Reviews
Kieron Tyler
"Both of us have always enjoyed listening to dance music, and we wanted to interpret disco in our own way. We wanted to make good quality soulful electronic dance music, more biting than the usual bland disco stuff. We wanted to make records that would stand out in a disco and that you could listen to in your own bedroom."Speaking to NME’s Paul Morley in May 1981, Soft Cell’s Marc Almond clearly expressed where he and Dave Ball intended to go with their music. At this point, the duo had not issued much. October 1980’s barely available Mutant Moments EP was followed by one track on the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The German composer Detlev Glanert, taught by Hans Werner Henze and a past collaborator with Oliver Knussen, received a Proms commission as far back as 1996. He remains, it might be fair to say, a shadowy presence here despite his prominence back home.Yesterday he came to the Barbican to hear Semyon Bychkov and the BBC Symphony Orchestra give the UK premiere of his Prague Symphony, commissioned by the conductor for the Czech Philharmonic and first performed in the city late last year. Although, after the interval, Bychkov followed up with a big-boned and open-hearted reading of Brahms’s Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The O2 has to be the K2 of comedy peaks: a vast ovoid drum of a place where those right at the back have to be content with watching magnified images on screens. And for a standup, there are no electric instruments to drown out the echoing acoustics.So it’s a measure of Trevor Noah’s charisma and charm that he cut right through these handicaps. It’s not the worst place he has played since his return to live comedy from hosting The Daily Show on US TV. That would be the giant tent his promoters booked for him in India, which had to have a score of air conditioning units on the go: there was no Read more ...
David Nice
Fascinating for the history of opera, less so for opera. The most interesting thing about Gazzaniga’s take on the libertine and the stone guest, apart from a couple of sprightly numbers, is the libretto by Bertati, repurposed with better dramatic shape by Da Ponte for Mozart, whose masterpiece opened in Prague eight months after the lesser work’s Venice premiere of February 1787. We have a right, though, to witness Gazzaniga’s unadulterated original. This wasn’t it.For most people in the audience, the first surprise – apart from discovering that the opening scene is Mozart/Da Ponte’s in Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Nobody would describe Felix Mendelssohn as a fringe composer, but his piano concertos aren’t exactly central classical repertoire either. They lack the foundational status of Mozart’s and the high Romantic seriousness of Beethoven’s or Brahms’, and Mendelssohn doesn’t help himself in the way that an air of the faintly hilarious hangs around his First Piano Concerto.It’s often so hyperactive that it’s impossible to take it seriously, with an almost comically energetic first movement that feels like a greyhound straining at the trap, and a finale so light-hearted that it’s almost a self-parody. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Joanna Hogg has made a film that resolves itself backwards: what happens in the final reel recasts what you have just seen completely. It’s something of a departure from her previous films in style, but equally probing and moving.The Eternal Daughter is the third Hogg film to feature a writer-director called Julie Harte, the lead character in The Souvenir I and II. Hogg explained at a recent Barbican Q&A that she had landed on making a film about her relationship with her mother back in 2008, after finishing her first feature film, Unrelated. But the outline she’d written for it Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Henrik Ibsen may well have wanted to shake things up, to rile against the social mores of his time. But his visionary critiques didn’t usually come with anything as radical as, say, optimism. And there’s no more of a downer than Ghosts.Directing his own adaptation, Joe Hill-Gibbins offers an intense night of the soul, which feels horribly contemporary in its depiction of characters suffocating in the fear of gossip, tarnished reputation and shame. Lest that appears too depressing, he’s aided by an excellent cast in nimbly navigating between despair and the kind of amusement that flows Read more ...
Lucy Thynne
Near the end of My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s prize-winning 2016 novel, a creative writing teacher tells Lucy, ‘you will only have one story […] you’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story.’ The advice might sound reductive – as though every writer is a kind of one-trick pony – but it’s meant to be reassuring, to legitimate a writer as a creature of obsession and habit. Anne Michaels’ third and most recent novel, Held, is not about the Holocaust, as her debut, Fugitive Pieces, was, but in its themes of memory, war, and personal ghosts, we see her Read more ...
David Nice
The only seriously false note about Maestro is its title. Yes, Bernstein was masterly as a conductor, and Bradley Cooper gives it his best shot. But he was no master of his life as a whole. Maybe the title should have been something like Lenny and Felicia (you think of something better).Broadway actor Felicia Montealegre, the woman he married after an on-off four-year relationship, is depicted as the shrewdest, harshest critic of the man rather than the artist, and though the music is brilliantly handled, Carey Mulligan is the real heart and soul of what Cooper as director and co-writer (with Read more ...
James Saynor
“Everything is legal if you have the money,” states the world-weary protagonist of this new film by the Mexican-American director Amat Escalante. And in the wilds of central Mexico, where the movie is set, the comment is unlikely to be questioned. Lost in the Night features characters lost at pretty much any time of the day in a slick, grim, ramifying desert mystery that never quite hits the escape velocity of thriller. At the start, the mother of young labourer Emiliano (Juan Daniel García Treviño) is disappeared by the cops for campaigning against a local mine, and the main Read more ...
Robert Beale
Sir Mark Elder’s zest for exploring fresh territory with the forces of the Hallé is unquenched even in his final season as music director. And who better to introduce the Stabat Mater of Rossini – a late flowering of the operatic wizard’s powers – than he, a champion of the rich and rare from operas past?It is, whatever else may be said, highly operatic in many aspects – and not unique in that respect in 19th century sacred music. Like other examples, it was premiered (in its final version) in a theatre, not a cathedral.For this performance there were both a starry quartet of soloists and the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s a faint whiff of Strictly Ballroom about Sasha Hadden’s Australian indie A Stitch in Time, another tale of people in later life rekindling lost dreams and a long-buried love while nurturing younger folk with the same passions. Here, though, this love is expressed in dressmaking rather than foxtrots and quicksteps. Hadden’s film is smaller-scale in its ambitions than Baz Luhrmann’s, not rising far above the feelgood. Which is a shame as it has an appealing central performance from Maggie Blinco as Liebe (yes, the German word for love), a repressed dressmaker in her seventies. She Read more ...