Reviews
Jasper Rees
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister joins an ever-lengthening list of dramas detailing the joys, the struggles of lady-on-lady love. It’s never quite clear who these entertainments are for. Blokes, as we know, have a response to this stuff that hovers between complex and Neanderthal. Sometimes you wonder why the schedulers don’t always screen them during major sporting tournaments, when the chaps are all looking the other way. On the other hand, do fans of six-hanky chick flicks, legs curled on sofas across the land, really want to watch girls getting it on with girls? So you never know Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A Balanchine on a mixed bill is a reminder of what a choreographer should desire to offer his audience: a specific new experience of art each time, not a repeated thumbprint in every ballet. Balanchine grew up in a borderless theatre country - jazz, music hall, Broadway, Cubism, Russian imperialism, folklore, classical piano studies, all soaked his personality and fed his imagination. It is a range of experience that both Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon have grown up without and it made the last of the Royal Ballet’s triple bills a faintly poignant affair. If McGregor and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Silhouetted against the sparkling waters of San Francisco Bay, a pelican surveys the scene from a quayside bollard, then takes flight. The beautiful opening shot of Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event establishes a mood of elegiac tranquility. We are at Ford Point, on the east shore of the bay, in a magnificent building – a Ford factory that made military vehicles in World War Two, but closed down in 1955. Floor to ceiling windows afford breathtaking views across the water and allow the California light to flood in, transforming the floor into a liquid sheen of shadows and reflections.In Read more ...
david.cheal
If the power-generating companies in the London area noticed a sudden surge in electricity consumption late on Sunday afternoon, I think I can explain why: many thousands of hair-straighteners and other beautifying devices were doubtless being put to use in the run-up to Lady Gaga’s show at the O2 Arena, the first of two nights in London. This was one of those shows that people got dressed up for, made themselves glamorous for; it was a big night out, and the result, as the O2 Arena filled up, was a sea of very straight and very shiny hair, often decorated with bows and flowers (though I also Read more ...
roslyn.sulcas
What is going on at New York City Ballet, home of the abstract, neo-classical, pared-down, no-scenery, no-story, nothing-extraneous aesthetic that George Balanchine made into an artistic religion? So far, three out of the four pieces commissioned for the company’s ambitious “Architecture of Dance” festival have been - more or less - story ballets (only Wayne McGregor has resisted the lure). Alexei Ratmansky’s Namouna offered a dizzying whirl through a faux-19th-century ballet, complete with mystifying characters, impossible plot and glorious choreography. Of Benjamin Millepied’s why am I not Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Ian Bostridge is one of those artists – Andreas Scholl is another – whose technique is so suited to the recording studio, his recordings so ubiquitously loved and lived-with, that the opportunity to see him perform live has become one of conflict. Suffering from the same malaise as successful pop artists, concert performances inevitably become processed by over-exposed ears as acts of mimicry; studied verisimilitude to a recorded original jostles for validity alongside live creative re-imagining.Last night’s performance of Schubert’s late songs – the programme released on CD by Bostridge Read more ...
fisun.guner
Wood is a mysterious substance. We do not make it, it makes itself. It is useful to us, alive and dead. Without it, our history would not be the same. But it is so ever-present, so much a part of that history, that we rarely see the wood for the trees. David Nash has seen both the wood and the trees for years. To him, wood is life. The opening of this show says it all. Outside the first gallery is a huge eucalyptus, split into three by the sculptor. (Nash only works with “found” wood – from dead or dying trees, offcuts from tree-surgeons, or from wood yards – "wood Read more ...
sue.steward
In the week that Sarah Ferguson was caught on a secret camera receiving a stash of $40,000 from News of the World journalists, Tate Modern launched this ambitious and excitingly diverse photography exhibition. Had the meeting been earlier, the incriminating images would have been perfect for the show. Instead, the Royal Family is spied on in Alison Jackson’s unusually generous parody, The Queen Plays with her Corgis. Spread across 14 rooms, the collection holds over 250 still images and several short films, and includes work by legends from the early years and 20th-century icons (from Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Rossini provided the lively curtain-raisers to both halves of this Chamber Orchestra of Europe concert, streamed live to Aberdeen where Shell, the sponsors, have something of a vested interest in keeping their employees entertained. The liquid gold on this occasion was of the legato variety and not one but two Fischers ensured that it flowed freely and purposefully. Ivan Fischer is quite simply one of the most perceptive and persuasive conductors on the planet; Julia Fischer (no relation) is the epitome of German cool and precision. She plays the violin rather well, too. But first, The Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There are, in urban myth, those moments when a runway model – leggy, impassively superhuman and dressed in some impossibly haute garment – catches a heel and collapses, foal-like, into a heap of fragile legs. It’s a moment that Sex and the City the series neatly turned on its head, urging us to celebrate the beauty to be found in human flaw and error; yet, watching the self-assured sass of this once-mighty franchise sprawl headlong, it wasn’t beauty but a sense of raging frustration that dominated. The fashion, the friends, even the puns are all still in their place, but where (as Carrie Read more ...
stephen.walsh
To launch a music festival with the Arditti Quartet, as Bath has just almost done (a pair of dance events preceded them), is a bold enough gesture, if no bolder than for the Arditti to open up their Assembly Rooms concert with Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – a finisher if ever there was one. But for this particular group, late Beethoven might well seem like a kind of starting point. Beethoven was the first to write unplayable music for string quartet; and the Arditti have always specialised in the unplayable. Beethoven thrived on making life hard for his players; he apparently believed that Read more ...
howard.male
I’m not sure what it says about a songwriter when they simply call a song “Music", but the half French, half Moroccan singer Hindi Zahra is a bit of an enigma all round. Critics have already compared the 30-year-old to Billie Holiday and Madeleine Peyroux, presumably because of her phrasing, timbre and a certain fragility in her voice. But her debut album is neither easy listening or jazz. In fact, it’s got more in common with the woozy, trip-hoppy work of Martina Topley Bird, or even the lo-fi experiments with sound that Tom Waits indulges in. The latter aspect being what got my ears paying Read more ...