Reviews
Adam Sweeting
"They all laughed at Rockefeller Centre, now they’re fighting to get in,” as the Gershwins put it. Much the same applies to Susan Boyle, the implausible contestant from Britain’s Got Talent who has soared fantastically from a closeted life of caring for her widowed 91-year-old mother in West Lothian to the top of the American album charts. In the inimitable stat-speak of music trade mag Billboard, Boyle’s debut album I Dreamed A Dream “marks the best opening week for a female artist's debut album since SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991.”ITV1 hailed Boyle’s astounding Read more ...
David Nice
Creative old age brings with it not just the expected serene glow but also a singular urgency, a fresh intensity, or so that magisterial pianist Claudio Arrau once wrote. Arrau was a living testament to his claim; so, now, is the 84-year-old Sir Charles Mackerras. Everything he's chosen to bring to life this season has a valedictory quality, or perhaps he simply selects the best. His Philharmonia diptych of concerts led us from the Wagnerian end of the world on Thursday to a Sunday afternoon of prelapsarian innocence in Beethoven's pastoral idyll and paradise regained in Humperdinck's Hansel Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You can just picture the meeting. Someone stands up and pitches. “We’ve got this girl, see. And she’s good at numbers, OK? You know, maths and stuff. But here’s the thing: she knows that statistically her best chance of a successful marriage is if she gets hitched to her 11th sexual partner when she’s 28. With me so far, guys? Trouble is, she discovers on her wedding day that Mister Eleven is really Mister Ten. Yeah? And then all hell breaks loose. What you reckon? Eh? Think it’s a goer?” Silence reigns in the room until the head honcho - you somehow assume it is a man - slowly raises his Read more ...
Veronica Lee
‘'You must see this show!” “You must not go to this show!” Faced with those exhortations from friends and colleagues who had already seen (and been quite shocked by) it, I of course go to Kim Noble Will Die at the Soho Theatre. I was trepidatious because they told me it includes film of him consuming dog food, vomiting, self-harming and doing an awful lot of ejaculating - not my idea of a chucklesome evening. But Kim Noble was once half of the award-winning, darkly surreal duo Noble and Silver (with Stuart Silver), who had several years of success at the Edinburgh Fringe, and this is his Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It is telling that there were drama critics at the Apollo to review Camille O’Sullivan’s show, The Dark Angel. The half-French, half-Irish woman is ostensibly a singer, but so unique is her delivery that each song is a piece of theatre in its own right. My companion confessed to being just a little scared of O’Sullivan, who has a distinctive look - part vamp, part cabariste, but wholly diva. She described the singer, with her raven hair and a gash of bright-red lipstick, as “a cross between Tracey Emin and Judy Garland”, but soon warmed to her. But then O’Sullivan is a pussy cat, as evidenced Read more ...
sheila.johnston
When the director Jim Jarmusch speaks of his new film, the discourse is jam-packed with cultural namechecks. One minute it's Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre, the next we're on to William S Burroughs, or Antonioni, or John Boorman's Point Blank. Joe Strummer is in the mix there too, and Jacques Rivette, and Boris, Sunn O))) and petenera flamenco and... well, you get the drift. Yet, freighted as it is with subtext, the story, such as it is, is the ne plus ultra of minimalist cool. And it is a fine line indeed that separates cool from boring.The main character, known only as Lone Man, is on a mission Read more ...
Russ Coffey
A self-styled “string quartet comprising a guitar, fiddle, mandolin and accordion” - welcome to the topsy–turvy world of Spiro. A world where nothing is quite what it seems. A world where up is down, black is white, and folk is, well, kind of avant-garde.The four-piece band started off in Bristol in the early '90s as “The Famous Five”. Two of them were classically trained and the other two were raised in the hard-knock world of punk. So they decided to form a folk band. Except they wouldn’t play folk It was to be more folk mixed with classical, warapped in a contemporary coat. If Steve Reich Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Even Schubert’s very earliest compositions terrify. His first songs, written when he was only 13, are unforgettably vivid, gory, messy, mangled, full of darkness and horror, like dead little birds. He never shakes off this Gothic sensibility; it’s never ironed out of him. A part of him remains untutored, untamed, right to the end, and over time his dark preoccupations gather a more and more frightening shape. Pitch blackness is reached in his Piano Sonata in A minor, D784, one of strangest pieces in the whole piano repertoire, a work of utter nightmarishness and a focal point for last night’s Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Wigmore Hall does not always take kindly to big voices; it’s an easy hall to over-sing. But when the singer is the American soprano Christine Brewer and the sound so open, so rich and effulgent, hall and voice become one resonance. It’s almost as if Wigmore is selective in its response. It warms to the right voice in the right music. Brewer in Strauss is about as right as it gets. And besides, regardless of the venue, Brewer has never sung to be heard; she sings to be understood.This BBC Lunchtime Concert began at the beginning of Strauss’ life in song with Zueignung, generally sung at the Read more ...
james.woodall
He was the biggest hitter in an A-team of mid-20th-century American painters: Jackson Pollock, Barnet Newman, Willem de Kooning. Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkovitz in what has become Latvia, was Abstract Expressionism's shaman, its restless thinker and febrile poet, an artist who fashioned from an investigation into the power of pure colour a philosophy of art as potent as Crick and Watson's contemporaneous unravelling of the double helix. Red, John Logan's new play about Rothko, directed by Michael Grandage, is both a tribute and an excoriation: a portrait of the artist as headstrong Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s a rare show that has every critic reaching for the superlatives and wishing they could award six stars out of five, but Pajama Men’s The Last Stand to Reason did that at the Edinburgh Fringe earlier this year earlier this year. Pajama Men consists of Mark Chavez and Shenoah Allen, two thirtysomething men from Albuquerque, New Mexico who, in a remarkable display of vocal and physical dexterity, create a world so detailed, so fully, beautifully and comically realised that it’s astonishing to note they do it with the aid of just two chairs and occasional music from the onstage Kevin Hume. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What’s the appeal of the traditional ghost story? Is it the knowledge that while the victims of the tale quake in their boots, you are perfectly safe and grinning like the Cheshire Cat? Or is it because the supernatural gives us a chance to journey into the weird and fearsome corners of our psyche, all the time kidding ourselves that we are just normal human beings? In Michael Punter’s new ghost story, Darker Shores, which opened last night at the Hampstead Theatre, all the rooms of the haunted house story get an airing.It is Christmas 1875, and the setting is Sea House, a suitably isolated Read more ...