21st century
Bernard Hughes
NMC Recordings has spent 35 years promoting contemporary music by British composers, and this commitment to both emerging and established voices was represented at this birthday concert in London last night, part of the Spitalfields Festival. From their emergence in 1989 in a different musical and technological world (“NMC” standing for “New Music Cassettes”) my early days of CD buying were guided by NMC’s developing catalogue and they are still a go-to for finding interesting new things. The audience at the Dutch Church in the City of London was garlanded with composer royalty of all Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In Marie Amachoukeli’s Àma Gloria there’s a remarkable performance by a child actor, Louise Mauroy-Panzani. So key is her contribution that It’s fair to say the director couldn’t have delivered the film she had planned without her,.Mauroy-Panzani plays six-year-old Cléo, who lives in Paris with her widowed father (Arnaud Rebotini, pictured below with Mauroy-Panzani) in the care of Gloria, who, like the actress playing her, Ilça Moreno, is a nanny from the Cape Verde islands. And Cléo, very like the director herself, is short-sighted and already wears glasses. But Amachoukeli turns Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Collective have come a long way since their early days of chamber music in dark and dingy Salford basements and former MOT test centres. But they haven’t forgotten what made those pioneering performances special: the sense of a unique experience, and a readiness to chat to the audience as well as playing.Now, with the virtuoso chamber choir Sansara, they’ve given four shows in a week, in London, Leverkusen, Antwerp and Manchester, with a trio of world premieres in the setlist (as they like to call it), each commissioned by themselves and all invited as responses to Morton Feldman’s Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We open on one of those grim, grim training rooms that all offices have – the apologetic sofa, the single electric kettle, the instant coffee. The lighting is too harsh, the chairs too hard, the atmosphere already post-lunch on Wednesday and it’s only 10am on Monday. We’ve all been there – designer, Rosie Elnile certainly has. Where we haven’t been is a war zone which is where our keen, but wary trio, marshalled by a slightly on-edge facilitator are heading. It’s a Médecins Sans Frontières type NGO doing good work within a White Saviour framework, somewhere in the Arabic- Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Legions of Ghibli fanatics may love the heartwarming My Neighbour Totoro and the heartbreaking Grave of the Fireflies, but they revere Spirited Away, their, our, The Godfather and The Wizard of Oz rolled into one. Totoro has been magnificently staged in London, setting the bar high, but it’s a simpler story, a simpler aesthetic and it’s obviously an easier gig to adapt a great film rather than an all-time great film, first winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Waiting for the curtain, I gulped back contradictory thoughts: I was so excited about them getting it right and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Cricket has always been a lens through which to examine the legacy of the British Empire. In the 1930s, the infamous Bodyline series saw the new nation, Australia, stand up to its big brother’s bullying tactics. In the 1970s, the all-conquering West Indies team gave pride to the Windrush generation when they vanquished an England whose captain had promised to make them grovel. In the 2010s, the brash and bold Indian Premier League saw the world’s largest democracy flex its financial muscle as global power shifted eastwards. Kate Attwell’s 2019 play, Testmatch (receiving its UK Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Shakespeare’s plays have ever been meat for masher-uppers, from the bowdlerising Victorians to the modern filmed-theatre cycles of Ivo Van Hove. And Sir John Falstaff, as Orson Welles proved in Chimes at Midnight, can be the star of his very own remix, bestriding three plays and dying offstage in a fourth. Inventive director Robert Icke has now created Player Kings out of the two Henry IV plays for this indelible character. It showcases Falstaff’s relationship with Prince Hal but leaves intact the frame of the play – Hal’s relationship with his father, Henry Bolingbroke, now Read more ...
Gary Naylor
"In care". It’s a phrase that, if it penetrates our minds at all, usually leads to distressing tabloid stories of children losing their lives at the hands of abusive parents (“Why oh why wasn’t this child in care?”) or of loving parents separated from their sons and daughters by over-zealous bureaucrats (“Social workers tore our family apart”). It’s a difficult subject to address, which is one reason why it’s more often done in the abstract, the language administrative, quasi-legal or covered a radio phone-in in which we’re invited to sum anecdotes in order to produce data. Well meant Read more ...
Robert Beale
For the second big concert of his “residency” with the Hallé this season, Thomas Adès chose one major piece of his own, rather than a set of shorter ones. Tevot, a 21-minute one-movement work written for the Berlin Philharmonic 18 years ago, requires a huge assembly of performers, so it was probably too good a chance to miss once having taken the decision to do Tippett’s Triple Concerto, which is pretty lavish in that regard, too.Or was it the other way round? Whatever, the Bridgewater Hall’s stage extension was needed to get everyone on board – and while they were about it, Adès and the Read more ...
India Lewis
Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel, Caledonian Road, feels very much intended to be an epic, or at the very least has designs on being a seminal work, documenting the modern (European) human condition. Character and storyline-rich, dense, and morally weighty, it looks set up to be a "state of the nation" contemporary chronicle.Set roughly on the eponymous A5203, and elsewhere around London, the book’s main focus is the (quite clearly) doomed life of art critic and social parvenu, Campbell Flynn. As well as taking up the bulk of the narrative, he is the first character we encounter. It is a distinctly Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Transgression was so deliciously enticing. Back in the Eighties when I saw Les Liaisons Dangereuses in the West End on three occasions, life was simpler – or so us straight white men flattered ourselves to believe. Consent was unproblematic for over-16s (unless you were young, gay and male), there was no social media, nor even any camera phones, and Britney was still a decade away from sucking on a lollipop and asking sweating middle-aged men how was she supposed to know on primetime TV. Things have become more complicated since, rightly so, and transgression’s darker side has Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If Mark Twain thought that a German joke was no laughing matter, what would he make of a German comedy? That quote came to mind more than once during Patrick Marber’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s 2022 play, Nachtland. I know it’s supposed to be funny (and it often is), but should I really be giggling? That's hardly an uncommon feeling watching a black comedy, but there’s something in the rhythms of Maja Zade’s translation and the bleakness of the Berlin period, Bowie inflected soundtrack that undercuts the guilty pleasure with an insistent Teutonic froideur. With Read more ...