America
fisun.guner
For dull reasons to do with a dodgy digital box and a very old analogue telly, I can’t tune in to BBC Four during live transmissions, so I either catch up on iPlayer, or (lucky me as a journalist) get to see programmes early. But I’m very glad I can get it at all, for when the BBC cuts come to pass and its premier arts channel starts broadcasting archive-only material, as it proposes to do, then I think I might just stop watching telly altogether.This is because everything, but everything, that the BBC stands for is encapsulated by BBC Four’s original programming. And in the visual arts it Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berlioz: Grande Messe des Morts Paul McCreesh/Ensemble Wrocław (Signum)After last week’s Mahler 8, another gargantuan choral work makes a welcome appearance on disc. Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts was first performed in the church of Les Invalides in 1837. The composer had been disgusted by the meagre musical resources on offer at St Peter’s in Rome – a colossal space serviced by an 18-voice choir and a weedy portable organ. Hearing a 600-piece childrens’ choir echoing through the expanses of St Paul’s Cathedral in London made a huge impression on the young Berlioz, and the Grande Read more ...
graeme.thomson
From Bill Haley’s frantic clock-rocking to Sting’s po-faced plucking, the double bass has written itself a pretty meaty book in the rock‘n‘roll bible. It’s strictly Old Testament, though, far more closely identified with the composers of rock’s creation story than to those tasked with mapping out its future. But hang on. Louisiana-born, Memphis-based singer-songwriter Amy LaVere might just be changing all that.Wrapping herself around an upright bass certainly makes for a neat (and not wholly unwelcome) visual hook, but LaVere’s music is accomplished enough not to rely on novelty selling Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It’s very deep, very private and full of love,” said Art Garfunkel of his relationship with Paul Simon. So private that for this examination of their swansong 1970 album Bridge Over Troubled Water the pair were interviewed apart, despite both being credited as executive producers. Whatever the nature of the love, 40-plus years on, bridges weren’t being built.Paul Simon didn’t seem too enthusiastic about revisiting his past. One of the few times a smile flashed across his face was when he recalled the journey he used to make to buy records by The Everly Brothers. Discussing the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Based on the novel by SE Hinton, The Outsiders is a tender coming-of-age movie set against a tough backdrop of flick-knives, rumbles and gang warfare. In Francis Ford Coppola’s vision, it’s also a romantic cinematic homage to Gone with the Wind.Released in 1983 to a fairly mixed critical reception, the story is set in 1960s Oklahoma and involves the gang rivalry between the Greasers, a bunch of kids born on the wrong side of the tracks, and the Socs, affluent prep boys. It's told through the eyes of Ponyboy (C Thomas Howell), a 14-year-old Greaser who is involved in an opening chase sequence Read more ...
Nick Hasted
As this remake’s director Rod Lurie, a former film journalist, well knows, competing with Sam Peckinpah is a loser’s game. His films are no more replicable than a Fred Astaire musical, inseparable from their demonic creator. Straw Dogs was his lone, 1971 excursion to Britain, with Dustin Hoffman as a mousey American mathematician who accompanies new wife Susan George’s return to her rustic Cornish home, which in Peckinpah’s hands is as hostile as the badlands his western heroes rode through. Hoffman’s civilised veneer cracks along with his marriage, and he becomes an atavistic killing machine Read more ...
Jasper Rees
He’s been in the presence of murderers, rapists and paedophiles. He’s auditioned naked for a porn movie and submitted his tender midriff to liposuction. He’s spent more time than can be good for anyone in the company of Mr and Mrs Christina Hamilton. Yet it was only last night that, for the first time ever, audiences glimpsed Louis Theroux in a state of unvarnished terror. And fair play, he wasn’t afraid to show it.The cause: a chimp, young but already powerful and, in the tentative Theroux embrace, threatening at any moment to remove, by force, the popular proboscis of documentary television Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Symphony No 9, Czech Suite, Two Slavonic Dances Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics)It’s easy to become a little obsessed with obscure, underrated music. You bang on and on about works which you’re convinced are masterpieces which no one ever seems to play. Which means that it’s also easy to dismiss pieces of classical music which are genuinely popular. You think you know them so well as to never need to hear them again. Grieg’s Piano Concerto and Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony are perhaps the easiest of all to undervalue; they’re deservedly loved because Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Some pretentiousness was inevitable. Any film that sets out to tell the story of the universe (we get the whole caboodle - big bang to eternal blackout - with cameos for dinosaurs, microbes, DNA and even Sean Penn) is I'd say bound, perhaps even required, to sink into the mud of philosophical grandiloquence. But to focus on this, or the film's frequent slips into the coffee-table visual language of Anselm Adams (electro-static trees, smoky waterfalls) or the moralising family lectures through which this story of the universe is mediated, would be unfair. For, however familiar Read more ...
peter.quinn
Spoiler alert: this CD contains grooves that will bring out your inner air guitarist. From the album's lead-off song, “Tenderly”, whose sumptuous voicings lesser artists can only fantasise about, to its towering sign-off, “Fingerlero”, George Benson's 24-carat gift for free-flowing improv remains a thing of wonder. “Fingerlero” also features one of the most recognisable and heart-stirring sounds in jazz: Benson scatting in perfect unison with his deftly picked guitar lines. He makes you wait, but it's so worth it.Heard in both combo and solo settings, the 12-track set includes nods to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
On Thursday the London Symphony Orchestra plays a night of epic movie music by the man who gave America’s cowboy heroes their most stirring tunes. Dimitri Tiomkin was one of Hollywood’s film-score giants, John Wayne’s choice as composer for The Alamo, Wayne’s magnum opus, and Tiomkin's was the music that urged Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood to ride out in iconic glory in landmark adventures such as High Noon or Rawhide.He was also a composer of suspense, of the knife-edge when a young wife is framed by her husband for murder, of the fateful convergence that brings two strangers together on a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you were to play a game as to who should play former US President Bill Clinton in a fictionalised account of his life, then George Clooney – liberal, politically active and drop-dead gorgeous – would surely be your number-one choice. So he must have been a shoo-in for the role of Democratic presidential hopeful Governor Mike Morris - who is charming, decent, ironic and very attractive - in The Ides of March.The film, which has shades of All the President's Men, Nixon and Primary Colors (and indeed Julius Caesar), is adapted from Beau Willimon's play Farragut North, said to be based on Read more ...