Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
It seldom happens that you long to hear choral music not in a modern auditorium but some chilly, echoing cavern of a great Victorian town hall. But that thought did arise as a full-strength London Symphony Orchestra and its hundred-strong chorus crammed uncomfortably into every inch of the Barbican hall’s stage for Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem. It felt like squeezing a herd of elephants into a cake tin, and the Barbican’s disobliging acoustic hardly helped enrich the mood. Yet Antonio Pappano still managed to work the uplifting magic that he reliably brings to choral blockbusters Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Fierce, unpredictable, complex, cussed, commie. Seymour Hersh would probably admit to all those descriptions of him except the last. Now at last the man who has dominated investigative journalism for 60 years has agreed to be investigated himself for a documentary made by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, 20 years after they first asked him.One could list the peaks of his career too – My Lai, Watergate, Abu Ghraib – recognising that these names also represent dark lows of modern American history. “Sy”, as he is known, claims that what a reporter personally believes isn’t the point, only what Read more ...
Robert Beale
There are enough historical reasons for differing approaches to Handel’s Messiah to allow every conductor to produce, effectively, their own edition. American conductor Jeannette Sorrell gave the Hallé audience a streamlined, power-driven one that had them on their feet at the end as well as during the Hallelujah Chorus.The main reasons for that were undoubtedly the precision attack and dynamic strength of the Hallé Choir’s singing – most of them doing it without the book (and choral director Matthew Hamilton got one of the biggest cheers as he took his bow) – and the exciting and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The opening track initially seems straightforward. To begin “Sons of Art,” Michael Garrick runs up and down his piano keyboard. Norma Winstone adds wordless vocals which weave in and out of his sparkling arpeggios. Then, the bass arrives. Drums kick in. So do the tenor sax and trumpet. After a climax around the two-minute mark, what begins as pacific turns turbulent. The conventional has become unpredictably experimental.To conclude the album, an extraordinary nine-minute piece which, on one hand, sounds like dawn breaking and, on the other, a collision between the contrapuntal and a free- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Among the many versions of America on parade in the ever-expanding universe of Taylor Sheridan, the one portrayed in Mayor of Kingstown is surely the bleakest. As AI helpfully informs us: “The show offers little respite, depicting extreme violence, moral ambiguity, and systemic failure without much sugarcoating.”Yet the longer it goes on, the more addictive it becomes. Now in the middle of season 4, the show continues to tighten its tendrils of menace, thuggery and corruption with seemingly no concern for the viewer’s delicate sensibilities. Much of its allure stems from its impeccable Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident is a shattering absurdist anti-caper – a kind of minimalist take on It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World inspired by Iran’s ongoing tragedy. His country's top director and one of the sharpest thorns in the Islamic Republic’s regime, Panahi was promoting his Palme’ d’Or-winner in New York last Monday when Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court sentenced him to a year’s imprisonment for “propagandia activities”. He’s also banned from overseas travel for two years and from joining social and political organisations. The Supreme Leader and his judges Read more ...
David Nice
Would it be possible to get to the end of the year without hearing a single Bruckner symphony live? I’d reckoned without the presence in Dublin of fabulous conductor Anja Bihlmaier, whose 2022 concert with the National Symphony of Ireland was a fine introduction to the thriving concert scene here, and of Boris Giltburg, one of the most engaging living pianists, in Mozart (and a far from insubstantial Schumann encore). Besides, Bruckner’s Ninth gives the lie more than any of the others to any settled spirituality or faith. Here the smoke-into-fire coda of the first movement and the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Zum Roten Igel – the “Red Hedgehog Tavern” – was a concert venue with pub attached in 19th century Vienna, frequented by the like of Schubert and Brahms. It is also the name of an ensemble committed to exploring the connections between these “classical” composers and the Volkisch music that would have been heard in the next-door room. In this case it means re-scoring Schubert’s String Quintet and garlanding it with wild interstitial dance jams, recreating an imaginary historical mash-up.It is a Marmite project, with a full Purcell Room seeing several people leave during proceedings Read more ...
James Saynor
Given that the British Red Cross has slammed Britain’s little archipelago of lock-ups for immigrants, and given that the government seems to have upped its xenophobia of late, this fictional look inside an immigration detention centre lands at a helpful time.It’s based, surprisingly enough, on the personal immigration experiences of producer Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor, who here writes and directs her first feature. The length of the movie – a natty 80 minutes – reminded me at first of the BBC’s Play for Today strand of many aeons past, as did its TV-style 4-by-3 aspect ratio, its social-justice Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As reports come in of theatre audiences behaving badly, slumped drunkenly in the aisles, gorging on noisy food and wrestling with their latest smartphones, it’s refreshing to see that kind of behaviour safely onstage, and played for big laughs. Surprisingly, perhaps, this mayhem comes courtesy of Noel Coward.The redoutable Menier has found another gem to polish after Nancy Carroll’s superb revival of Pinero’s The Cabinet Minister and its exuberant The Producers: a 100th birthday edition of Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels. Roundly denounced for its vulgarity and loose morals at its debut, the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
On a rainswept Monday, “Miss American Idol 1956”, as Judy Collins likes to introduce herself these days, drew a near-capacity crowd to the Union Chapel, Islington, for an intimate concert that felt at times as if it were in a large living room. She’s 86 now, wearing a pixie cut instead of her once-signature rock-star mane, but the eyes that so entranced Stephen Stills are no less blue and she’s still doing what she's done so gloriously for some 65 years. It was, she reflected, 1965 when she made her British debut, with Tom Paxton, and she’s been a regular visitor ever since. In the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It was, without doubt, a moment unlike any witnessed in Fabric’s history of just over quarter of a century. Hundreds of us crammed into the superclub seen worldwide as an icon of underground electronic music culture and listened in silence as Jack Bazalgette, co-founder of Through The Noise, read a description of the conditions in which Messiaen composed Quartet for the End of Time. For many in this unconventional classical music crowd, it would have been the first time they had heard about how Messiaen – who was captured by the Germans in World War II after serving as a medic in the Read more ...