Reviews
Ismene Brown
What do you call a dancer with a fractured shoulder and only half a show to offer, who nevertheless takes you to the outer reaches of dance nirvana? It can only be Akram Khan. Now fêted as a (reasonable) contemporary choreographer, the favourite of Kylie, Juliette Binoche, Sylvie Guillem, Khan is too little celebrated for what he does at a level beyond anything most of us are ever likely to see, which is dancing in his magnificent, complex, disturbing traditional Indian form of Kathak.Four weeks ago he was intending to prepare for Sadler’s Wells a new contemporary dance premiere, Gnosis, to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Has somebody got it in for poor Matthew Macfadyen? In the recent series of Criminal Justice he didn’t even make it to the end of episode one before he was fatally stabbed by Maxine Peake. Now here he was as Enid Blyton’s adoring and supportive first husband Hugh Pollock, books editor at the George Newnes publishing house, only to find himself on the wrong end of Ms Blyton’s brutally self-centred drive for success at any price. For heaven’s sake, was this any way to treat a man who’d given you your big break in publishing and even bought you a new typewriter?Eventually he was driven to drink Read more ...
Anonymous
There’s something of a Polish theme to the London Jazz Festival 2009, part of the “Polska! year” celebration of that nation’s art and culture. Trumpeter Tomasz Stańko is by some margin the strand’s biggest name. The man who once explained the mournful, meditative tone of his (and his country’s) music in terms of the “melancholy light” he’d known since birth took to the stage in appropriately sombre attire: suit, shirt and hat alike in any colour as long as it was black.Much of the playing was similarly noirish, in keeping with both the moody shadows of Stańko’s current publicity shots and the Read more ...
David Nice
Whether or not you rate Vladimir Jurowski among the top 10 hardest-working, most inspirational conductors in the business – I do – you have to award him the palm for enterprise. His passionate involvement in youth projects of various kinds, and a quest for innovative programming that would send most concert managements running, combined in the launch of his latest festival centred around the work of a single composer.He could have begun his exploration of Alfred Schnittke, Russia’s greatest maverick composer after Shostakovich, with full pomp in the Royal Festival Hall with the orchestra he Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Steven Soderbergh's new film has Matt Damon in a toupee! Stand-up comics in supporting roles! The most bizarre, strange-but-true of story premises! An eager-beaver, 100 per cent unreliable voice-over narration! Perky, parping horn music! And that exclamation mark in the title! It is, just in case anyone might miss the point, a comedy. Is it funny?Based on a book by Kurt Eichenwald, it stars Damon as the real-life figure of Mark Whitacre, a biochemist and senior executive at Archer Daniels Midland in Decatur, Illinois, a huge agri-business which, though you probably haven't heard of it, Read more ...
joe.muggs
I have seen Roberto Fonseca play before – in Havana backing Omara Portuondo and in London with the incomparable Ibrahim Ferrer - so although I was well aware of his ferocious talent I had no idea of how he would fare as a solo star. And I have seen plenty of jazz before, including Latin-style jazz – but only in venues the size of pub function rooms, generally full of nicotine-stained old men, so I had some trepidation about how it would come over in a venue as clean and swanky as the Royal Festival Hall.
But before Fonseca's “jazz Cubano” came the young, cosmopolitan and – let's be frank Read more ...
josh.spero
As questions go, "What is beauty?" is quite possibly only second to "What do women want?" in the frequency of its asking and in the difficulty of its answer. As the first programme in BBC Two and BBC Four’s Modern Beauty season, What Is Beauty? features Matthew Collings skirting around the edges of an answer and in doing so inadvertently hitting upon one.Collings tries to identify ten different components of beauty with reference to some of his favourite artworks. Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto from Monterchi is beautiful because of its simplicity, Robert Rauschenberg’s Charlene Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At first glance, verbatim theatre is a total bore. This form of drama, which collects the words spoken by real individuals and puts them into the mouths of actors, has been a central plank of the rebirth of political theatre since 9/11, but its pleasures tend to be cerebral rather than visceral, moral rather than physical. Attending a verbatim theatre event - such as Out Of Joint's latest show, Mixed Up North - usually makes you feel good as a citizen rather than as a person. You feel worthy, but don’t usually have much fun.Written by Robin Soans, Mixed Up North (which finishes its nationwide Read more ...
sue.steward
“Photography is a refuge for failed painters,” declared the French poet, Charles Baudelaire around 1862. Yet photography took over a century to become a genuine family member of the art world. The British Library was slow to capitalise on the visitor value and historical significance of the vast photo-archive that it accumulated over the birth-period of this new artform. But its spectacular debut exhibition has burst open the vaults containing over 300,000 images, and now presents a magnificent production leading visitors on a journey back through time as the new art form was gradually Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It is quickly apparent when you are in the company of exceptional talent. In even the most hackneyed repertoire nothing is quite as you expect it to be: there’s a charge in the air, phrasings take on a different urgency, textures are opened up and newly revealed. And on this night, certain revelations concerning Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony were, under the exciting baton of Vasily Petrenko, no longer conjecture but irrefutable fact.But first there was a Night on the Bare Mountain to endure and if you thought that the tamer Rimsky-Korsakov version of Mussorgsky’s classic had ceased to Read more ...
sheila.johnston
If you would like to wallow awhile in visions of apocalypse this week, where are you going to turn to: the special effects splurgefest that is Roland Emmerich's 2012 (reviewed here) or the remorseless austerity of Michael Haneke'sThe White Ribbon? Their respective audiences may be almost entirely mutually exclusive. But, say what you like about the contemporary cinema (and some say it's going through a mini-Armageddon of its own), nobody can legitimately complain that it's not catering for all tastes.If you would like to wallow awhile in visions of apocalypse this week, where are you going to Read more ...