Reviews
Adam Sweeting
You might consider it odd that a man whose wife spends half the year in Hong Kong without him hasn’t managed to get around to catching a plane from Heathrow to visit her in the Far East, but that is the case with Jonah Mulray, the stressed-out protagonist of Strangers. Jonah’s excuse for his marital negligence is that he’s “scared of flying”.In last week’s opening episode, he was forced to conquer his terror of leaving the ground by the traumatic news that his wife Megan (Dervla Kirwan) had been killed in a road accident. As soon as he arrived in Hong Kong, everything looked exceedingly fishy Read more ...
David Kettle
Of the Edinburgh International Festival’s three productions by 2018’s resident company, Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, The Prisoner is the most gnomic, the most baffling, and, frankly, the most disappointing. Which is a great shame, of course, because it is also the one possibly most hotly anticipated, being co-written and co-directed by the Bouffes du Nord’s guiding light across several decades: the legendary elder statesman of the theatre Peter Brook who, astonishingly, is 93.We’re in an unnamed foreign land – judging by the sun-scorched trees, dusty rocks and heat- Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
It is a pleasure to report on the continuing success of the Saffron Opera Wagner project. The organisation was formed in 2013, and since then has presented concert performances of the Ring cycle and Meistersinger, and now Parsifal, all with an amateur orchestra and chorus and a cast of mostly lesser-known professionals. As this Parsifal demonstrated, the casting choices have generally been superb, and the amateur forces all well prepared, the results dramatically convincing, even in concert performance.The orchestra here was committed and well into the style of the music. But there were no Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What lunatic would ever have the idea of turning War and Peace into an opera? Well, maybe if you, a composer, had found yourself in Moscow in June 1941 when news of the German invasion reached the Soviet capital, you might have decided to mount an Operation Barbarossa of your own, and that’s in all but name what Prokofiev did. The project occupied him on and off for the rest of his life (he died in 1953 on the same day as Stalin), and it never quite reached a definitive form.In his new production for WNO, David Pountney has had to take a somewhat intricate view, with the help of the Prokofiev Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A tradition seems to have been invented. First nights of the LSO’s seasons with Sir Simon Rattle as its Music Director start with a concert of music by British composers. The first one last year had Helen Grime, Thomas Adès, Birtwistle, Knussen and Elgar. This year’s selection was Birtwistle (again), Holst, Turnage and Britten. Rattle described the formula as a mixture of the brand new, the undiscovered and an "established masterpiece". As with most things going on in this fissile country at the moment, there were some very fine moments, but it left mixed feelings.The inclusion of Birtwistle Read more ...
graham.rickson
Puccini’s Tosca isn’t a subtle work, and this, Opera North’s fourth production since the company’s founding in 1978, is occasionally too loud and crude. But it’s undeniably powerful. Edward Dick’s 2017 Hansel and Gretel left me a little nonplussed, but this Tosca is miles better, a colourful update which manages to juggle plenty of schlock with sound artistic nous. He’s helped by conductor Antony Hermus, making his Opera North debut and securing some terrific, full-throated orchestral playing, much of it at the upper end of the dynamic scale.Nab a seat near the front of the stalls and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It may be a sign of the times that the two lead performances in Killing Eve are female, with Jodie Comer fizzing hyperactively as shape-shifting assassin Villanelle and Sandra Oh (from Grey’s Anatomy) as British intelligence officer Eve Polastri (pictured below). Yet simultaneously, the show has a comic campness and air of fantasy that feels Sixties-like, reminiscent of such timewarp delights as The Avengers or Modesty Blaise. Amazingly, they had female leads back then too.My crystal ball (alias BBC Previews) tells me that the cracks start to show as Killing Eve works its way through its Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
During their original 1980 to 1984 lifespan as a recording unit, Soft Cell issued three albums, a mini-album, eleven singles and EP. There were also compilation appearances, bonus tracks on discs included with albums or singles (such as the 12-inch of Jimi Hendrix cover versions accompanying The Art of Falling Apart) and extended tracks which appeared on 12-inch singles. Everything could probably be collected on six CDs.The new box set Keychains & Snowstorms: The Soft Cell Story features 10 discs, one of which is a DVD. The albums and the Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing mini-album are not Read more ...
Ismene Brown
“What is it about Mozart?” wondered the legendary pianist Sviatoslav Richter, pointing out the composer's frightening demands of accuracy and lucidity. Even though many pianists today command technique to spare, a Mozart fear factor tends to keep his sonatas off recital programmes. Richter’s longtime protegée Elisabeth Leonskaja once made a disc with him of arrangements of late piano sonatas but she is now more associated with the epic romantic repertoire that she is playing around the world for most of this year, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and the great Schubert sonatas.So an evening of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Annemarie Jacir’s third feature may have picked up a subtitle, “The Wedding Invitation”, for international distribution, but the key to her intimate portrait of Palestinian life seen through a father-son relationship lies in understanding the full nuance of its title. The word wajib, best translated from Arabic as “social duty”, is spoken only once in the film – an invitation is taken to an old lady whom the hosts know will be unable to attend, but they offer it because that is the accepted, the proper way in their society – but its concept pervades the entire film.Jacir has located her story Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Formats are second nature to TV: the BBC and Eagle Rock’s Classic Albums will run and run. Like all formats, there’s always the risk that the medium becomes the message, and content suffers under the weight of form. But Classic Albums at least avoids the BBC’s slavish reliance on presenters, and makes possible programmes that draw the viewer in closer than when everything is mediated by the wall-to wall ego of an expert or celeb.Although we have the trademark moments when the album’s different tracks are teased apart at the mixing desk to reveal the architecture of a recorded song, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Director Madani Younis, who since 2011 has transformed the Bush Theatre in West London into one of London's most outstanding Off-West End venues, is leaving in December, on his way to becoming the creative director of the Southbank Centre. For his last show at the Bush, he has chosen a project close to his heart, Vinay Patel’s An Adventure, an epic reading of one Asian family’s global migration story. It’s a typically ambitious choice, a beguiling tragi-comedy whose narrative is original and which, more importantly, makes its political points deftly and unobtrusively, using a three-part Read more ...