orchestra are something of a Scottish Chamber Orchestra speciality. They’re always among their best-sold concerts each season, and there are obvious gains of warmth and communication when the band are playing to support one of their own. This week, the honour fell to Philip Higham, the SCO’s principal cello, and he played Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto with so much involvement and quasi-operatic intensity that it was easy to forget how low down the priority list Schumann’s concertos were until very recently.Higham clearly believes in the work Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the 1920s, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was as famous as it gets really, author of the beloved Sherlock Holmes stories, a polymath and a rare British example of that most continental of figures, the public intellectual. Across The Atlantic, Harry Houdini was a phenomenon, the escapologist showman, personifying The Great American Dream, even making movies.A century on, Holmes and Houdini (both of whom are invented characters, lest we forget) persist as metaphors and memes that require no explanation.Ah, lest we forget. Neither man could, to the extent that memories became pathologised. The writer Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Contrast and variety are as vital in a three-ballet programme as in a well-built sandwich. Typically that might include textural interest, a spicy element and something substantial in the middle. Alchemies, the Royal Ballet’s latest triple bill, ignored that time-tested formula with the result that not one of the three works by Wayne McGregor registered as strongly as it should. Granted, the final item was a world premiere, so management couldn't have known exactly how it would turn out. On paper, Quantum Souls (terrible title), with its wall of onstage percussion instruments surrounded by Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Hallé Orchestra is still in many ways the well honed, burnished instrument created by Sir Mark Elder over his near quarter-century as its music director, and his calm authority over it was apparent in almost every note of this, his second Bridgewater Hall appearance in the present season.Radio 3 listeners – the concert was broadcast live – will have been aware as much as those in the auditorium of the qualities of its playing under its now Conductor Emeritus: incisive articulation, intelligently balanced and unified ensemble, sweet and passionate string playing, rapier-thrust brass Read more ...