2000s
bruce.dessau
Sometimes as a critic one cannot help pre-judging an album however hard one tries not to. I expected the worst of this all-star jamboree bag from TV's most haphazard interviewer, which mixes some Hootenanny turns with new recordings of old favourites by some of music's blandest and/or most irritating personalities. Yet apart from a few excruciating exceptions this is not a bad something-for-all album to stick on when the in-laws pitch up on Boxing Day.Best of the crop by a fair lick is the Hootenanny 2006-era duet of Amy Winehouse and Paul Weller on "Don't Go to Strangers". Winehouse's vocal Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s hard to imagine that a composer’s death at the age of 103 could be a loss to music, in the sense of possible future work, as well as a personal loss, which of course death will always be. But Elliott Carter was a unique exception. Not only was he still writing music up to a few weeks before his death on 5 November, but the dozen or so works he had completed since his 100th birthday showed none of the negative traces of old age one would normally expect to find in the music of somebody even four-fifths his age.The nearest significant parallels I can think of in modern times are Verdi and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Plenty of great films have been made about old age, about the humiliations, emotions, fragilities and joys of the end of life. Wild Strawberries, Harold and Maude, Venus, Driving Miss Daisy, even Pixar’s Up probably has a claim on this category, but Asia, with its regard for the elderly, has always had a special cinematic affinity for the subject. Following in the path of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, A Simple Life explores and exposes with infinite delicacy the relationship between an ageing Hong Kong servant and her employer.Ah Tao (Deanie Ip) has worked for the same family for 40 years, bringing up Read more ...