Reviews
Jasper Rees
Ken Burns is the closest American television has to David Attenborough. They may swim in different seas, but they both have an old-school commitment to an ethos that will be missed when it’s gone – the idea that television is a place to communicate information with a sober sense of wonder. Burns’s field is American history in all its breadth and depth. Last time round it was a lapidary decalogue of documentaries about the Vietnam War. That had such an impact that, for his latest, BBC Four have promoted his name to the title to create a forgivable misnomer: Country Music by Ken Burns.The Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was something fitting about the Lumineers entrance in Glasgow. As “Gimme Shelter” blared around the SSE Hydro, lights pulsating over the crowd, it was drummer Jeremiah Fraites who took the stage and started the opening beat of “Sleep On The Floor”, an array of phones quickly whipped out to act as a welcoming committee from the crowd. The rest of the band followed in due course, but this is a group for whom the drums are at the heart of their stomping songs, no matter what.The other key element is, of course, the voice of Wesley Schultz , an unassuming and laid back frontman, who Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A defining chapter in American history is all but sold down river in Harriet, director Kasi Lemmons' tubthumpingly banal film about the extraordinary bravery and courage of the American freedom fighter, Harriet Tubman. Telling the same story more expansively chronicled several decades ago in a Cicely Tyson-led American mini-series, Harriet casts the diminutive yet mighty English actress Cynthia Erivo in the title role without seeming to know quite how to use her. In context, it comes as a relief when a performer who shot to fame (and won a Tony) on Broadway in The Color Purple gets to belt Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Leonard Bernstein talked about “the infinite variety of music” and the late maestro would have been thrilled by the variety on display at the Royal Festival Hall where Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi were as exciting and exhilarating as anything I’ve heard.Their performance, part of the EFG London Jazz Festival, lasted two hours but could have gone on for 22, a display of brilliant musicianship and total engagement that was breathtaking, two classically trained performers absolutely in command of their material and sharing their love and knowledge of it. The prior evening Giddens and Read more ...
Owen Richards
Ophelia is one of Shakespeare’s most iconic yet underdeveloped dramatic roles. A sweet and naïve girl, she’s driven mad by Hamlet’s wavering affections and her father’s death. She was often the subject of paintings, yet rarely of novels until the 21st century. Ophelia, starring Daisy Ridley, is an adaptation of Lisa Klein’s 2006 book of the same name, and does a valiant job at not only filling in the blanks but bringing some flair of its own.Ophelia is a precocious child of the Danish court, handpicked by Queen Gertrude (Naomi Watts, pictured below right) to join her ladies-in-waiting. She Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Time moves fast in the music business. It has only been a matter of months since Fontaines DC were playing the far smaller confines of King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow, and here they were at a sold out SWG3, celebrating the success of debut album “Dogrel”. If that record is one of the finest released this year, then this gig was not quite the victory lap hoped for, albeit still a show that displayed evidence of their quality.The record itself is rich in thoughtful lyricism, the nuances of which were somewhat lost in a live setting. That was not particularly problematic, because the sheer Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Less really is more. Vinícius Cantuária is a musician who has done it all, but has reverted to the simplicity of singing classic Jobim bossa nova songs, to which he brings a quite astonishing lightness of touch. Last night at the Barbican, alone on stage, with just a nylon string guitar for company, he made the 1,850-seater Barbican feel like the most intimate of small clubs.Cantuária’s sublime art is to glide through chord sequences as if they are a liquid. Whereas jazz musicians can sometimes turn the act of working through a song form into a ponderous and self-conscious exercise of landing Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As I write, I’m listening to Clara Rockmore intoning The Swan by Saint-Saëns. Her melancholy humming also welcomes you to Eco-Visionaries along with a globe suspended in the cloudy waters of a polluted fish tank. This simple installation by artist duo HeHe neatly pinpoints our predicament; our planet is suffocating.In the Air by Nerea Calvillo reveals the pollution hovering over the rooftops of Madrid as a coloured veil, while cars cruise along the city streets below. Electric vehicles, we are told, will solve the problem of these dangerous emissions, yet they simply shift the pollution from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A few years ago it would have been hard to envisage proto-punk maniac Iggy Pop being a star feature of the EFG London Jazz Festival. His last few albums, though, have been heavily flecked with jazz, and let’s not forget that as far back as The Stooges’ 1970 album Funhouse, free jazz sax squalling was part of the mayhem. Tonight doesn’t veer into that kind of transgressive noisiness but is still far more than just, as the promotion suggests, a run-through of his often elegiac latest album Free.Once his band are onstage, including album co-creator, New York experimentalist Noveller (Sarah Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The pink, turquoise and orange world of Greener Grass is a riot of derangement. Here is the suburban dream gone haywire, where, out of politeness, a woman gives her baby to her friend because she admires it. Every adult wears braces, hair bleeds when you get it cut and a boy turns into a golden retriever (his father is delighted – at last he’s willing to run for the ball).There are echoes of The Truman Show, Stepford Wives and Desperate Housewives, even Dean Spanley, but Greener Grass is its own brand of surreal Americana, with a slice of Saturday Night Live thrown in. This is Jocelyn Read more ...
David Nice
No Joan of Arc means no Henry VI Part One. France, where we left the victorious Henry V - the superb Sarah Amankwah, a shining light of this company - in the Globe's summer history plays, only figures briefly in the last act of a candelelit, intimate stepping-back to the more problematic saga. It's earlier in terms of composition - though it seems strange that people used to reject Shakespeare's authorship - but in terms of historic kingship actually shows how everything about England and its French posessions fell apart with the advent of the introverted Henry VI. Concentrating on the second Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The four young men who comprise Darlingside met at Williams College, in the Berkshires which, each October, declares a “Mountain Day” when students hike up Stony Ledge and celebrate with donuts, cider and a cappella singing. Perhaps on one such hike was born the idea of a band and perhaps one day in the future the names of Don Mitchell, Auyon Mukharji, Harris Paseltiner, and David Senft will be added to the roster of notable Williams alumnae that includes Elia Kazan, Stephen Sondheim and Michael Beschloss.Take a bow, Darlingside, who returned to Britain this week for just two dates. Named in Read more ...