Reviews
howard.male
From the long shot of the suburban London semis onwards, I couldn’t help but think of the 1960s BBC sitcom Not in Front of the Children which similarly focused on a middle-class couple with three children. There’s no laughter track on Outnumbered but there’s also no escaping the fact that - apart from a colourful new range of insults the kids casually fire at each other (“numb-chuck”, “toss-piece”) - this could easily be one of Wendy Craig’s naughty but nice TV families, bickering over breakfast and complaining about the burnt fish fingers. Oh and look, there’s John Sessions playing the Read more ...
graham.rickson
We head east this week - new pieces by a contemporary Russian composer, and a bargain box set showcasing the flamboyant orchestral music of a neglected Russian. And a famous viola player leads a young Moscow orchestra in electrifying accounts of Brahms and Tchaikovsky.Brahms: Symphony No 3, Tchaikovsky: Symphony No 6 Novaya Rossiya State Symphony Orchestra/Yuri Bashmet (ICA Classics)
You don’t expect to find these two composers sharing a disc, in the light of an infamous quote attributed to Tchaikovsky in 1886: “I have played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard!” Read more ...
David Nice
Under Western eyes, Gergiev’s Mariinsky forces had been turning to stone – like the titular shadowless woman's solipsistic husband in Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s polyphonic fairy tale – each time they stepped outside the Russian repertoire. There was the calamitous Verdi season at Covent Garden, and the ungainly Wagner Ring cycle which saw the opera company’s temporary twilight in London. In densest Strauss, the German word and the vital sense of movement arrived stillborn, but last night there were enough sparks in singing, playing and scenic vision to ignite swathes of this Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Days of Heaven made Terrence Malick’s legend. Released four years after his relatively conventional lovers-on-the-run debut Badlands (1974), it gave a similar story transcendental themes and images of painterly gorgeousness. Then he directed nothing else for 20 years. Choosing not to engage with interviews or celebrity, like Pynchon and Salinger he vanished into mystery and silence. Relative productivity since means this Malick-approved new print is issued in the wake of his fifth film, The Tree of Life. Badlands is the Malick you’re most likely to have seen, a Springsteen-referenced slice of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Police. Placards. Protests. And bag checks. It meant only one thing. Jews were performing at the Proms. Here we were in the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2011 witnessing a stage of musicians being barracked and abused for having the gall to be Jewish. Last year, four more Jewish musicians, the Jerusalem Quartet, had the cheek to perform and broadcast a recital at the Wigmore Hall. They were again heckled and hounded off air. No, not a portrait of Europe in the early 20th century, but Britain in the 21st. I wonder. In a few years, will Jews be able to make music publicly in Britain at all?If Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Shen Wei is only 43, but he’s packed an epic amount into his career. A child sent from home aged nine to study opera; an emigrant to New York; a return to China to choreograph the Beijing Olympics. His urge to put this extraordinary tale into dance theatre is understandable. That Re-Triptych, a semi-biographical creation that’s one of the Edinburgh International Festival’s features in its Asian dance programme this year, is only intermittently intriguing to watch, and largely inchoate in choreography, seems also understandable. Some experiences are just too much to render in art.The format is Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A monolithic slab, like a giant incarnation of a Biblical tablet of stone, dominates Mark Thompson’s set for Jamie Lloyd's production of the third play by Alexi Kaye Campbell. Nothing else is so solid in this big, weighty work, which wrestles with abstract notions of faith, the human soul and the myths and narratives by which we choose to live.It’s an ambitious piece of writing, and at times Campbell trips over his own verbosity. In an evening of nearly three hours’ duration, carved up by two intervals, it’s difficult not to wish at times that he had more full-bloodedly dramatised his Read more ...
Nick Hasted
After 10 minutes in the company of Fright Night’s vacuous US teens I was thinking, like Colonel Kurtz, “Kill them all!” One of the several virtues of this remake of the 1985 vampire horror-comedy is that its writer, Marti Noxon, feels the same way. Partnering this Buffy veteran with Craig Gillespie, the director of sensitive man-and-sex-doll romance Lars and the Real Girl, makes this deeply unpromising entry in the current cycle of Eighties horror reboots surprisingly engaging. A keen cast including Colin Farrell as king vampire Jerry and David Tennant as a burnt-out Vegas magic act add to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Over the past six weeks of the Proms the BBC’s hard-working Symphony Orchestra has performed everything from Britten to Brahms, Verdi to Volans. Their Mahler with Ed Gardner was an operatic epic, their programme of English music for Mark Wigglesworth glowed with wit. Yet hearing their ragged and unlovely account of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony last night it was hard to remember their triumphs, hard even to remember the delicate account of Graham Fitkin’s new Cello Concerto that they delivered in the first half, so complete was their collapse.Conceived as a programme of boundary-breaking works, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Six months after giving birth to a child conceived through anonymous sperm donation, Sylvia decided to become an egg donor. It was her way, she said, of “giving something back”. It was 1991 and she was to become one of Britain’s first anonymous egg donors. Once she'd left the clinic, she was expected to think no more about it: she was helping an infertile woman realise her dreams, just as she, lacking Mr Right, had been helped to realise hers. She never thought for a minute that her act of altruism would come back to haunt her.Six weeks after donating her eggs, Sylvia came across an article Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
David Fray certainly has the locks to be a piano virtuoso (eat your heart out, Franzi). And he has the looks, the troubled brow, the pallor and a suitably eccentric manner (the Glenn Gould hunch and hum came out for all the runs). But does he have the hands?He definitely has hands. And on last night's viewing they were the right hands for Mozart. The understated Piano Concerto in C major K503 has never been the most popular of Mozart's concertos. Eschewing virtuosity and outward emotion for sunny but sensitive inward mooching, the work requires an especially careful and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Does anyone else ever feel a mite sorry for the North Pole? It always takes second billing to its more famous namesake, and you can see why. The South Pole belongs to a continental land mass. Antarctica has penguins, historic huts, and chaps going outside, maybe for some time. The North Pole, stuck up there on basically a huge floating icicle, is hedged about with ifs and buts. Who got there first? No one knows. And when you stand precisely at 90.00.00 degrees north, the drift of the ice soon shifts you off it. If the Poles were siblings, the South would inherit the land and the title. The Read more ...