Reviews
Mark Kidel
As a child, Anselm Kiefer tells us, in a bombed out German city, he would play in the rubble, creating life out of ruin and destruction. As an artist who is remarkably consistent, without being predictable, he continues to play in the ruins, breathing new life into the detritus of the world as well as his own collection of found objects, waste materials and other elements from which life appears to have been sucked out by time and history.Kiefer’s latest exhibition at the White Cube Bermondsey, a space with which he’s developed an intimate relationship, is inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Mali’s Tinariwen have been a serious powerhouse in non-Western music since the 2001 release of their first major label album, The Radio Tisdas Sessions. Their sound certainly hasn’t stood still in the last twenty years though. Female backing singers have come and gone, and pedal steel, banjo and fiddles have also made appearances on several of their albums, as Ibrahim Ag Alhabib and his crew have explored the shared sounds of West African desert blues and the rural music of the USA.This week, however, Birmingham was treated to a back-to-basics line-up of the band, that dropped all external Read more ...
Tom Teodorczuk
Plays chronicling the unscrupulous collision of high finance and big tech seem 10 a penny these days. Some writers, such as Joseph Charlton, seem to have built entire careers around telling glossy tech morality tales (for my money the best in this burgeoning genre is Sarah Burgess's Dry Powder staged at Hampstead Theatre in 2018 starring Hayley Atwell).Disruption, which is receiving its world premiere also in North London at Finsbury’s Park Theatre, is yet another slick tech show. Written by Andrew Stein and directed by Hersh Ellis, Disruption tackles the seemingly unstoppable rise of AI. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Channel 4 has been getting a lot of flack on Twitter from people involved in disability for the title of this documentary. Family members protested that "retard" was a word that could not be reclaimed, only to be told that as non-disabled people themselves, their voices had to take a back seat. An interview with its presenter Rosie Jones in The Guardian erupted into online arguments about who had the right to speak for intellectually disabled people. All this controversy won clicks online and ends up with potentially more viewers for this C4 show. It also meant that three Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A full house, and television cameras: rarer events at the Proms than they used to be (or should be). Both lent a sense of occasion to the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s visit to the Royal Albert Hall with their Conductor Laureate, Tadaaki Otaka. The cameras (for a BBC Four broadcast on Friday) had descended not for Cardiff’s long-serving Japanese stalwart – who first led BBC NOW in 1987 – but for Elena Urioste’s performance of the Violin Concerto by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The Proms first hosted this work to considerable acclaim in 1912, just weeks after the African-British composer’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With a track record that includes Memento, Dunkirk, Insomnia and Inception, Christopher Nolan is not a filmmaker who could be accused of a lack of ambition, but even by his standards Oppenheimer is a staggering achievement. Its three-hour running time is a little daunting, but it’s as if Nolan is saying if you want to make the most of this trip, you have to make the commitment. Its historical scope, intellectual depth and sheer cinematic power make Oppenheimer a thing of wonder.Nolan has based his story of the renowned physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atomic bomb”, Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This Prom by the BBC Philharmonic was billed as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Royal Northern College of Music, in distant Manchester.By design or lucky accident, the RNCM was well represented, with a new work by recent graduate Grace-Evangeline Mason, and a concerto performed by slightly less recent graduate Sir Stephen Hough (he was ennobled last week). Conductor Mark Wigglesworth (pictured below, image Mark Allan) has no obvious connection with the college or the orchestra, though he did study at Manchester University. He is always an asset on the podium, and each of the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The prologue to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie augurs well. A gaggle of young girls in a rocky desert are playing with doll-babies while enacting the mind-numbing drudgery of the early 20th century housewife. Then a new godhead arrives, a giant pretty blonde whose stilettoed feet turn slightly inwards. The girls go into a frenzy of old-doll-smashing, Also Sprach Zarathustra swells up and one girl throws her doll high in the air.But that’s more or less it for the oldster cinephiles in the audience. Still to come is a “Proust Barbie”, plus chatter about cognitive dissonance and existentialism, as you Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Writer Peter Bowker apparently had plans to make six series of World on Fire, but the arrival of Covid after 2019’s first series threw a spanner in the works. Anyway, here’s the second one at last, and it’s a little strange to find that this encyclopedic saga of the Second World War has only advanced as far as the autumn of 1940.Bowker’s plan was to stitch together a panorama of the war told through the stories of a range of characters across different continents, and this time we find ourselves visiting Manchester, Paris, Berlin and the Egyptian desert. Familiar characters return, including Read more ...
Alice Brewer
A few pages before the titular poem of Up Late, Nick Laird describes a haircut in a bathroom mirror, and finds a possible art form reflected back: "something like a poem / glances back / from the deep inside." The lines are broadly representative of the image-repertoire and diction of Laird’s latest work: glassiness, fish and questions of depth perception loom large.So too, does a concern with poetry’s definitions. In "Mixed Marriage", for instance, poetry is "the art of introducing words that haven’t met & getting them to sit together / in a small room". In "The Vocation", Laird restates Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Pekka Kuusisto, making his Proms debut as conductor in the first half of this concert, and then as violinist/conductor/ringmaster/energiser in the second, brought lightness, playfulness, and a Finnish sense for the absurd to the Albert Hall. He is an absolutely live-wire performer and has a hugely charismatic musical presence. He radiates joy in his craft and also unfailingly communicates his appreciation for those around him.Lightness and a sense of the dance were certainly there in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1. Recent recordings of the Carl Friedrich Ebers chamber ensemble version of this Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Cotswold Line railway stations currently sport posters for Alex James’s “Big Feastival”, in which the ex-Blur bassist hosts a food-and-music jamboree on his cheese-making farm. Just up the road at Longborough Festival Opera, the crowd gathered on stage for the nuptials of Orfeo and Euridice would fit snugly in chez James as well.For Olivia Fuchs’s new production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, an arch wreathed in laurels presides over a chilled-out parade of casual summer wear, with glam accessories, as the rock-god singer finally gets to wed his beloved. An atmosphere of B-list villeggiatura, more Read more ...