Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
Last week I saw Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play which behind its pyrotechnic wit affirms that sorrow and calamity can strike chaotically at the heart of any human idyll. At first glance, the programme presented at Kings Place by the ever-resourceful Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, with Vermont-born folk singer-songwriter Sam Amidon and a quartet from the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, looked rich in time-honoured pastoral pleasures. The launch concert for Kuusisto and Amidon’s new album Willows, on the Platoon label, it featured a string quartet arrangement (by Martin Gerigk) of Vaughan Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I don’t remember yesterday, but I remember when I was eight years old.” The opening lyrics of “Sure & Steady,” Gained / Lost’s second track, underline a core concern of UK indie stalwarts The Wave Pictures’ 20th (!) album: the passage of time, what can and cannot be remembered, what may or may not have a bearing on the here and now. A look at the images collected for the Exile On Main Street-style sleeve of Gained / Lost confirms what’s going on.Thematic considerations aside, The Wave Pictures have a fondness for American musical archetypes. Despite guitarist and singer David Tattersall’ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Simon Amstell says this show is a departure from his previous ones, which were full of angsty introspection. And true, in I Love It Here he appears less wired, but fans fear not; this is more of the same, albeit wrapped up in positivity and some knowing self-deprecation.The show is a description of a Hollywood party he attended last year while living in Los Angeles with his partner of 14 years, and the comic seems to be in a happy place – or at least a contented one. He was relieved, he says, not being expected to “be” Simon Amstell, away from the level of fame that hosting Channel 4’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHWest Virginia Snake Handler Revival They Shall Take Up the Serpents (Sublime Frequencies)
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Californian producer Ian Brennan walks, loosely speaking, in the footsteps of groundbreaking (and controversial) father and son song collectors, John and Alan Lomax, who, between them, gathered an essential storehouse of American folk music in the early-to-mid-20th Century. Like them, he’s interested in the cultural context of roots music and he’s ranged across the world, from Rwanda to Azerbaijan. His recent 2023 Parchman Prison Read more ...
David Nice
Janáček's Vixen Sharpears has been making streamlined runs between eight Irish cities and towns, no doubt winning new admirers for this singular take on man, nature and the cycle of life. The chamber concept has some problems, but the 13-piece orchestra still makes beautiful work of a ravishing score under Charlotte Corderoy, the voices all project perfectly over it and the basic set design by Maree Kearns is impressive given its need to fit into diverse smaller theatres. It's always a tricky work to bring off in all its aspects: not really a children's opera, despite the picturebook Read more ...
Robert Beale
Valentine’s Day was only a week gone when the BBC Philharmonic gave us a programme on the theme of love. And the most haunting memory of it all was the gentle, song-inspired and highly original Viola Concerto by Cassandra Miller. It’s subtitled "I cannot love without trembling" and was played by this orchestra at the Proms under John Storgårds on 31 July 2024, by all accounts leaving everyone mesmerized. This time it was conducted by Ludovic Morlot, the orchestra’s Associate Artist, and again the soloist was Lawrence Power, who commissioned it (through his Viola Commissioning Circle, along Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Settling into my seat in this most intimate of houses, I realised that I had never seen a play written by Nobel Laureate and Academy Award winner, George Bernard Shaw. Nor did I know what his very own adjective, Shavian, connoted with any certainty. Nor did I know why an actress chose to go by the distracting stage name, Mrs Patrick Campbell.Partly that speaks to the limitations of my own experience (though when lines were read from the proto-script of Pygmalion, I was word-perfect, albeit from My Fair Lady) but it also speaks to the fact that Shaw has long fallen out of favour. His outspoken Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s semi-satirical new thriller looks back with sorrow and ambiguous nostalgia at the Wild West that Brazil became during the 1964-85 military dictatorship. Mendonça set The Secret Agent during 1977, when he was eight, and he has filtered his memories into its world of casual killings and endemic corruption.Fatalistic in tone, despite its leisurely pace and a gonzo horror interlude, it follows the progress of a fugitive from injustice. Widowed former university professor Armando, a passive protagonist, is portrayed with disarming equanimity but an undertow of sorrow by Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If heart were art, there would be no stopping The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the 2012 Rachel Joyce novel that became a film and then a stage musical, seen first at Chichester last summer before arriving on the West End. As it is, I'm afraid I stumbled at the first hurdle of plausibility. Let's just say that if I had someone important in my life dying of cancer - as in fact has happened - I would do everything I could to get there as fast as I can.That is decidedly not the route taken by Devon's own Harold Fry (Mark Addy, inheriting Jim Broadbent's screen role) who embarks upon the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Never mind the Sex Pistols, here's the rotting corpse of Johnny Rotten, stinking to high heaven like some maggot brain from the Bryan Ferry School of Design. Rotten has dubbed his new band Public Image Ltd. PiL's first single ‘Public Image’ sounds like a powerful Pistols' reject. And for making a nyah-nyah statement, the single is sufficient...but an entire album of catcalls is pure self-indulgence. Hearing Rotten make music now is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to understand.”The US music magazine Creem’s April 1979 review Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In his illustrious career, director Michael Waldman has profiled all manner of divas, from Elizabeth Taylor and Lord Byron to Karl Lagerfeld and Christian Louboutin. So why not Tony Blair?His three-part series traces Blair’s story from his schooldays at Fettes College in Edinburgh to the present day, although perhaps not all points in between, with a string of contributors (alongside plenty of Blair himself) including Jack Straw, Clare Short, former Labour supporter Robert Harris, David Miliband, Harriet Harman, Jonathan Powell and more. Peter Mandelson delivers some typically slippery Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To watch Deep Azure is to feel a double loss. The death of Prince Jones, the black student who was shot dead by a police officer in a case of mistaken identity, and the death of his friend, Chadwick Boseman, who wrote the play to commemorate him. Boseman, of course, would become world-famous as Marvel’s first black superhero, Black Panther’s King T’Challa, before dying of colon cancer aged 43. Yet the exuberance, inventiveness and giddy lyricism on display in this piece of hip-hop theatre – written by Boseman in his late twenties – is so bracingly original, it makes you grieve to wonder what Read more ...