Reviews
David Nice
They came in their thousands again last night, most – I’m guessing – for “the Elgar”. Lacking faith that Tasmin Little could fill the enormous soul of that most elusive of violin concertos – a prejudice, alas, fulfilled - I put my money on the polytonal jungle Percy Grainger grows from pastoral seeds at the heart of his wacky In a Nutshell Suite. Yet unforgettably though Sir Andrew Davis swept it along, even Grainger was overshadowed by the lone, late-night transcendentalism of folk singer June Tabor.That 10.15pm Prom was, as my companion described it, “born-again brilliant”, not least given Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is there a place for the travelling fun fair any more? Static attractions like Alton Towers and Thorpe Park have rides that are bigger, grander, more varied and scarier than anything a traditional, transient fair could ever transport. All the Fun of the Fair’s answer was that the fair has survived by winding the clock back, rekindling the past with original Victorian and Edwardian rides. There’s still room for something less bombastic.All the Fun of the Fair traced the history of the travelling fair in its familiar form. What we now recognise as the fair, with rides, sideshows and snacks Read more ...
Matt Wolf
History rears its harrowing head in Sarah's Key, a sometimes galumphing film that lingers in the mind not least because of the terrible tale it has to tell. Reminding us that the atrocities of the Holocaust weren't any one country's exclusive preserve, the film chronicles both the eponymous Sarah, a young girl who survives the French internment camps, and Julia, a Paris-based American journalist in the modern day whose life is taken over by Sarah's story. Are the film's two parts of equal value? Let's just say that fiction yet again is trumped by fact.That the contemporary sequences achieve Read more ...
judith.flanders
It is all too easy to be cynical about the ballet version of Don Quixote. With almost no part for the title character, it is a 19th-century Russian take on faux-Spanish dancing, a farce in which the barber Basilio longs for the charming Kitri, while her father wants her to marry a rich fop. As the Radio Times used to say, “Much hilarity ensues.”Well, actually, it rarely does, for funny ballets are few and far between. Frederick Ashton achieved it in his miraculous La fille mal gardée; Jerome Robbins’s The Concert can make a grown (wo)man weep with happiness on the right night; Baryshnikov Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
WOMAD is in its 29th year, and ticket sales have gone up 29 per cent, we are told, with over 35,000 sold. World music, always rather beyond fashion, is thriving, at least in this live festival incarnation in Wiltshire. One criticism, according to The Independent among others (made by trendy middle-class people in a fit of self-loathing, generally), was that there were too many Cath Kidston tents and it has become too bourgeois. But there was enough strangeness and idiosyncrasy on display to undermine the idea that WOMAD has become complacent in its middle age.In fact, WOMAD has expanded Read more ...
josh.spero
If you're reading this review, you'll probably be expecting a sarky analysis. It invites that - wow, posh girls with unpronounceable names have to work in a Newcastle chippy! - but the programme, which sent four Home Counties fillies up North to compare lives with four Newcastle lasses, hit on something so important that we should force MPs to watch it.Aside from the usual solipsism that all teenage girls have in common - both sides discover that the other has a heart and means well - what GFSG showed is that the divide between the haves and the have-nots in Britain is now so wide that it Read more ...
sue.steward
Ten o'clock at night and the WOMAD air felt as hot as Dakar preparing for Baaba Maal. Sadly, given this year's hugely expanded audience, it was hard to see the stage unless you know how to glide to the front like a snake (which years of festival practice have taught me). Though I still missed close views of the opening three songs and the singer’s acoustic guitar accompaniment, it was impossible not to hear his voice, even adjusted to unusually soft and mellow soulful tones rather than the familiarly sharp, declamatory style that pierces the heart.A slow start and build-up was a plan Read more ...
stephen.walsh
In 1981, when I last came to Bayreuth, the festival still seemed to be a battleground between the German Left and Right, between the blame faction and the guilt faction, between the commie East and the fat-cat West. Plus ça change. Without quite openly taking sides, Sebastian Baumgarten’s new staging of Tannhäuser rings some cracked old political bells while, apparently with Bayreuth’s connivance, candidly parodying most of the thinking that underpins this admittedly somewhat raw, yet for Wagner absolutely crucial early work.Baumgarten is the latest scion of the Felsenstein school, a pupil of Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Late on Friday night at WOMAD, on the more intimate Charlie Gillett Stage in Charlton Park, there was an unusual cross-cultural treat. Ballaké Sissoko is one of Mali’s most accomplished kora players: not as well known as his Bamako next-door neighbour Toumani Diabaté and more firmly rooted in Manding musical tradition, but undoubtedly in the same class. Vincent Ségal is a brilliant French cellist who moves with consummate ease from the classical repertoire to free jazz. They are both technical virtuosi but neither of them plays to the gallery.
In a manner consonant with some of the most Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
According to Classic FM’s managing director Darren Henley there are many people who find the term “chamber music” offputting, if not downright intimidating. Perhaps the best explanation of the genre comes from a musicologist who has termed it “the music of friends”. It’s a lovely description and one that, for the very best ensembles, can extend beyond the confines of quartets or duos to even the largest of symphony orchestras.While yesterday’s Proms Chamber Music concert from Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques was chamber music at its authentic best, so also yesterday evening’s Read more ...
fisun.guner
The only voice recording Sigmund Freud ever made was for the BBC. It was made in December 1938, at Freud’s West Hampstead home just a few months before the father of psychoanalysis succumbed to throat cancer. He was 82 and wouldn’t see out another year, yet here he was on fighting form: “People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavoury,” he declaims, his voice clipped, precise and resoundingly emphatic. “Resistance was strong and unrelenting. The struggle is not yet over."Freud was a revolutionary, and like all revolutionaries he was, clearly, a dogmatist. Twenty years Read more ...
matilda.battersby
It was the invasion of the collapsible chairs at this year’s Co-operative Cambridge Folk Festival. From above it appeared that an army of extremely well-equipped picnickers was staking its claim on the quarter of a mile surrounding the main stage using only fold-up chairs, checked blankets and pints of cider, occasionally lobbing colourful balloon missiles into the air. To call it civilised would be an understatement. It was quite simply extraordinary how far people had gone in pursuit of convenience. Those of us poor sods who sat on the floor could barely see for the sea of green canvas Read more ...