Reviews
David Benedict
“It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations.” Oscar Wilde was being ironic when he had Gwendolen contemplate the sound of her beloved’s drab name in The Importance of Being Earnest, but he had a point when it comes to composers and poetry. With their own “vibrations”, great poems rarely warrant musical interference; bad poetry, meanwhile, can resist even the finest scoring. Choosing poetry that can be richly enhanced by music is not always a trick composers have pulled off, so it’s to Sarah Connolly's and pianist Joseph Middleton’s enormous credit that they created such an eloquent Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Catherine Bohart ★★★★Catherine Bohart tells us at the top of the show that she is the bisexual daughter of an Irish Catholic deacon, which is, when you consider it, a niche description. Oh, and she has OCD. That’s quite an introduction, and she more than lives up to it in this debut show, Immaculate.Her style is conversational as she rattles through her realisation about her sexual preferences and her mental health, as well her father’s reaction to them. She is very close to him, and a story about his childhood is a neat throughline in the show.His story, of emotional neglect, is of an Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A complex Swedish product to unpack, this one. Someone in the BBC must have worked out that it could do with a detailed instruction manual to help people with the task: the programme booklet duly ran to a full 50 pages.There were two sets of components: firstly, all six of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, performed by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and soloists. Plus, alongside each concerto, a newly commissioned companion piece by a prominent composer. The 12 works, six by Bach plus the six new pieces, were spread over two Proms on Sunday. Time required for complete assembly of the finished Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Anyone who came to the National Youth Orchestra’s annual Prom in the hope of hearing some roof-raising feelgood blockbuster might have slunk out disappointed into the tropical night of Kensington. What an ambitious, high-concept menu Sir George Benjamin slated for the teenaged regiment – over 160 of them at full strength – and how confidently they served (almost) all of it. If this was big-band music, then it took the form of a suite of pieces that often demanded that the orchestra march – or perhaps, swim – in several directions at once. From Mussorgsky (as arranged by Rimsky-Korsakov) in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Theatre critics tend not to experience an 140 percent increase in their financial assets within 21 minutes. So on that remarkable front alone, the London premiere of the Belgian £¥€$ (LIES) is giddily immersive fun, at least up until such time as the Ontroerend Goed production shifts gears and sends the financial world, and our momentary prosperity, crashing down. Staged within an Almeida Theatre transformed for the occasion to accommodate gambling tables instead of rows of seats, the show is certainly cheaper than a trip to Vegas and contains a lot more cautionary oomph. By their Read more ...
David Nice
"Sounds like an opera by Handel," said a friend when I told him that I was going to see Vanessa at Glyndebourne. Possible – the name first appeared in print as "invented" by Jonathan Swift in 1723 – had Handel not stuck to mythological and Biblical subjects, The title in fact has an incantatory ring in an overheated piece of hokum concocted by Samuel Barber and his long-term partner Gian Carlo Menotti for the Met in 1958. Glyndebourne often felt too small a space for its blowsy histrionics, but conductor Jakub Hrůša, director Keith Warner and a splendid team of singers did it proud. I won't Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The post-modernists have taken over the asylum. At least, that's what I thought twice this week. Once when I saw Vlad Putin on YouTube doing karaoke to an adoring audience. The other was seeing Brazil’s latest contenders BaianaSystem, who played to a sweaty packed-out house at the Village Underground. "Post-modern" in the sense of beyond defineable genre and with a dose of irony thrown in, and not quite beleiving what is in front of your eyes.Of course, there have always been interesting musical mixes in Brazil, especially in Bahia in the North-East where they come from. The state has been a Read more ...
David Kettle
Ulster American ★★★★★ David Ireland’s brand new, brutally incendiary black comedy gleefully tosses a grenade into any lazy liberal sensibilities at the festival (and, let’s face it, there are plenty of those). Race, gender, rape, prejudice, all and more are mercilessly prodded, provoked and picked apart in this viciously hilarious farce of ideas.Timid director Leigh (a wonderfully nervy, squirming Robert Jack) has miraculously enrolled obnoxious, swaggering Hollywood A-lister Jay (Darrell D’Silva) to star in the West End premiere of a shocking new play on the Troubles. But its Read more ...
Katherine Waters
“When you were our age, how did you imagine your life? What did you hope for?” It is a video of a classroom south-east of the Périphérique separating Paris from the working-class suburbs. The students are mostly girls between fifteen and sixteen and they wear make-up, jewellery, low-cut tops – we understand they’re sexy, confident, cool. Several are African, North African, Caribbean. When the teacher laughs, which is often, it bears vestiges of the provincial attitude of “a young girl who acknowledges her lack of importance,” though it’s unclear whether the students notice for she Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Gary McFarland’s 1965 album The In Sound had the Samba and Bossa Nova influences which were colouring the sound of American jazzers from around 1962, it was on the button for the year it was released. This despite sporting a pop art sleeve evoking those of the swing-based easy listening albums from Enoch Light and Terry Snyder issued by the Command label in 1959.The In Sound’s sensitivity to a then-current zeitgeist is confirmed by its fast-on-the-uptake version of “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction”, which The Rolling Stones released as a US single on 6 June 1965 – the album was Read more ...
David Nice
Sometimes the more modestly scaled Proms work best in the Albert Hall. Not that there was anything but vast ambition and electrifying communication from soprano Anna Prohaska and the 17-piece Il Giardino Armonico under Giovanni Antonini, making that 18 when he chose to take up various pipes (★★★★★). By contrast the big BBC commission from Joby Talbot to write a work for much-touted guitarist Miloš Karadaglić and orchestra in the evening's first Prom left very little impression. Praise be, then, to Glinka and Tchaikovsky for showing what glittering substance is all about, and to Alexander Read more ...
Heather Neill
Any actor playing Lady Bracknell must dread the moment when she (or, indeed, he) has to deliver that unforgettable line about a significant piece of hand luggage. Since Edith Evans's wavering, vibrato, multi-syllable version of "a handbag?", audiences have waited to see how it will be dealt with this time. Sophie Thompson's solution is to pause knowingly then say the word quickly, almost dismissively, and regard her own modestly-sized reticule. It works a treat as part of a beautifully modulated exchange with Jacob Fortune-Lloyd's Jack about his suitability – or lack of it, in view of his Read more ...