Reviews
sheila.johnston
It begins with a touch of brio: a sinuous, swirling tracking shot plunges deep into the daily chaos of a market place in a remote Algerian desert village. Signs are hoisted aloft and askew, mobile phones noisily bickered over, clapped-out bangers pushed out of the way. Eventually, the camera pauses on three old men as they, as one, clasp their handkerchiefs to their noses: a honking wedding cortege is about to roar past in a miniature dust-storm to set the seal on the mayhem.A battle of the sexes, a comedy of errors and a cutting satire, Mascarades has won plaudits on the international Read more ...
David Nice
Seeking the snows of yesteryear, I remember a time when John Schlesinger's Covent Garden Rosenkavalier filled every moment of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's rococo libretto and Richard Strauss's jewel-studded score with life and meaning. 25 years on, its creator is no more, a revival director (Andrew Sinclair) fails to pull a dramatically variable cast together and many startling new productions have shown more readiness to engage with the opera's Viennese time machine - that's to say, any era between the 1740s and the present day - and with greater panache.A strictly period Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Piano ballades and fantasies are the repositories of dreams. They are the places where the mind is left to wander, to roam precipitously, unaided by known paths, undisturbed by familiar structures. The romantic fantasies and ballades of last night's Wigmore Hall recital plunge and soar, catch you by the feet and dangle you by the ankles. To cast the right spell, to heave the right ho, you need the right storyteller, one like the ancient Mariner: a glittering eye, a hoary beard, a man of myth and terror. In fact, you need what we got: the towering Paul Bunyan-like Russian, Nikolai Read more ...
rose.dennen
Everybody needs a daddy and the paternal focus of Battles is their drummer - nothing seems to be done without the say of John Stanier. This is no bad thing, a lynch pin is needed in every rag-tag mob. With Battles, last night, they seemed extremely comfortable in airing new material and, for the first time, fucking with their tried and true older material. Every other time they've played they've played by rote; as on the album as is on stage. Last night they elongated and morphed "Atlas" from their first and only album proper "Mirrors" and it felt like it was being played like Coney Island Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Luckily, the budget for this two-part adaptation of Andrea Levy's prizewinning novel stretched to some location shooting in Jamaica. The contrast between the Caribbean's luminous skies and brilliant colours and crushed, monochrome, half-dead 1940s London is almost too painful to watch. It's the perfect visual metaphor for a story about Technicolor dreams crashing to earth"Why would you leave such a place to come all this way and fight for us?" Queenie Bligh asks Gilbert Joseph, who has come from Jamaica to join the RAF. Gilbert (David Oyelowo) gives a poetic reply about how Jamaicans regarded Read more ...
David Nice
Let's suppose that off-centre genius among opera directors Richard Jones had been asked to bring his imagination to bear on Sir Colin Davis's latest Verdi-in-concert. I imagine he might have weighed up leading men, chorus and the conductor's unexpected blend of manicure with flash alongside swathes of masterful beauty, and decided to follow up his 1940s Windsor Falstaff at Glyndebourne with a 1970s Otello set in Surbiton.As things rather stiffly stood on the concert platform racial issues, Love thy Neighbour-style or otherwise, could be left behind. There were instead two pressing questions Read more ...
graeme.thomson
While we’re busy falling over ourselves in the rush to laud the latest beard-and-guitar export from Wisconsin tundra or Williamsburg tenement, it’s easier than ever to undervalue home-grown talent. Lau formed in 2006, a coming together of three British traditional musicians with outstanding individual pedigrees but little in the way of mystique. Featuring Orcadian Kris Drever on clear-blue vocals and beautifully fluid acoustic guitar, Oban-born Aidan O’Rourke on the fiddle, and token Englishman Martin Green, who proved there’s very little you can’t do on the accordion, Lau have won Best Band Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Beware the ids of kids: Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze's film of Maurice Sendak's seminal children's picture book, centres on a hyperactive nine-year-old boy, Max (Max Records), who’s so angered and frustrated by the reverses of a winter's day that he destroys a keepsake he gave his adolescent sister and ends up biting his single mother (Catherine Keener) while she’s entertaining her boyfriend at home.This first and best section of the movie sets up Max’s voyage that night to a faraway land occupied by a handful of huge two-footed beasts who speak in urban Americanese, are Read more ...
David Nice
To summon spirits from the vasty deep is the ambition of too many overloaded contemporary scores. George Crumb is better than most at getting those spirits to come when he calls, yet even he touches the transcendental more surely the fewer instruments he engages. That, at least, seemed the conclusion to draw from the latest of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's perilous but admirable "Total Immersion" days exposing a curious audience to the style of one composer, and here giving us the chance to compare the grandiose and the intimate. If the intimate won hands down, that's no reason to Read more ...
robert.sandall
After years of cultish acclaim and enthusiastic reviews, the American singer-songwriter and star of New York's “anti-folk” scene Regina Spektor has now reached a career tipping point where mainstream acceptance beckons - and her detractors begin to sharpen their knives. She is, depending on your taste, either an idiosyncratic, piano-charming genius, or a contrived and slightly irritating kook cut from similar cloth to that of Tori Amos. With her heavy red lipstick and mane of auburn hair she even looks like her.Unsurprisingly, the sell out crowd who filled the Hammersmith Apollo last night Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Passion, pain and loss: they are companions in life more faithful than many a lover. This duo of solo dramas by Stefan Golaszewski, which opened last night in London after success in Edinburgh, turns its perceptive gaze upon them through the eyes of both eager youth and desolate old age. Poignantly, true emotional maturity remains elusive.In the first piece, titled with apt adolescent awkwardness Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved, it is 1999 and Stefan is an 18-year-old gap-year student doing work experience backstage at The Lion King. He’s hanging out in a pub with his Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We watch and listen simultaneously so much today that it hardly seems blasphemous for a superlative pianist to decide to conceive an evening of piano music plus video installation. Leif Ove Andsnes has doubts about the transmittability of classical music to a general audience today - he calls the status quo into question, and he may be right. So he turned a concert programme into a video show, focusing on Musorgky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Schumann’s Kinderszenen, to which would be set a visual installation around him and his piano.There is already a CD and DVD set out of this, which I Read more ...