Reviews
David Nice
Kudos, first, to Edward Gardner for mastering a rainbow programme of 21st century works in his first season as the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Principal Conductor. Three Americans and a Berlin-based Brit, two women composers and two men, one of them a Pulitzer Prize-winning Afro-American who wrote the work in question in his nineties, all had the benefit of committed, clearly well-prepared performances, enthusiastically received by an ideally mixed audience.The concert kicked off a five-day Southbank Centre celebration of new and newish music from around the world, SoundState (though Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
This recital of love songs by Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, devised by the pianist Helmut Deutsch and sung by the megastar duo of soprano Diana Damrau and tenor Jonas Kaufmann, looked on paper like the Lieder event of the year. In practice, it left a good deal to unpick.Deutsch had pulled together 40 songs – yes, 40 – by the two composers, exploring aspects of love from myriad angles. Each half was arranged in three groups of songs (six by Schumann, seven by Brahms, etc), the idea being to build a narrative of sorts from number to number. The first half was the darker (Damrau Read more ...
Bill Knight
Ming Smith is a Black female photographer. When she first dropped off her portfolio at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1978 the receptionist assumed she was a courier. When MoMA offered to buy her work she declined at first because the fee didn’t cover her bills. Luckily for us, she relented. Later she said that, "Being the first Black woman photographer to have a work acquired by the MoMA was like getting an Academy Award and no one knowing about it."Smith was the first woman to join the Kamoinge Workshop in New York in 1963, a pioneering group of Black photographers who, she says, “ Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Of all the expectations one might have of a new ballet from a choreographer raised on street dance who has made work about the American prison system, serene loveliness isn’t one of them. The name Kyle Abraham is not new to Royal Ballet audiences, but the squib of a piece he made for a mixed bill last year, Optional Family, gave scant idea of what he would do given 35 minutes of stage time, several more dancers and an orchestra. The Weathering, premiered as part of a contemporary triple bill, is surprisingly classical and utterly gorgeous.Abraham – who turns out to have a string of Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There are few people, especially musicians, who would wish to revisit the spring and summer of 2020 with any fondness, but Sophie Ellis-Bextor might be an exception. Her kitchen discos, in which she and her husband Richard Jones, aided by their children, played a variety of covers became a lockdown source of solace and regular entertainment at a time when it was much needed.Two years later she has taken the concept out on the road for a celebratory party, albeit sans the kids, as she admitted with a laugh. To replace her children’s unexpected antics we instead had a large wheel, spun on a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What the [expletive deleted]?That’s a viewer’s only logical response to the 94th Academy Awards, which was trudging along predictably and fairly aimlessly until such time as Chris Rock took to the stage in the closing hour and events took a dramatic turn. Forget the envelope mix-up of 2017, the streaker of 1974, or Sacheen Littlefeather subbing for Marlon Brando in 1973. None of those unscripted moments can match the shock that ensued when Will Smith responded to a GI Jane joke Rock had made in reference to Smith’s wife’s shorn hair by stepping up to the stage and striking the presenter in Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The history of Estonia has been described as “a story set to song”. The Estonian activist Heinz Valk called singing “our nation’s most glorious form of self-expression.” There are, of course, other nations where singing is seen as an expression of national identity, but probably none more so than the Baltic country.The fully professional Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, founded in 1981, is one of the great choirs of the world. In Kings Place Hall One, directed by their genial founder Tõnu Kaljuste, they could use the wonderfully lively acoustic to allow their unique European-yet-Slavonic Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Speed in an ambulance? Gone In 60 Seconds meets Heat? Reports that Michael Bay’s lockdown-shot LA film would be an intimate, “character-based” drama don’t survive contact with the director’s high-concept, high-velocity MO. If anything, working within pandemic restrictions in the Covid-emptied streets has amped up his OD’ing on tech and technique.Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is more earthed as Afghanistan veteran Will Sharp, living in a cramped, Stars and Stripes-draped flat with his cancer-stricken wife and their baby. He’s thus convinced to ask a life-saving financial favour from his bank-robber Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Motown and its related labels have been heavily collected and meticulously scrutinised since the early Sixties. There ought to be nothing left to say. Yet here this is, a smart, 24-track collection of Motown instros which includes five previously unreleased tracks.It’d be reasonable to assume that there was nothing more to give, that every tape vault everywhere had already been scoured. The download-only tracks which appeared last decade under the banner “Motown Unreleased” ought to have been it. Nonetheless, an unreleased quintet from 1961, 1963 and 1964 have surfaced. OK, three are by Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Some British TV viewers who were in junior school in the mid-1960s will recall the imported Australian kids’ show The Magic Boomerang. When the adolescent hero, a sheep farm kid, threw the eponymous piece of wood, he stopped time and was able to thwart crimes and right other wrongs as long as it was airborne; once he caught it, life continued as before in his corner of the Outback.Unequipped with an Aboriginal hunting weapon, Julie (Renate Reinsve) in The Worst Person in the World wills time to stop so she can run across Oslo, passing freeze-framed foot and road traffic, to start a passionate Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of Bridgerton (Netflix) became a ratings-blasting sensation because of the way it thrust a boldly multiracial cast into the midst of a Regency costume drama, and because of the camera-hogging presence of Regé-Jean Page as the swashbuckling Duke of Hastings. Above all, it had countless astonishingly graphic sex scenes.In season two, there’s no Duke of Hastings and shockingly little sex, so many original viewers may find themselves feeling that they’re getting noticeably less bang (if you will) for their buck. This time around, the action centres on Viscount Anthony Bridgerton Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park arrived at London’s Royal Court like a blazing comet in 2010, a bold kind of satire about race relations that was both sassy and savvy.Now it’s back for a run at the Park Theatre, N1. Twelve years on, we have learnt to don a tin hat and duck whenever somebody enters the minefield of other people’s sensitivities. But Norris’s play is a reminder that it’s possible to barrel straight into no-man’s land and lob grenades from there at targets on all sides, to hilarious and provocative effect.The piece is structured like a Rohrschach blot: two acts set a half-century Read more ...