Reviews
Ed Vulliamy
Twenty years ago, the British-Ghanaian saxophonist Tony Kofi recorded the results of a venture as ambitious as it was potentially audacious: an album of transpositions for sax of music by the master of improvisational quirk and idiosyncratic technique on piano: Theolonius Monk.Plays Monk was, duly, an astonishing debut statement of intent, musicality, and reverent but confident understanding of Monk specifically, and of Bebop’s journeys parallel to Monk’s studio and live recordings for Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside and Columbia records.During the interim years - and several awards and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The giant crinolines are back, and the winsome little royal children with miniature temples on their heads, and the glorious songs. The King and I is at the Dominion for a six-week run: how does its storyline look under a 21st century follow-spot?Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1951 musical, based on a 1944 novel by Margaret Landon, Anna and the King of Siam, ran on Broadway for a record three years, then became a much loved film in 1956, starring the first stage King of Siam, Yul Brynner, with Deborah Kerr as his schoolma'am sparring partner. Anna’s true age and Anglo-Indian background weren’t Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As last week’s news evidenced, genocide never really goes out of fashion. So it’s only right and proper that art continues to address the hideous concept and, while nothing, not even Primo Levi’s shattering If This Is a Man, can capture the scale of the depravity of the camps, it is important that the warning from history is regularly proclaimed anew – and heeded.With just a few bleak, snowy back-projections of Silesia’s woodland near Auschwitz (it was enough to chill my soul with memories of a visit 34 years ago) and a lone cellist (Gemma Rosefield) to accompany her on stage, Samantha Spiro Read more ...
Robert Beale
Chief conductor John Storgårds’ first programme of 2024 in the Bridgewater Hall was notable for the visit of Christian Tetzlaff as violin soloist, but perhaps a little puzzling in the choice of Thomas Adès’ Violin Concerto as the vehicle for his talents.The concerto, sub-titled “Concentric Paths”, is a fascinating piece of orchestral composition but not the most obvious opportunity for a star soloist to engage his audience. And Bridgewater Hall attenders can hear Adès conducted by Adès in the Hallé’s series, too, now that he’s in post as artist-in-residence with them for two seasons.Maybe we Read more ...
David Nice
That it would be a vividly operatic kind of oratorio performance was never in doubt. Mendelssohn, who said he wanted to create “a real world, such as you find in every chapter of the Old Testament,” instigates high drama with Elijah’s brass-backed opening statement. Pappano then let the orchestral and vocal narrative fly like an arrow, supported to the hilt by all involved, not least four great singers with whom he’d achieved several major successes at the Royal Opera.The only real problem with the evening was the work itself. You feel Mendelssohn was made for the sweet and the sorrowful, yet Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sarah Jessica Parker's screen renown as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City has made a London event out of the West End revival of Plaza Suite, the Neil Simon triptych from 1968 that is as definably New York as the TV series in which Parker made her name. But for all that Simon has over the years been dismissed in London as overly frothy and glib, this current production reminds us that his landscape was no less alive to melancholy, even pain.That awareness lends a sense of discovery to the director John Benjamin Hickey's surprisingly affecting production, seen several years ago on Broadway Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
It’s hard to imagine that any London audience this winter will hear more thoroughly gorgeous singing – or more refined musical artistry all round – than Nardus Williams delivered at the Wigmore Hall on Sunday afternoon. This was a magical hour of early-Baroque Italian bliss.Williams, who once worked as a steward at Opera Holland Park before she starred on its stage, made her name with Mozart and Puccini. Recent recitals have seen the Worcester-born soprano shine with Handel heroines. This programme – solo, with just Elizabeth Kenny’s delicately dazzling theorbo for company – took us even Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Terrapath is a prog-rock album with a large dash of jazz-rock fusion. When the styles were in their Seventies pomp, an album side could be occupied by one cut. Both sides might feature, at most, four, maybe five tracks. Yet Plantoid’s debut LP fits 10 tracks into its 39 minutes, three of which are under three minutes apiece.This take on early Seventies archetypes, then, doesn’t cleave to a standard template. Nonetheless, songs sport shifts in time signatures, very Jan Akkerman-come-John McLaughlin guitar and jazzy drums. There is also fuzz guitar, a hard rock sensibility and a manic approach Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Tempest-tossed seas seem all too apt a theme for January, so it felt fitting that the LPO decided to begin Saturday evening with Wagner’s stirringly elemental overture to The Flying Dutchman. As the programme note fascinatingly reminded us, he composed the work shortly after a turbulent voyage from Riga to London with his wife and their Newfoundland dog Minna, an early and terrifying exposure to the sea that would provide rich creative fodder.Just a few months after conducting her first Prom, German conductor Anja Bihlmaier took the helm in her debut with the LPO. Right from the horns’ stormy Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The hefty Essex builder Keith Martin, who plays a version of himself, as do most of the non-professional actors in Mark Isaacs' comic docufiction This Blessed Plot, is no Olivier or Branagh. But he puts brio and a touch of bombast into the dying John of Gaunt’s famous monologue lauding his ailing England in Richard II.Keith (also a fence builder in Isaacs’ 2020 The Filmmaker’s House) performs the speech before the camera held by the protagonist Lori (Lori Yingge Yang), a young Chinese documentarist who has come to Thaxted to improvise a film.A former anthropology student of Isaac, Lori Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In October 1977 Glasgow punk band Johnny & the Self Abusers decided to change their name. This was a problem for Chiswick Records, who were about to release their debut single. The records were pressed, the sleeves printed and the press release issued. There was no time to recall any of it and alter the band’s name. The single was credited to Johnny & the Self Abusers.The new name the band went for was taken from the “so simple-minded” lyrics of David Bowie’s “The Jean Genie.” After reconfiguring their line-up, Simple Minds began regularly playing under the new Bowie-derived name from Read more ...
David Nice
Asking whether there could be an end to melody given only 12 notes to work with, Sergey Prokofiev compared the possibilities to a chess game: “for the fourth move of the White there will be about 60 million variants.”So it is with the basic formula of The Traitors, subject to the infinite variety of human foibles, ambiguities and treachery, plus superficial twists introduced by the master planners, with the wry and stylishly, sometimes outrageously, clad Claudia Winkleman as their conduit.This is one game show that shows little signs of getting tired. The contestants are knowing when they Read more ...