Reviews
Veronica Lee
There was a very strong line-up last night for the finals of the Funny Women newcomer competition, held at the Comedy Store in London. The award was won by Miss London, whose look-at-me-but-don't-touch stage presence and strong set went down a storm with the audience. Jan Ravens, who compered with a light and witty touch, was clearly impressed by the runner-up, fellow impressionist Eve Webster, while Jo Selby came third with a fine deadpan turn in character as Russian comic Tatiana Ostrakova.Only three could pick up awards, but the judges - producers, agents and comic Stephen K Amos - would Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Valery Gergiev shimmying his way through Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe. There he was, London’s loosest-limbed maestro, back on the Barbican podium (just about) with the London Symphony Orchestra, after a summer flogging his chaotic Ring Cycle around the globe, returning to more favourable ground, an all-French programme of Debussy, Dutilleux and Ravel that had his dancing juices flowing and his legs a-leaping. Certainly, there’s no gainsaying his moves. The question is were they being put to good musical effect?Whenever the moment took him, the answer was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, and despite its sometimes erratic quality control, the loss of The South Bank Show (ITV1) is going to be like having a leg sawn off TV's arts coverage.The final season got off to a thunderous start last week with Tony Palmer’s film about the Wagner family. Wives, children and grandchildren elbowed each other aside in their eagerness to accuse each other of barbaric behaviour or rabid anti-Semitism. When Richard Wagner composed Parsifal, apparently he was creating nothing less than the complete blueprint for the Third Reich. Who knew? Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When you go to a Schubert recital, you’re plunged into a whirlpool of emotional ambivalence, heat and chill running together, music and lyrics not always playing the same tune. When Schubert seizes on a poem, it’s not because he’s interested in Mickey-Mousing that poet’s sentiments - on the contrary, he may see a purple passage of words and set it simply, as if deflating it, or he may take a plain statement of action (looking out of a window, say) and fill that phrase with complex music containing a world of dark feeling.When Matthias Goerne is the singer, this counterpoint gets a third layer Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
When I met the Nigerian rebel pop star Fela Kuti I asked him who was the greatest musician - he didn’t hesitate before replying George Frederic Handel. Kuti was wearing only a pair of red underpants at the time and smoking a massive spliff. His music has echoes of Handel, certainly in some keyboard lines, in all its solidity and moments of transcendence. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at Handel’s continuing reach across the centuries and continents. Beethoven and Mozart are among many to have re- arranged Handel. But how would a selection of contemporary composers (all of whom Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Club music has always been a mongrel creation. By definition, DJ-driven music – assuming the DJ is any good – is about combination, recombination and juxtaposition. But even allowing for all that, we are currently going through an uncommonly fecund time in the clubs as disparate fringe innovations of the last decade collide and combine.London's pirate radio stations and blacked-out VW Golfs are pumping out the sound of “UK funky”, a deliriously upbeat reboot of 1990s UK garage, fusing house music, dancehall, calypso, African rhythms and grime, its whipcrack rhythms supporting untold melodic Read more ...
edward.seckerson
“If you feel like singing along... don’t.” Michael Ball knows his audience – I mean, really knows his audience - and only he could turn a rebuke into a well-timed gag. About that audience: the age range is a good half-century but at its heart are the hardcore Ballites, the mums and grandmums who adopted the fresh, smiley, dimple-faced, leading juvenile 25 years ago and have been on his tail ever since.The defining moment for them was probably a number called “Love Changes Everything” from the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Charles Hart show Aspects of Love. Not one of Lloyd Webber’s best numbers ( Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“If you've been affected by any of the issues in this episode, click here.” I wouldn’t bother. Really. In fact I haven’t put the link in. They are – trust me - just ticking boxes. Some kind of Ofcom diktat. “If you’ve been affected bla bla bla,” it says when you click, “here are the details of organisations that can provide help and support.” It’s a long old list. You’ve probably not got the time, but here goes.There's a whole Rotadex of numbers for the Samaritans, Childline, Missing People, Drinkline, the Terence Higgins Trust, the Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, helplines offering advice on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though our French cousins like to boast of their superiority to the Anglo-Saxons in every sphere of endeavour, the Paris-based police dama Spiral, returning after a three-year absence, suggests that the Cartesian paradise across the Channel is under siege. Already, it’s clear that the ghoulish murder that opened this first episode of series two has triggered an examination of the interplay of police, politicians and judiciary which threatens to uncover hideous secrets in the loftiest eyries of the French establishment.You could say that Spiral’'s subject matter makes it a kind of Gallic Law Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For someone who until very recently had an avowed dislike of Shakespeare, stand-up comic Lenny Henry makes a decent fist of Othello. It’s an astonishing role in which to make his stage acting debut - complex emotions are expressed in rhetorical gymnastics and he’s rarely off stage - but not for one moment does one believe Henry guilty of hubris. Rather, this is a man who has come to the Bard late (Henry is now 51) and clearly fallen in love with him.When I first saw this Othello (a co-production between Northern Broadsides and the West Yorkshire Playhouse) in Leeds last February, I was Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Door-sized detachable nipples, an angel of death with a dick to die for (literally), a cave of an arse housing a disco-dancing unit of storm troopers and an all-singing all-dancing couple of randy cadavers. Ever wondered what the Europeans might have done if they’d ever got hold of the Carry On brand? The ENO’s new production of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre offers up one possibility. Few new productions have been so keenly anticipated as this one from Catalan theatre company La Fura dels Baus that opened the ENO’s new season last night.And it was hard not to be impressed by the scale of their Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Folk singers travel well. And it’s often as ex-pats that they best appreciate their own culture. Martin Simpson, born in Scunthorpe, lived the life of a professional English folkie for 15 years before relocating to America. Although working the clubs as a bluesman he never lost his keen ear for his own roots music.But success in Simpson's adopted home eventually gave way to homesickness, and his homecoming album, Prodigal Son, was released in 2007. If folk singers travel well, folk audiences often look more at home, at home. Folk is, after all, about people. And when folk fans Read more ...