Reviews
Bernard Hughes
Danish by name, and very much Danish by appearance (the cellist is Norwegian, but we’ll let that go). This quartet combines a glorious selection of blonde beards and moustaches and eyelashes and floppy fringes with playing that is joyful and life-affirming, both in the sound the players produce, and the evident joy they have in playing together. This was my first time hearing the Danish Quartet, but I am determined it won’t be the last.They played three pieces, starting with Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne, an arrangement of an arrangement of an arrangement. It’s based on Stravinsky’s ballet Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Kurt Vonnegut’s hallucinatory countercultural classic, Slaughterhouse Five, famously took his experience of being a prisoner of war in Dresden and turned it into a story about a man abducted by aliens whose life jolts backwards and forwards in time. It’s a testament to the So It Goes theatre company that this agile production – performed by four actors – simultaneously captures Vonnegut’s eye-spinningly deadpan humour and the horror that led to this becoming one of the Vietnam era’s great anti-war narratives. Cream’s late Sixties song Sunshine of Your Life is playing as we wait for Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The first question is always: Don Carlos or Don Carki? Verdi’s opera was originally composed for Paris in 1867, in French, with the requisite five acts and the inevitable ballet. For Milan in 1884 he reduced this to four acts, dropping the whole of the first act and the ballet, and making substantial revisions to what remained, as well as of course translating the libretto into Italian. There were many tinkerings in between.Jo Davies’s production, made for the Hampshire Grange Park Opera a decade ago and now revived for the second time at the Surrey Grange Park, opts (somewhat unfashionably) Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Ryland Caravan Festival is an annual festival put together by local musical eccentrics, Independent Country, and held in the outside amphitheatre at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham’s Cannon Hill Park. As it is takes place just as spring becomes summer, the elements can obviously be a bit temperamental – with punters being just as likely to have to deal with sunstroke as trench foot – but with the bar of the MAC within spitting distance, there’s always protection from whatever the unpredictable weather might produce with a bit of added alcoholic support.The MAC’s amphitheatre Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
As Metallica have long known, Ennio Morricone's Ecstasy of Gold is a rousing choice of walk on music. Deadletter might not be playing the stadiums the metal giants ply their trade in, but strolling on to a near pitch black stage with music from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly booming out was a nicely theatrical opening.The group themselves might have wished for a Clint Eastwood style lawman at points this year. While 2026 has marked the arrival of second album “Existence Is Bliss”, it also saw the theft on tour of thousands of pounds worth of equipment and gear from the Yorkshire six-piece, a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“My Ice Queen” immediately makes its case. A mid-to-low tempo chugging rhythm underpins choppy guitar, a contemplative, distant vocal and a general air of disassociation. Brief sections of the song feature – albeit muted – guitar mangling and feedback. The lyrics tell of a “heartbreak machine, coolest girl you’ve ever seen.” Icy? Absolutely.Then take the similarly restrained “Life Goes on,” so hazy a rumination it seems to have materialised from the mists enveloping Venus.
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It isn’t all so crepuscular. “Song For John” – seemingly an Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Charli xcx’s cinema blitz includes seven acting roles and Wuthering Heights’ soundtrack, reinforcing her cultural ubiquity since 2024’s Brat summer. Film remains an adjunct to her sensational avant-electropop, not yet following Lady Gaga’s transition to Oscar-winner and pop part-timer. Pete Ohs’ micro-budget Erupcja anyway trades minimally on her persona, trusting her charisma to underwrite a character who credibly triggers volcanos.Bethany (Charli xcx) is in Warsaw from London for a weekend during which boyfriend Rob (Will Madden, pictured below left with Charli xcx) means to propose, a Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Okay, theatre is all about acting, but then so is most porn. Except for amateur stuff. Sort of. And then there is AI, deep fakes and digital manipulation, while not forgetting real-world sexual violence and missing children. But even these things can be manipulated by those in power. And by the media. In her debut play, Are You Watching?, staged in the Royal Court’s studio space, Georgie Dettmer explores the relationships between the real and the fake, the watchers and the watched. And she does this by breaking down a dozen storylines into a series of fragments, intermittent short scenes, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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By the time Marina Diamandis reaches “Cuntissimo”, Birmingham’s O2 Academy is a sing-along sauna. We’re squeezed in like rice in vine leaves, drenched in human juice. Attempts to dance are restricted to meagre hip wiggles and hands waved above the head. No-one seems to care. The outrageous, pop-ballistic single of last year hits the desired chord. “Your ex is hitting you up,” Marina sings, and holds the mic towards us all. “BUT YOU NO LONGER GIVE A FUCK!” the place roars as one.Marina is that curiosity, a cult female star making pop Read more ...
David Nice
Richard Strauss, who conducted this orchestra and programme to an audience of 7000 in the Royal Albert Hall on 19 October 1947 aged 83, would have shared our mixed feelings about the curious phenomenon that is Santtu-Matias Rouvali, the now-80-year-old Philharmonia's Principal Conductor. Not for Strauss Santtu's expansive, sometimes sluggish approach to his most popular symphonic-poem calling card, Don Juan. And in the 1940s he was quicker, too, with his mostly tongue-in-cheek, brilliantly worked saga of 24 hours in the life of the Strauss family, Symphonia Domestica. But he would have Read more ...
David Nice
If the Wigmore Hall sought perfection in its 125th Anniversary Festival, it found it in the two concerts I've attended this week - in the greater part of Lise Davidsen's and James Baillieu's Schubert cornucopia, and last night in the sublime Belcea Quartet's teaming up with similarly legendary viola player Tabea Zimmermann in two awe-inspiring string quintet masterpieces. Zimmermann held centre place in Mozart's G minor Quintet, telling from the start because Mozart has the first viola as the lower of the top three voices at the start, only to take the upper line with second viola and Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Sathnam Sanghera’s previous books have included a memoir about growing up Sikh in Wolverhampton, and two acclaimed (and very good) accounts of colonialism – so it wasn’t entirely obvious that his next should be a meditation on the life and work of popstar George Michael. But Sanghera, a fan since childhood, sets out to investigate Michael through a number of lenses (including those of “Queer Icon” and “Celebrity”) and to interrogate his own complicated relationship to the star. Not a biography, it instead often feels like an (over)extended magazine feature (Sanghera writes for The Times), but Read more ...