Reviews
Helen Hawkins
The Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason follows up Godland with an equally striking film, this one about a moribund marriage. It’s a living album of impressions and memories, small incidents and fragmented snapshots, with no conventional narrative shape. Yet there’s a coherence and weight lent to all these disparate elements by the teasing affection of the director’s lens.The family preparing for the break-up are parents Anna (Saga Gartharsdóttir), an artist, and Magnus, known as Maggi (Sverrir Guthnason), a trawlerman, with their young family: two boys (Thorgils and Grímur Hlynsson, Pálmason’ Read more ...
Sarah Kent
My walk through Hyde Park was an absolute joy. Spring is in the air, the weeping willow is in leaf (pictured below right: photo by S.K), the narcissi are in bloom and the sun was shining, yet the Serpentine Gallery is plunged into darkness.The lights are dimmed to enable you to see David Hockney’s frieze of iPad paintings which wrap around the gallery walls in a continuous strip. Of the 200 or so pictures he made in the course of a year following the changing seasons in Normandy, where he has a studio, roughly 100 are on show (main picture: detail). But even when your eyes have adjusted to Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
My last St John Passion arrived during the Proms in the vast hanger of the Royal Albert Hall, where the impeccable, discreet musicianship of Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan sometimes struggled with the chilly open spaces all around. At St Martin-in-the-Fields yesterday evening, no such problems: the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, with Peter Whelan directing, balanced intimacy and grandeur in a reading whose visceral impact and involving immediacy wholly filled the church, while never overwhelming it. Vocally and instrumentally, the Monteverdi singers and EBS Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To watch Martin Hayes play the Irish fiddle is like watching a man possessed by his music. As his bow flickers across the strings the infectious energy of it spills into the air, through his limbs, and eventually out into the whistling, whooping crowd. Through the course of his career, Hayes – most famous for founding the Irish-American supergroup The Gloaming – has joined forces with musicians ranging from Paul Simon to Yo-Yo Ma, and played everywhere from small pubs to Obama’s Whitehouse. At Koko last night, with his ensemble The Common Ground, his virtuoso repertoire of Irish Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Middle East is on fire – again. So Ryan Craig’s brilliantly provocative play, The Holy Rosenbergs, is more relevant than ever. Near the start, a rabbi says, “Everyone feels strongly about what’s happening out there”, and since he’s referring to tensions between pro-Israel and anti-Israel Jews, he’s definitely touching a nerve, both in the play and in the audience. Yes, this revival of Craig’s family drama, originally staged at the National Theatre in 2011, and now with a cast that includes Adrian Lukis, Tracy-Ann Oberman and Nicholas Woodeson, retains all of its power to disturb.Set in Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Search “black ballerinas” online and you will be offered shoes, which doesn’t say much for the racial diversity of classical dance in today’s Britain. Black male dancers, even at principal level, are not doing badly, and there has been the odd breakthrough for their female counterparts, with Birmingham Royal Ballet leading the way. But the fact that Ballet Black is now marking its 25th birthday – it having been conceived to give exceptional dancers of colour a platform – suggests that things haven’t changed nearly enough.Founded by a 21-year-old with a vision in 2001, Ballet Black is also a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
American photographer Catherine Opie took her first self-portrait at the age of nine with a Kodak instamatic she’d been given for her birthday. There she stands in the garden, a little toughie flexing her biceps like a muscle man.And there she is again, twenty four years later. This time she presents herself as Bo (pictured below right), a persona developed among her queer friends in California. Her stance – chest square on, feet apart and thumbs in pockets – makes her look like an off-duty cop, an idea enhanced by what could be a baton dangling from her belt. She looks to camera with a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Berlin always makes a flavourful setting for labyrinthine stories of betrayal and deception (see Le Carre and Len Deighton for further details), and it doesn’t disappoint in this absorbing German-made thriller. Writer Paul Coates and director Lennart Ruff have constructed a taut and twisty narrative that gradually pulls together various themes dating back many years, set in a cool and chilly-looking Berlin.The city’s notorious Wall has ceased to exist, but ghosts and murky echoes from the old East-West past still haunt the protagonists.The action kicks off with the arrival of an unknown man, Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
When David Byrne made a mention of heroes and superheroes, one audience member could not resist. "Like you" they yelled out, and while the former Talking Heads singer might not be able to leap buildings in a single bound, his current creative hot streak is a nifty power indeed. Several years on from his terrific American Utopia tour, and Byrne is back on the road with a 12-piece backing band and a seemingly empty stage. To begin with, he was joined by only three musicians for a pared back "Heaven", the Talking Heads track from 1979, but it wasn't long until more and more started arriving Read more ...
David Nice
Most concerts of operatic excerpts serve up an after dinner mint. This one offered - to follow up Menotti's image of light versus serious in art - the very bread of life, albeit framed by familiar women's duets from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Delibes' Lakmé. Jennifer Davis, about to make her role debut as Dvořák's Rusalka with Irish National Opera, may have been the initial draw, but mezzo Sarah Richmond was a revelation new to me in major roles, and pianist Aoife O'Sullivan knew no bounds in dramatic torrents, as well as setting up so poetically a perfect Rusalka Song to the Moon. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What a strange little film, uncertain if it’s a Hitchcockian thriller or a comedic poke at the shibboleths of psychoanalysis, A Private Life is definitively a vehicle for Jodie Foster, comèdienne. The American pulls off an impeccable accent in her first French-speaking role, playing Dr Lillian Steiner, an expat psychiatrist who treats patients from her elegant Parisian home. Unmoored by the suicide of Paula, a patient whose husband blames Steiner for prescribing the fatal pills, the doctor becomes convinced that in fact murder was the cause of death.A Private Life looks lovely, Paris Read more ...
Music Reissues Weekly: This Can’t Be Today - A Trip Through The US Psychedelic Underground 1977-1988
Kieron Tyler
This Can’t Be Today - A Trip Through The US Psychedelic Underground 1977-1988 is marketed as a “3CD set documenting the 1980s American ‘paisley underground’ scene” which includes “over 65 scene setting, taste making tunes inspired by all things 60s, thrift store and Rickenbacker” with “scene staples, underground nuggets, leftfield gems and everything else between.”Indeed, this is pretty much what this clamshell set, titled after a Rain Parade track (it’s on Disc Two), does. However, the words “leftfield gems and everything else between” imply that this umbrella shelters more than The Bangles Read more ...