Reviews
Jonathan Geddes
In just over three years Olivia Dean has gone from taking the stage at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow to selling out two nights at the city’s largest venue. Such a leap up in surroundings in a short space of time did not seem to faze Dean though, the 27-year-old Londoner possessing both a honeyed voice and a Disney Princess smile onstage. She was confident enough, in fact, to drop in a cover of the classic “Movin On Up” late on. It was a risky choice that did not totally work, but you could not fault the boldness of it, and you can understand why she has reason to feel such Read more ...
Robert Beale
Ives’ The Unanswered Question remained unanswered when the BBC Philharmonic and John Storgårds performed it in the Bridgewater Hall in January, but on this occasion, with Thomas Adès, it was followed by Kurtág’s even briefer The Answered Unanswered Question. Spatial effects were very much part of the first half of the concert (I say “half”, but there were about 20 minutes of actual music; the rest was spent in platform re-arrangements), beginning with the 118-year-old Charles Ives piece, for which the solo trumpet was positioned in Stygian gloom on the organ bench at the centre of the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Wars in the Middle East provoke furious arguments. Red hot. So why is British theatre so cool, distinctly chilly, about staging new work about these controversial issues? If any proof is needed that current new writing is meek and mild then it must surely be this. Even the exceptions are not exceptional: written by Yousef Sweid and Isabella Sedlak, Between the River and the Sea, first seen at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin last year and now comes to the Royal Court via Edinburgh, is a likeable autobiographical one-man show about Middle-Eastern identity which insistently avoids the Read more ...
David Nice
As those of us who were there at what turned out to be his unofficial inaugural concert with the Irish Chamber Orchestra will know, Henning Kraggerud dances, and makes sure his fellow players can follow suit without self-consciousness. His theory is that Mozart must have danced a lot, too; his music certainly does, even as it sings. This programme drawn from Mozart's earlier compositions took us from a vital symphony by the 18-yearold genius to the middle movement of a violin sonata which, Kraggerud argues, ushered in a deeper vein given the 22-year-old's grief at the death of his mother Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This new play, In The Print – by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky – gives a pacy account of the seminal moment when Rupert Murdoch moved News International to Wapping. Over the last decade and a half the playwriting duo have rolled up their sleeves to tackle political subjects including Brexit and the fight to succeed Labour PM Harold Wilson – and here they put the lens on the moment that changed the newspaper industry for ever.It's a spiky depiction of the struggle between trade union leader Brenda Dean and Murdoch that doesn’t sugar coat events, but nor does it resort to demonisation. Instead Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Filmmaker Charlotte Regan has been moving steadily up the creative ladder with music videos, short films and her 2023 feature debut Scrapper, which made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival. Now she takes a crack at a major drama for the BBC with Mint, whose eight 30-minute episodes describe a tale of young love, family dysfunction and gang violence.At its core is the Glasgow crime dynasty headed by Dylan (Sam Riley), who has been maintaining the thuggish legacy of his appalling father Andy (Clive Russell), but now seems to be wearying of the struggle to keep the operation afloat. Andy, now Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius is generally discussed and judged – and judgment, of course, stands at the heart of the work – by those who love, indeed revere, without any caveats this journey of the soul through death. For a long time, this reviewer could not. Even now, I can understand some Anglican bishops’ reluctance to have the work played in their cathedrals in the 1900s. Perhaps that revealed not simply small-minded anti-Catholic prejudice (the default critical position) but a credible resistance to the cruel doctrine of Purgatory. God has forgiven you, has already assured Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Ace bass-player Jasper Høiby achieved fame with his band Phronesis, recording and performing sophisticated yet accessible jazz, and establishing themselves as leaders in the crowded piano trio field. With 3Elements, and new collaborators, he is continuing to explore the seamless and inspiring combination of composition and improvisation that has characterised his work to date.The set started with solo acoustic bass: there were (probably unintentional) echoes of the North African gunbri, a lower register plucked string instrument favoured by the Gnaoua, a sect who use music and trance for Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
With the good looks and dash of his signature 1947 Triumph Roadster, the Jersey detective is back for a second season in his new incarnation: the polar opposite, seemingly, of his colleagues in Shetland.Yet Damien Molony’s Jim Bergerac has as many rain clouds over his head in sunny St Helier as Dougie Henshall’s melancholy Jimmy Perez in windy Lerwick, another single father with a demanding job and a teenage daughter to raise. Not the least of Bergerac’s problems is his simmering alcoholism, which his sporadic attendance of AA meetings can’t wholly suppress. This is a more pitiable hero than Read more ...
Simon Thompson
There’s something slightly odd about listening to Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartók’s great opera of darkness, on a sunlit spring afternoon. However, the sun streaming through the windows of Glasgow’s City Halls was the only thing wrong with this corker of a concert performance from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Elim Chan. And indeed, conductor Chan was the not-so-secret weapon in this concert’s success.Pacing is everything in this opera. The tension needs to heighten and steadily tighten as the successive doors are opened, becoming unbearable with the last one; yet the conductor needs Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Returning to the West End to celebrate two decades since those strange muppetty posters went up on London buses, I’m still laughing along with “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”.Back then, the London Olympics Opening Ceremony, surely the high watermark for progressive optimism in the public domain, was still six years in the future. We could scoff at the swivel-eyed backwoodsmen of UKIP and the likes, immigration barely registering as an issue of concern to voters. It was our world and those obsessives were, as the magnificent finale tells us, only here “For Now”.
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Gerald Barry's Salome, NSO Ireland, Kuhn, National Concert Hall, Dublin review - funny-queasy genius
David Nice
You know to expect a crazy ride, especially when Gerald Barry, greatest living Wildean and wild one among composers, has flagged up his very unStraussian take on Salome with "I didn't want her to dance, so I thought...not "dance", but "type' "(there are three typewriters of varying ages at the front of the concert platform). Right at the start, with deliberately unwieldy unison galumphings, mostly strings and lower brass, you also know it's him by the style. But you can never second-guess the extraordinary turns, both funny and dark, often both at the same time, this utterly original riff on Read more ...