Reviews
David Kettle
La maladie de la mort ★★★ Toxic masculinity in all its appalling variety is a hot topic across Edinburgh’s festivals this year – just check out Daughter at CanadaHub and even Ulster American at the Traverse for two particularly fine and shocking examinations.But few works can provide quite as clinical and uncompromising a dissection of the male gaze as the International Festival’s La maladie de la mort, written by Alice Birch and directed by Katie Mitchell, based on the 1982 novella by Marguerite Duras, and one third of the residency from Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Read more ...
David Nice
Those of us schooled in the English choral tradition know and love Hubert Parry's "My soul, there is a country", but few have sung or heard it live as the first of a mighty cycle. Parry completed the six Songs of Farewell not long before his death 100 years ago. In the sensitivity of their word-setting and the harmonies used to underline the text, they are as much of a collective masterpiece in their way as Strauss's Four Last Songs of 44 years later – featured, with astute Proms planning, in the evening Prom – and they need a fine conductor to marshal their speech-melodic flow. It must have Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Hegel, Kant, David Hume, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Leibniz are all adduced, referred to, and paraphrased, and that’s just for starters. Add Rameau, Schubert, Beethoven, Benjamin Britten and the contemporary composer David Matthews (who is also a friend) into the mix for Professor Sir Roger Scruton’s odd and uncategorisable series of essays on music and – especially – listening to music. Underneath it all is a kind of call to arms about how to listen. Scruton is a self-declared conservative, scholar, philosopher, polemicist, prolific writer, teacher and musician – both player and composer – as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The cover images of the four albums Teenage Fanclub issued on Creation Records suggest ambivalence. While Bandwagonesque’s title acknowledges the hopping onto trends endemic in pop, the graphic of a bag with a dollar sign recognises the related collateralisation of music. Thirteen's mismatched halves of a ball hints towards oppositionality as well as, with the sporting reference, competitiveness. Grand Prix features a Teenage Fanclub-branded sports car. More awareness of competition, then. Songs From Northern Britain transports a closed fairground ride into a forested landscape, a Read more ...
David Nice
Who is the greatest British conductor in charge of a major orchestra? It's subjective, but my answer is not what you might expect. Jonathan Nott has done all his major work so far on the continent. He left the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in excellent shape to another of the world's best, Jakub Hrůša; and now he is, as we learned from two long-term players in the Proms Plus talk, liked and respected across the board at the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. Continuity with the first major Swiss orchestra founded by Ernest Ansermet 100 years ago was underlined last night in Debussy, Ravel and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Initially, this month’s theartsdesk on Vinyl began with the sentence after this one, but it's so dry readers might drowse off, so I started with this one instead and would advise moving through the next one, just picking up the gist quickly... Discogs, a key hub for global record sales in physical formats, recently presented its Midyear Marketplace Analysis and Database Highlights for 2018, which reckons vinyl sales are up another 15% over the last year. Very boringly stated but good news, right? The biggest seller was Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon which is predictable but it’s Read more ...
caspar.gomez
One of the biggest crowd roars of the night comes right at the start when Jake Shears runs onstage. He is wearing a grey top hat, a white tail-jacket with glittered lapel-edging, silver glittery trousers, a tight black sequinned vest top, and a bow tie on his bare neck. The 600 capacity Concorde 2, right on Brighton's seafront, is sold out. The audience had been singing along loudly with the immediate pre-show tune, “All That Jazz”, then cheered when the band walked on looking snappy in matching zig-zagged suits like tropical pyjamas. The bassist is songwriter/sometime pop star Mr Hudson and Read more ...
David Kettle
Orpheus ★★★★ This unashamedly sentimental storytelling show got its premiere a couple of years back in the back garden of a cheese shop in Cromarty, before touring the Scottish Highlands, we’re told. With its lo-fi, minimalist aesthetic, which strips theatre right back to its essentials of story and song, Orpheus could pitch up anywhere and charm with its captivating collision of present-day beery nights out and ancient Greek myth.Dave is nearing 30, and only sees the world in shades of grey, until he encounters Eurydice and his life magically transforms to vivid colour Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s an event that only comes around once a generation: a new Matt Groening TV series. The Simpsons is rightly regarded as one of the greatest shows ever made. It changed the face of American television, and 10 years later was followed Futurama, a series that may lack the cross-demographic appeal of its predecessor, but consistently produced satirical masterpieces. Now, with a vastly changed viewing landscape, Groening makes the jump to streaming giants Netflix with his new show Disenchantment. The question is, can lightning strike thrice?On first appearances, probably not. Disenchantment is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rosie Jones ★★★★There are two versions of Rosie Jones, she tells us; one nice, one not so nice. And who knows which of those would have won the battle of psyches if the comic had not been deprived of oxygen for a quarter of an hour during birth, she asks in Fifteen Minutes. It's a terrific device – subtle but pointed, witty but poignant – as she muses about what kind of person she might have been without cerebral palsy.Jones is a mischievous woman and likes subverting people's expectations, manipulating the audience into uncomfortable moments, and then relieving the tension with a killer pay- Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It feels like Michelle Terry’s first summer season at the Globe has been building up to Emilia for a while now. The theme is Shakespeare and race, so Othello was something of a given. It's joined by The Winter’s Tale, as if the Emilias of these two plays have been waiting for their chance to step into the spotlight. This new work, written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and directed by Nicole Charles, has a lot of potential that it never quite realises.Eponymous heroine Emilia Bassano, who appears at three stages in her long life (Leah Harvey, Vinette Robinson and Clare Perkins), was the first woman Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A slow tracking shot over the gassed corpses of soldiers, their masks having failed the ecstasy of fumbling, opens The Guardians. This French art house film would perhaps have been better served by the English title The Caretakers; it's closer to the original French meaning and would have made it less likely to be confused with a superhero movie. Set during the years when the Great War devastated France, the battle front only makes two dreamlike appearances in Xavier Beauvois’ meticulously crafted, slow-paced drama. Instead the focus is on a family farm in the Limousin and the women Read more ...