Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
The adrenalin was in full flow yesterday lunchtime at the Wigmore Hall as the dynamic young Mithras Trio delivered a vigorous, toned performance featuring Beethoven, Bridge and an electrifying new work by Joy Lisney. The trio, who have been together for just over five years, are part of Radio 3’s New Generation Artists scheme and dispatched the repertoire with an intensity and expressive range that was often as beguiling as it was exhilarating.Frank Bridge’s Phantasie Piano Trio in C minor provided a tempestuous start to the concert, with a double forte opening that made it feel as if it Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Sam Mendes assembled most of the ingredients necessary to make Empire of Light a wrenching English melodrama with a potent social theme. The stars are Olivia Colman, Colin Firth, Micheal Ward and Toby Jones. Mendes teamed with his usual cinematographer Roger Deakins, whose elegant panoramic images lend a grandeur to Margate’s faded glory. The town’s art deco Dreamland Cinema provided the main location of a movie admirably modest in scale. Fatefully, what the production didn’t have was a screenplay that ensured a consistent tang of verisimilitude. Though a heartfelt and well- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A strange new single went on sale in Britain’s record shops in April 1962. Credited to Ray Cathode, “Time Beat” combined a metronomic rhythm with peculiar, otherworldly sounds. It was not a standard pop record. The flipside, “Waltz In Orbit”, was also about its tempo and was just as weird. Not many copies were sold.The Ray Cathode single was issued seven months before The Tornados’s equally unearthly “Telstar” and was, in time, recognised as a ground-breaking combination of studio-created sounds and pop music. The Ray Cathode handle masked a collaboration between the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’ Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There are going to be people who enjoy A Man Called Otto I’m sure, but it’s definitely not a film for hardened cynics or Tom Hanks' finest hour. It’s a remake of 2017’s Swedish black comedy, A Man called Ove – itself based on a popular novel. The original movie cast Rolf Lassgård (better known as detective Wallander) as a depressed, misanthropic widower whose various attempts to kill himself fail with comic effect. Tom Hanks stars in the American version, and also executive produced it. The film is very much a family affair. There’s a juicy role for his son Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Carvings is recorded so it sounds as if Juni Habel is adjacent to the listener’s ear. The Norwegian singer-songwriter may as well be inches away. Such intimacy can be disconcerting, especially as Carvings evokes a reflective melancholy. Its eight crepuscular songs evoke twilight and wintertime, when introspection is never far.Habel’s second album is the follow-up to summer 2021’s All Ears. That was a mood piece drawing from influences including Vashti Bunyan and Jessica Pratt. Carvings is less about the atmosphere created but more about the form of the song itself, and rising and falling Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A disclaimer in the opening credits confessed that some scenes in this three-part history of disgraced Labour MP John Stonehouse had been “imagined for dramatic purposes”, but there was no need. The man’s life story fell comfortably into the “you couldn’t make it up” zone, and there wasn’t really much that screenwriter John Preston needed to add.It was indeed true that Stonehouse was given a job as a junior minister of aviation, that he negotiated a technology agreement between Britain and Czechoslovakia, and that he was later found to have been spying for the Czechs (he was depicted here as Read more ...
David Nice
In precarious times, musical wonders never seem to cease – for now, at least. Who would have thought during lockdown that we’d be back so soon and so frequently to the kind of massive orchestra needed to play a cosmic blockbuster like Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra? Of the three live performances I’ve heard since September 2021, last night’s, the biggest and youngest (160 players aged 14 to 19), was also the freshest and most exciting.To hear young people in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain playing a supremely challenging work which used to be second nature to hardened Read more ...
David Nice
When the first volume of Estonian master Jaan Kross’s peerless historical trilogy first appeared in an English translation by Merike Lepasaar Beecher back in 2016, what leapt out at me about this fictionalised saga about the adventures of real-life chronicler Balthasar Russow was how much it had in common with the Thomas Cromwell of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.Like Cromwell, Russow came from humble stock – though whether the peasantry into which he was born was Estonian-speaking, as Kross assumes, is open to question – and rose to mingle with aristocracy and royalty, a thorn in the side of many Read more ...
Katie Colombus
When asked what I wanted for Christmas this year, my response was mostly that I just want to drink Baileys out of Lindt bunnies and dance in my socks in the kitchen. Y'know?More specifically though, it's Beyonce's Renaissance that I particularly wish to be kitchen-disco-ing to. Mostly because it is the strongest, sexiest riot of soul, disco and house music I've heard in an age, but also because Queen Bey is (basically) the same age as me and my children think she's cool, which keeps hope alive in my soul.Whilst Harry Styles' "As It Was" and Taylor Swift's "Anti-Hero" have been particular Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In December 1977, the music weekly Sounds included an article about the County Durham punk band Penetration. By Jon Savage, it was headlined The Future Is Female. The same four words would be used by the band for their promotional badges.Penetration were fronted by Pauline Murray. In the article, an unidentified male band member is quoted as saying “we’ve never considered Pauline as anything different from just another member of the group – why should she be any different? It's person to person that's important..."Pauline Murray said “I just feel as though I'm a boy. (laughter). Nooooo. You' Read more ...
Tom Carr
Flick through my 2022 Spotify Wrapped playlist and those who know me best won’t be surprised by what they find. Architects, the UK’s preeminent metal group who grapple with progressing their sound further on the classic symptoms of a broken spirit – check. Foals, the indie delights who continue to sweep all before them, and adorned new, summery vibes with latest album Life Is Yours. Check.Also present are Alexisonfire, Rolo Tomassi, and Zeal & Ardor among many others, but all indicative of how my go to listens span the spectrum of hardcore and metal, to straight edged indie/rock. Though Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“At the age of 40 a person begins to disperse and fade, darkening like a cloud,” says Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, played by a mesmerising Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) in Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s brilliant, fictionalised portrait of a woman whose main duties are to have her hair braided and stay thin, eating only orange slices for dinner. If her looks fade in this circumscribed royal world, what will be left of her?The action takes place over several months in 1877-8, in Vienna, Bavaria and England, as Elisabeth's 40th birthday comes and goes. Again and again Read more ...