London
ash.smyth
There can't be many excuses for a back-up band at a triple bill, but back it up they did at last night's The Good The Bad album launch at Madame Jojo's. Way up.Hot Fiction deserve a mention for their efforts. A two-man White Stripes (drums and bass) with - both literally and metaphorically - an extra set of balls, they play an old-school, sludged-up tangent somewhere between The Stripes and The Killers, with a few Hendrix-lix and hints of the Bayou thrown in. It's like something you might have seen on black-and-white Top of the Pops, only with better amps, tailor-made for a Guy Ritchie " Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“A simple story of everyday life in a big city, a story of love and passion and greed and death.” That was how Kurt Weill described Elmer Rice’s 1929 play, Street Scene, set on the front stoop of a New York brownstone in sweltering summertime. Together with lyricist Langston Hughes, the left-wing poet and writer, Weill turned the drama into a gritty 1947 American opera, setting Rice's book against a score that offered an exhilarating blend of Puccini-esque melody, bright, brassy, impudent jazz, brooding blues and sparkly Broadway showtune. Like the tenement where its struggling characters Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Fresh from a fortnight of disappointments, Adele showed she was back on top form in London this evening. Having missed out on the Mercury Music Prize and cancelled a string of dates on her nationwide tour suffering from a chest infection, today heralded better things for the Tottenham-born warbler after she was nominated for three MTV music awards. Not that a bit of sadness is a bad thing for this pair of lungs, mind. Her albums 21 and 19, sung lustily in an emotively crackling contralto, has earned the 23-year-old a reputation for depth and maturity well beyond her years.Explaining that she’ Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s not like we’re short of operas. Thousands of works spanning over 400 years make up the western operatic repertoire. Of these maybe 100 get a regular airing in contemporary opera houses, with only about 20 making it into the popular consciousness. For the rest, a trip outside the archives is rare indeed, with many scores still vainly awaiting their “modern premiere”. So why then, with so many works to choose from, do directors persist in returning to Bach – who famously never composed an opera – for inspiration? It’s a question that Jonathan Miller’s St Matthew Passion only partially Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Welcome back Stephen Poliakoff. With his first new play for 12 years, the master penman has set aside his television excursions into history and memory — most recently Glorious 39 for the BBC — for a haunting, contemporary tale of chance encounters and mysterious city nights. As the title makes clear, the play is a vision of London which is both personal and meditative. For me, it felt like a trip to a world that is surprising yet also familiar.One evening, a young man called Richard (pictured below right) finds his former primary school head, Miss Lambert, sleeping on a bench near St Paul’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As artificial spaces, clubs struggle to embrace the organic environment. The music and arts collective Noise of Art are bridging the gap by working with the charity Trees for Cities, with DJs donating their time to raise funds for planting trees in London. On 17 September, Noise of Art is working with Trees for Cities at Battersea Park and taking over the Village Underground for a fundraising event.The events are supported by the Cultural Programme of the European Union and are part of the pan-European Metiss’age street art festival. During the day (between 10am and 3pm), Battersea Park will Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Photography isn’t looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures. Thus Don McCullin, quoted on the information board of a new display at Tate Britain of around 50 black-and-white silver gelatin photographs, chosen and printed by the artist himself. No digital here, the process of the darkroom is under his control.The subjects cover anything but his direct war work, although his wholly justified fame rests on decades of hideous risk-taking (he was wounded several times and the lucky escapes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What a strange, shape-shifting thing Luther is. Storylines ebb and flow around Idris Elba's dauntingly huge central character like flotsam and debris borne along on a heaving swell, but the man himself wades imperiously through it all like the Colossus in an old Jason and the Argonauts movie. Gross professional misconduct, subterfuge and blatantly aiding and abetting criminal behaviour are all part of Luther's daily routine. It's quite easy to forget that he's supposed to be a copper.The show's disorientating aura gets an additional boost from the way seemingly crucial characters just go Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The funny thing about updating is how old-fashioned it can seem. Perhaps that’s why opera directors “update” to the Fifties, building in their own obsolescence. Steven Berkoff didn’t deliberately do this (I suppose) in his Oedipus play Greek; yet behind the interminable shits and fucks, the inyerface monkey farts, the snot and the vomit, there does lurk a rather touching aproned and flat-capped mum-and-dad Family Favourites world that was certainly long dead by 1980, when the play was first done. And it’s one of the strong points of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s 1988 opera that it preserves all the Read more ...
josh.spero
You might say that the grand hotels brought this on themselves. Time Shift: Hotel DeLuxe on BBC Four last night saw beneath the shine of their marble atria and heard the uncomfortable murmurs under the joyful gossip of their chic bars. What started out as an apparent paean to the luxury hotel - the Savoy, the Ritz, the Dorchester - with an emphasis on the glamour, energy, buzz and innovation they created soon turned into a documentary with a social conscience.The fruity, naughty narration of Fenella Fielding, the jazzy soundtrack ("Puttin' on the Ritz"), hyperbolic statements Read more ...
David Nice
If Eric Coates’s Knightsbridge March is good enough for Gergiev, who conducted it as a saving-grace encore of a very messy World Orchestra for Peace Prom in 2005 (17 orchestral leaders in the first violins, not a happy gambit), then it’s certainly worth the time of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and one of its biggest sound-shapers. Bright spark John Wilson unhesitatingly claims Coates as his favourite light-music composer. But this concert served up more than just bubbles in the champagne of the Southbank’s Festival of Britain 60th anniversary celebrations; there was some decent semi-serious Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Tickets were like gold dust for this one and the stage was lit as if some of that dust had been sprinkled on the Festival Hall in a midsummer dream of a concert. The massed ranks of the Crouch End Festival Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra and a backing rock band magicked up on the Southbank to pay handsome tribute to the presiding Puck and genius loci Raymond Douglas Davies, alumnus of the William Grimshaw Secondary Modern School, in the manor of Muswell Hill. As the last night of the Meltdown series, curated by Davies, was it all hopelessly OTT? Short answer: yes. But it was also Read more ...