London
fisun.guner
In one small room of the Freud Museum, which was once the home of Sigmund in the last year of his life, are the works Jane McAdam Freud made in the final months of her father’s life. Below an imposing photograph of Freud the elder, the progenitor of the clan, are two detailed, tender sketches of Lucian in profile. In the right sketch the dying artist stares resolutely ahead, his gaze, coupled with the firm set of his jaw, capturing a sense of absolute stillness. The left sketch shows the artist now more gaunt, eyes closed, in death, we imagine, or possibly just asleep. Perhaps much more Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The London Philharmonic’s current festival – Prokofiev: Man of the People? – is all about the question mark. While the festival’s concerts, lectures and even its classical club-night each make their own statement, the overarching spirit here is one of exploration, of questioning. Jurowski and his orchestra are peeling back the composer’s grinning modernist mask and attempting to expose the human face (or possibly faces) behind it. It’s a provocative process, and one that calls Prokofiev’s lesser-known works to testify against the evidence of such popular, high-gloss favourites as Romeo and Read more ...
Justin Quirk
In popular myth, Margaret Thatcher reportedly said that any man still travelling by bus after the age of 30 could consider himself a failure. The quote is almost certainly apocryphal, but it stuck in the public consciousness because it sounded like the kind of thing that an arch-conservative would say; cars were the preserve of the rich and successful, whereas buses were how the poor, the failed and the antisocial travelled around the city.If there’s any truth in that distinction, then it damns an awful lot of people in London. Every weekday, over 6,800 buses carry around six million people Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
There are 300 or so people in the Westbourne Studios, although it was only a couple of days ago we knew we would be there. We are on the mailing list of The Lost Lectures, and this is the first one. Under the Westway in Acklam Road, we’re in Clash territory. Think of it as post-punk intellectualism. In the course of the evening, several speakers get up and have about 12 minutes to put their case. Like a punk song, they have to make their points with maximum concision with no frills or drum solos. Tickets are a tenner and they say it sold out over a month ago.Billed as “enchanting talk from Read more ...
fisun.guner
Featuring over 100 galleries specialising in modern and contemporary British art, the London Art Fair is a January highlight for those who prefer a more relaxed atmosphere to that offered by the international VIP frenzy of Frieze. From the great names of the 20th century to leading contemporary artists and emerging talent, the fair offers a tantalising showcase on a huge variety of British art.It’s ideal for both buyer and browser. In addition to the main fair, you’ll find solo shows and curated group displays in the Art Projects section, while Photo50 is an exciting display of contemporary Read more ...
peter.quinn
The band's Facebook page states “Dirty Soulful Groovin Dancey Sweet” under genre. To which I'd add “Dramatic Playful Intense Voluptuous Transporting”. Performing last night as part of the London A Cappella Festival, The Boxettes swept away any residual festive cobwebs and dazzled a packed Kings Place. “Loosen your shirt, loosen your bow ties,” we were told. I have to confess I didn't actually see any bow ties, but, metaphorically speaking, we got the point.
The all-female, London-based vocal quintet comprises Belle “Bellatrix” Ehresmann - currently the female world champion beatboxer - plus Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Wigmore Hall staged its own Entente Cordiale last night with an operatic double bill bridging both sides of the Channel. Christian Curnyn and the Early Opera Company looked beyond predictable partners for Purcell’s inconveniently short Dido and Aeneas, lighting on Charpentier’s Actéon, another miniature tragédie en musique. With rather more emphasis on the musique and rather less on the tragédie, the work may not be quite the equal of Purcell’s concise emotional epic, but as an evening’s musical dialogue this was harmonious indeed.Near contemporaries, Charpentier and Purcell have both Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Of all the 20th century’s literary dystopias, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has proved most tenacious, epitomised by its sinister promise: “Big Brother is watching you.” But what happens when he stops watching? What becomes of us when the all-seeing eye of civil authority blinks shut for good, leaving us gazing, alone in perpetuity, at one another? It’s the unsettling question posed by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos. Written some five years prior to Orwell’s novel, the play’s existential vision of Hell (famously defined here as “other people”) might not have claimed the same place in the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Absent or abusive fathers are a staple of British drama. As such, they are both an explanation for ferocious male violence and a metaphor of a paternal state which, in an age of austerity, seems ready to abandon the needy to their own devices. In Tash Fairbanks and Toby Wharton’s punchy play, which is a remarkable collaboration between a woman born in 1948 and a man born in 1984, the consequences of a father’s abandonment of his children are played out with chilling logic.The plot reads like a social worker’s case history: Cannon, a soldier with the Parachute Regiment, abandons his two Read more ...
graeme.thomson
My, but it’s been a bumper few months for the Baker Street Boy. There’s been Anthony Horowitz’s superior new Holmes novel, The House of Silk, Guy Ritchie’s second instalment of his steampunk take on Sherlock as karate-kicking action hero, and now the return of the BBC’s stylish reboot of Holmes as a new millennium net 'tec. And what a lot of fun it was. There may be helicopters, webcams and Wi-Fi, and Dr Watson may be blogging rather than scratching away at the old pen and ink, but still the essence of what makes Holmes such an enduringly compelling fictional figure was evident in spades.The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Without wanting to sound humbuggy, do we really need another Great Expectations? Let alone two. There’s yet another movie coming next year but breasting the tape first is a new three-parter from the BBC. Cinema last visited the story of Pip Pirrip in 1998 when Alfonso Cuarón transplanted the novel to present-day New York. On television Tony Marchant had a go a year later. Theatre was there even more recently with Declan Donnellan's staging for the RSC in 2005 and Watford Palace's Asian version earlier this year. And looming over them all there’s always David Lean’s still definitive adaptation Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Beethoven has been a real touchstone for classical music in the UK in 2011; flattening all in their way, the mighty Leipzig Gewandhaus and Riccardo Chailly delivered high-speed, high-risk thrills in their complete cycle of symphonies.But while their recording, also released this year, is unquestionably my classical CD of 2011, in performance they were outdone by the stylish whirlwind of John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.This year’s Proms season for me was all about the CBSO and Andris Nelsons, who balanced a tenderly diffident performance of Walton’s Violin Read more ...