Reviews
edward.seckerson
The hills are alive with the sound of... well, Donizetti, actually. His mature "Melodramma Semiserio" Linda di Chamounix arrived towards the climax of a prolific career in opera and was clearly a late attempt to capitalise on his successes and give his adoring audiences a little of everything and at great length. This season-opener concert performance at the Royal Opera (recorded, incidentally, by Opera Rara) was not far short in duration of Verdi’s epic Don Carlo, a starry revival of which occupies this very stage imminently.As the subtitle implies, the really startling thing about Linda di Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
What a splendid little ensemble the Purcell Quartet is. The sort of group that you rather hope might reduce in size as the years go on, so that in the end you can put them in your pocket and carry them around with you all the time. If ever an ensemble could provide a soundtrack to the ups and downs of life then this is it.Which is just as well really, because this little celebration of Purcell’s music covered the whole gamut of emotions, from heart-wrenching song to boisterous sonata to the frankly ludicrous When the Cock Begins to Crow, replete with busy bees, singing crickets and lazy sluts Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bestival was the first festival to embrace fancy dress and, five years into its career, still does it best. This year the theme was "Out of Space" and with the weather delivering gorgeous Indian summer sunshine, a welcome contrast to Bestival 2008’s deluge of wind-blown sleet, a contagious carnival of intergalactic characters extended across the site. Most attendees regarded it as mandatory to make some effort for the big Saturday dress-up and a few, such as the gent who’d carved a cargo-loading exoskeleton, as worn by Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, from polystyrene, had really gone beyond the Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Design for Life is a new BBC2 series about the philosophy of Philippe Starck, he of the iconic ‘space rocket’ lemon-juicer, in the form of an Apprentice-style reality show. It was also an intriguing insight into the control exercised by producers of such shows - for, unlike The Apprentice et al, the choice of contestants and the nature of the challenges were left to Starck himself. ‘Bloody terrifying’ was how Joe Houlihan, the executive producer, described to me the experience of delegating his powers to somebody who didn’t have the imperatives of television foremost in his mind.But back to Read more ...
howard.male
OK, let’s start with a bit of icon-bashing. In some circles, to say that a current Afrobeat band might actually be better than what the originator of the style, Fela Kuti, produced in the 1970s, would be as outrageous and absurd as proclaiming that the Ruttles were better than the Beatles. Fela Kuti is untouchable and beyond criticism, just as John Lennon and Bob Marley are. But Fela’s mythological status is fed by an incongruous mix of the good, the bad and the ugly.His insatiable appetite for women and marijuana would now make spectacular tabloid fodder. But his heroic one-man war Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A beloved if flawed film becomes the latest celluloid icon to stumble on its way to the stage, The Shawshank Redemption on the West End flailing where theatre adaptations of The Graduate, When Harry Met Sally, and Rain Man, among various others, previously led. Devotees of the 1994 Oscar hopeful may bring enough prior affection for the material to see them through the (copious) chinks in the prison cell armour, leaving newcomers to this parable of liberation pondering how it is that a piece so devoted to inspirational uplift should seem so uninspired.Co-authors Dave Johns and Owen O'Neill Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What an absolute joy. Two and a half hours of Abba songs performed by a (mostly) stellar line-up with Kylie Minogue topping the bill, and the songwriting duo Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus appearing on stage to take the tumultuous applause of a 35,000 crowd gathered in Hyde Park in London. Only the surprise appearance of their erstwhile musical and marital partners Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Faltskog could have turned this memorable evening into a perfect one.Thank You for the Music, a BBC Radio 2 event (broadcast live, with a television recording to follow soon), was subtitled "A Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Appointment-to-view content. That’s what they’re calling it. Not drama. Not soap. Content. Which you have to make an appointment to view. Although you actually don’t because it’s all on the iPlayer but let's let that pass. Here I am on BBC Switch, 8.10 sharp, for the Beeb’s first online daily soap, The Cut.Well, they've got the name right. I hit the button on the dot and the music cuts in. And then cuts out again. Ignore it, I think. Minor glitch. The system will sort itself. Which it does in six seconds. Back comes the music. Cut. Didn’t like the theme tune anyway. That little timer icon is Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The height of naffness? The best of British? A bit of fun? Opinions always splinter over the Last Night of the Proms. The received wisdom is that, if you have a brain or any genuine care for music, you’re not really meant to enjoy the Last Night; you’re meant to endure it, bravely, stoically, heroically, like a terminal illness, by taking each sonic and visual blow on the chin. What is really not meant to happen is for one to find - next to the usual bits of aural and intellectual GBH - moments of genuine comedy, emotion and even musical revelation.Things began before they'd begun. Conductor Read more ...
graham.rickson
The film critic Mark Kermode maintains that if a film is advertised on the side of a bus, it will inevitably be rubbish. Opera North are advertising this revival of Tim Albery’s 2004 Così fan tutte extensively on the sides of buses here in Leeds. Kermode’s theorem evidently doesn’t hold for opera.This production is an invigorating, life-enhancing evening which showcases all that Opera North excel at: it is visually imaginative, crisply sung and underpinned by marvellous orchestral playing. The witty English-language version (in an uncredited translation) is always audible. Conducting is by Read more ...
edward.seckerson
One sure (but expensive) way of luring Zubin Mehta to London is to hire the Vienna Philharmonic, too. He and the orchestra go way back to a time when the Indian-born superstar’s smouldering good looks might have suggested Bollywood as a more likely destination than the Vienna Conservatoire. But only the most precociously gifted 20-something conductor offers up Bruckner’s 9th Symphony for his first recording with the illustrious Philharmonic. And quite a fist of it he made, too. I still return to it from time to time.Forty-something years on there’s an air of luxurious well-being about Mehta Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Caught in a crossfire between licence-payers and rival media groups, the BBC has reached the frankly surreal conclusion that the answer is to cut down on imported programmes. Luckily Harper's Island (BBC3) has snuck in under the wire.A fiendishly slick 13-parter acquired from CBS in the States, Harper's whisks us off to the eponymous location (situated offshore from Seattle amid dreamily-shot Washington State scenery) where wedding guests are gathering for the nuptials of wealthy Trish Wellington and earthy regular guy Henry Dunn. Trish's dad (Richard Burgi from 24 and Desperate Housewives) Read more ...