Scotland
David Kettle
Time travel, Britpop, Sleeping Beauty. Classical ballet, the ravages of alcoholism, serial poisoning. There’s plenty going on in Douglas Maxwell’s idiosyncratic Charlie Sonata at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre – so much, in fact, that it’s hard to know what it all adds up to.Girvan-born Maxwell is known for his poignant dissections of contemporary issues – he had big Fringe hits in the early 2000s with Decky Does a Bronco and Our Bad Magnet, plus plenty of well-received productions since then. Charlie Sonata feels like his most ambitious offering so far, but also his most uneven. It’s clearly a Read more ...
David Kettle
In the end, it’s all about Mamillius. It’s he – the young son of Leontes of Sicily – who launches director Max Webster’s really quite magical new production of Shakespeare’s credibilty-busting tragedy-cum-comedy at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, suggesting it’s all a child’s made-up story in the first place. It's he who fast-forwards us 16 years just after the interval.And it’s he – superbly played by young Will Robertson on press night (the role alternates between two youngsters) – who provides the uncanny sense of innocence and wonder in Webster’s production, as though it’s all seen through Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Mention the name “Barbara Dickson” and everyone remembers “I Know Him so Well”, the duet with Elaine Paige which hit the top spot in 1985, the era of big hair, shoulders pads and dry ice. That song didn’t feature in Dickson’s concert at Union Chapel, but those who came to hear her other top 20 hits – “Answer Me”, “Caravans” and “January February” – weren’t disappointed. The last was the appropriate opener on a frigid February eve, but like everything she played, it was totally reinvented.Quite deservedly, Dickson has enjoyed considerable commercial success and won awards for her acting (“Tell Read more ...
theartsdesk
These photographs of sand dunes were taken by Brian David Stevens in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire, along a stretch of pristine Scottish coastline. The pictures themselves, while captivating and beautiful in their own right, also have political freight. For it is dunes such as these over which a long and ugly battle raged for several years. In one corner was the voice of conservation, including a stubborn fisherman who might have walked out of the screenplay of Local Hero; in the other, the multi-millionaire developer, star of America’s version of The Apprentice and 45th President of the United Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Susan Calman's latest show has a delightfully silly title – Calman Before the Storm – which neatly doesn't pin her down to any particular theme but instead allows her to riff on a wide range of subjects. It makes for a pleasing hour of feelgood comedy.This show started life at the Edinburgh Fringe earlier this year, while the Rio Olympics were taking place; but Calman wasn't worried that she might lose potential audiences. She knows her demographic: “Oh, I’d love to go see Susan, but no… the taekwondo is on!”Calman infuses the hour with some terrifically sharp political comedyPeople Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Got Soul! Honeybelles! Mums in Durham! Three shortlisted finalists from the north and Scotland. Along the way we – and Gareth Malone – were sung to by the Mancunian Rhythm of Life, not to mention Too Many Cooks in Inverness, and a septuagenarian all-male group from Malton kept in order by a retired schoolmistress, who had evolved into a disciplined conductor – and had a fit of the giggles when faced with Mr Malone.Hundreds of choirs involving thousands of people applied to be considered by the choirmaster of the nation for the Best in Britain. Our Gareth is subject in the programme to scores Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Two personable musicians, who win on all fronts: at the pinnacle of their highly competitive and skilled professions, highly articulate, and perhaps unlikely partners in their art. In one corner, ladies and gentlemen, the composer, world-leading jazz trumpeter, teacher, head of Lincoln Center Jazz, the New Orleans-born Wynton Marsalis, 55. In the other, Nicola Benedetti, 29, the Scottish classical violinist, teacher and leading campaigning proselytiser for the importance of music in all spheres.Miss Benedetti played the premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto in D, with a mere 100 Read more ...
David Nice
No living composer writes more compellingly for choir or for strings than James MacMillan (a surprisingly accepted "Sir" is now an optional addition to the name). This beautifully planned programme's first half gave us the former, a cappella choral music at its most masterly in the setting of the Miserere premiered by The Sixteen in 2009, before Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis lay down the gauntlet for the latter. Both were matched - though it would be hard to surpass them - in the world premiere of a masterpiece combining the two forces, MacMillan's Stabat Mater.Post- Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s not often you need a passport to get into a theatre show. But then the journey required to get to Scottish site-specific experts Grid Iron’s Crude does feel like something of a pilgrimage – first get yourself to Dundee, then find the Science Centre car park, and hop on a coach to transport you deep into the restricted, ID-required heart of the city’s port.To an immense industrial hangar, modestly named Shed 36, a mere corner of which has been transformed into a multi-level stage for Crude, Grid Iron’s masterful exploration of the seductive, destructive power of oil. The Edinburgh-based Read more ...
David Nice
His transformational Brahms series with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra may have been truncated by slipped disc troubles - he was much missed at Glyndebourne too - but Robin Ticciati is back with renewed energy and purpose. To judge from the brilliant but focused party they seemed to be having with Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony last night, the players are as overjoyed as he is.There was much to celebrate just in the evening alone: the last symphony came as the cathartic third act of an opera for orchestra which had led us from the majestic 39th into the woods of the radical 40th and out into the Read more ...
David Kettle
Fleeing rape and forced marriage in their war-torn homeland, a boatload of women refugees washes up in Greece, where they beg asylum from the suspicious locals. No, not a depressingly familiar news story of our own times, but the basis of Aeschylus’s 2,500-year-old drama The Suppliant Women – an ancient work whose unmistakable contemporary resonances David Greig brings unashamedly to the fore in his brand new adaptation.His first production at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre since taking the reins as its artistic director this season, The Suppliant Women also marks Greig’s second collaboration Read more ...
David Kettle
One of two Danish Thomases at the head of BBC bands (compatriot Thomas Søndergård is at the helm of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales), Thomas Dausgaard joins the Glasgow-based BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as chief conductor this season.Dausgaard follows in the rather illustrious footsteps of Donald Runnicles (who becomes the Orchestra's conductor emeritus), and joins a high-flying team of Ilan Volkov as principal guest and composer-conductor Matthias Pintscher as artist-in-association.Runnicles has left, as they say, big shoes to fill. But Dausgaard is out to make his mark with a Read more ...