Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
During his quarter-century in charge of the Gewandhausorchester in Leipzig, the late Kurt Masur nobly held out a musical hand of friendship and collaboration from the other side of the Iron Curtain. So how heartening to hear that the Southbank Centre has inaugurated a five-year partnership with the venerable Saxons – just when, as Bob Geldof, Simon Rattle, Ed Sheeran, John Eliot Gardiner and other celebs have warned in their recent open letter, the “serious madness” of Brexit threatens to shut British music into an East German isolation of its own.For all his versatility as a conductor, Masur Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What better way to celebrate a homecoming than with a party? That is the capacious-hearted thinking behind this new musical version of Twelfth Night, which additionally marks Kwame Kwei-Armah's debut production at the helm of that undeniable dynamo otherwise known as the Young Vic. Resident of late Stateside where he was running Baltimore's Center Stage, Kwei-Armah has posited as his opening production a show that celebrates London in a giddy spirit of inclusion that seems a necessary antidote to our mean-spirited times.And if Kwei-Armah's production, credited to him and the powerhouse Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Baroque repertoire doesn’t seem to register on most British opera company’s schedules these days, so it is good to see ETO devoting their autumn season to Handel, Purcell and Bach, with some additions from Carissimi and Gesualdo for good measure. Their first production, Handel’s Radamisto, is a good choice for touring, a compact six-hander with strong characters and great music. The staging, by General Director James Conway, with designs by Adam Wiltshire, is colourful and atmospheric, though clearly on a scale for touring. And musical standards are generally high, with a strong and engaging Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Re-casting a beloved character always carries a measure of risk. Solo: A Star Wars Story relied on the willingness of fans to buy in to Alden Ehrenreich as a younger incarnation of Harrison Ford: the film bombed (you know, in Star Wars terms, since it barely made $400 million). New Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall had an even bigger risk on his hands, casting the first northerner in the titular role since Christopher Eccleston in 2005 – but Jodie Whittaker did not disappoint.In fact, by her first “what?” – delivered to half the supporting cast after she dropped through the roof of an Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Pitched as “a tale of two artists”, the National Gallery’s big autumn show promises a history woven in shades of friendship and rivalry, marriage and family, privilege and hard graft. Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini were brothers-in-law, Mantegna’s marriage to Nicolosia Bellini in 1453 a strategic match that brought fresh blood to Venice’s greatest artistic dynasty. The marriage kept commissions, and so money and prestige, safely within the family, but the two artists pursued entirely separate careers, Bellini distinguishing himself as a painter of landscapes and Mantegna as a master of Read more ...
David Nice
You get a lot of notes for your money in a two-piano recital - especially when seven pianists share the honours for two and a half hours' worth of playing time. Well, they did call it a marathon, crowning the London Piano Festival so shiningly planned by Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen, and the baton passed seamlessly from two pairs of hands to the next. All the more remarkable when nothing seemed likely to surpass the infinite poetry of the opening couple, young Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy in Debussy's arrangement of Schumann's Six Pieces in Canonic Form. Nothing did, but there were Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Considering where Motion Sickness ends up, Ivo Graham's new show begins a million miles away, as he talks about his love of trains and his favourite train company, Chiltern – or “The Chilt”. But don't be fooled by this quotidian fare; what begins as a seemingly aimless wander down a path of nothing very much packs an emotional punch by the end of the hour.Graham has previously made much gentle humour out of his thoroughly English, middle-class existence. His USP (not quite so unique, but we'll let that pass) is that he was Eton and Oxford, rather clever but witty and self-deprecating enough Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two days after announcing his appointment as their next chief conductor (he takes the reins officially next summer, in time for the Proms), by remarkable good fortune the Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic was able to present Omer Meir Wellber as the conductor of their second Bridgewater Hall series concert. It was a harbinger of things to come – he said as much in the talk before the concert – in that he’s an experienced opera conductor and wants to bring the spirit of the stage, and probably the reality of more operatic performances, to the Philharmonic’s programming.So his Mozart opener – Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Humdinger! This is a totally brilliant idea for an amazing anthology, although the subtitle “Letters that Changed the World” is slightly misleading. All or any of these letters might substantially or subtly change your view of grandees of all sorts – emperors, tsars and tsarinas, kings, queens, presidents, generals, admirals, dictators, politicians, authors, artists – as well as the ordinary folk who have written them, but not all are letters that fall into that elevated category (there are certainly letters that initiated wars, though).In the age of the internet, who will be writing letters Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Stanley Kubrick’s use of music in his films has been inspirational. In 1999, The Caretaker – a nom-de-musique of Jim Kirby – issued Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom. While his alter-ego openly acknowledged the director’s film The Shining, the album’s music reconfigured vintage recordings of bands in tribute to the film’s haunted ballroom scenes.Kubrick has affected how music is heard. Until 1972, “Singin' in the Rain” was inseparable from the 1952 film of the same name. A song of joy, it exulted the shared belief that obstacles were there to be overcome. However, with the release Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For all the bleakness of its subject matter, there’s considerable exhilaration to Ali Soozandeh’s animation feature Tehran Taboo. That’s due, in part, to the film’s breaking of many of the official “rules” of Iranian society, the myths of the theocracy that can’t, and don’t conform with the realities of human life. But there’s something wider as well, almost Dickensian, as the director presents his varied cast as players in a big city drama in which the Iranian capital itself becomes a protagonist, an entity bubbling with life, most of it “not conforming to Islamic virtues”.But what otherwise Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
There must be something of a beauty parade going on in Liverpool now that Vasily Petrenko has called time on his tenure at Philharmonic Hall. After all, someone will need to step into his shoes from 2021 after he departs for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It was refreshing, therefore, to welcome Anu Tali to conduct the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, making her debut with the orchestra. She’s conducted extensively in the USA and in Asia and in many parts of Europe, especially Germany, Scandanavia and her native Estonia. But her appearances in the UK are few and far between. That’s Read more ...