1920s
Bevan, LPO, Jurowski, RFH online review – never-ending storiesFriday, 01 January 2021
The LPO, and its soon-to-depart chief conductor Vladimir Jurowski, began its 2020 Vision season back in February. It set out to mix and match the music of three centuries and show how it echoes in contemporary works. Well, little of that turned out... Read more... |
Roald and Beatrix: The Tail of the Curious Mouse, Sky One review – twinkly tale for troubled timesFriday, 25 December 2020
They say "never meet your heroes". That may be true, but it forms the premise of a new TV drama concerning two of the world’s most famous children’s authors – Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl – who encounter each other at opposite ends of their life.... Read more... |
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom review - keeping things theatricalWednesday, 16 December 2020
There was always bound to be a hint of melancholy watching George Wolfe’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Try as you might to focus on the film, you can never quite shake the fact that you’re watching the final performance of Chadwick Boseman, whose life... Read more... |
L'enfant et les sortilèges, VOPERA, LPO, Reynolds online – Ravel and Colette reimaginedThursday, 26 November 2020
Colette’s sharply fantastical libretto for Ravel’s second one-act opera imagines wrongs exercised upon objects and animals by a naughty child revisited by the victims upon the perpetrator. In a giddying venture which may be the most imaginative use... Read more... |
Kanneh-Mason, CBSO, Gražinytė-Tyla online review - muted celebrationsThursday, 19 November 2020
“This year was supposed to be so very different” said Stephen Maddock, Chief Executive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra when he spoke to theartsdesk earlier this year. Talk about an understatement. The CBSO has hardly been alone in... Read more... |
Nicky Spence, Jess Dandy, Julius Drake, Wigmore Hall review – Moravian rhapsodyTuesday, 17 November 2020
We don’t often see sultry come-to-bed moves in the Wigmore Hall, that chaste Parthenon of refined musical taste. But when Jess Dandy stretched out languidly on stage while offering to show Nicky Spence “how the gypsies sleep”, the temperature shot... Read more... |
The Great Gatsby, Immersive London review – a warm and electric tribute to the bookFriday, 23 October 2020
The Prohibition-era setting of The Great Gatsby brings an appropriately illicit feel to this bold decision to stage an immersive theatre event in the age of Covid. Where, in 1922, champagne was the essential liquid to get any evening going... Read more... |
Album: Loudon Wainwright III with Vince Giordano & The Nighthawks – I’d Rather Lead a BandMonday, 05 October 2020
Those Wainwrights, they never cease to surprise. Get out your soft shoes and prepare to shuffle, for the “six-string diarist” has set his guitar aside and put on his metaphorical tux to croon with a band on more than a dozen timeless classics. Songs... Read more... |
BBC Proms live online: Viennese Night review - sophisticated pleasuresTuesday, 01 September 2020
Viennese operetta is like that other great Central European treat, goulash. It comes in many forms. In Vienna it’s coffeehouse comfort food; in Slovenia they add bacon for a smoky tang. And in the marketplaces of Transylvania it comes in bubbling... Read more... |
Tutankhamun in Colour, BBC Four review - amazing enhanced images bring fabled Pharaoh to lifeFriday, 19 June 2020
Tut in colour, and he is! The new painstaking technique of colourising vintage black and white photographs and film was touchingly exploited in this documentary for BBC Four to narrate the most thrilling and best-known archaeological discovery ever... Read more... |
Alex George: The Paris Hours review - captivating yet frustratingSunday, 03 May 2020
A century on, the années folles of Paris between the wars do not cease to excite readers and writers of all varieties. Alex George’s latest novel, The Paris Hours, draws on the myriad charms the interwar period has to offer, condensing them into a... Read more... |
DVD: Babylon Berlin Series 1-3Sunday, 26 April 2020
There are bad times just around the corner for the characters of Babylon Berlin, though 1929 is grim enough. Focusing on the moment to take away the easy option of hindsight for the viewer and making its vast line-up, played by actors of supreme... Read more... |
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