Reviews
Bernard Hughes
My final visit to the Proms for this year was a Sunday double-header of the RPO playing Respighi, Milhaud and Vaughan Williams at 11am and an evening concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and massed choirs in Gipps, Grieg and Bliss.The matinée (★★★★) was a set of three cityscapes, depicting Rome, Rio and London. Respighi’s The Pines of Rome is a terrific orchestral showpiece, low on memorable musical content but high on vivacity, gorgeous in its Technicolor scoring and performed here with pizzazz by the RPO, especially in the second and fourth movements. After the rumbustious opening Read more ...
James Saynor
The Coen brothers’ output has been so broad-ranging, and the duo so self-deprecating, that critics have long had difficulty getting their arms around them. Telling stories of distemper in the American heartland, with the occasional drive-by hit on Old Hollywood, they defined indie cinema for a generation and then perhaps single-handedly released it from its ghetto and merged it into the mainstream. After an extended run of successes from Blood Simple (1984) up to but excluding Intolerable Cruelty (2003), intermittent irritation has greeted some of their 21st century offerings, a few Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHBlack Lips Season of the Peach (Fire)Some of the many releases by don’t-give-a-damn southern US rockers Black Lips are of variable quality. They’re actual rockers, not Modern Music BA university graduates, so it depends where their wild heads are at. Their latest is a good one. Their garage instincts are intact, but they also render loose-limbed, fibrous versions of country music, southern soul and indie guitar pop. There aren’t many bands who could write a song with a chorus that runs, “I just want a prick of my own”, and make it a catchy new wave singalong akin to the best Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There is such nonchalance with Sabrina Teitelbaum that even her appeals to the crowd appeared laid-back. At points during her set the Los Angeles singer would slowly raise an arm, in the time-honoured tradition of a musician demanding noise, but in a way that suggested she wasn’t bothered if the call was actually heeded. Then again, perhaps it was just a sign that she knew the gesture would have the desired effect, given her evident popularity here.Two albums into her career, and with this show – her first ever in Scotland – upgraded due to demand, the 28-year-old appears in a settled Read more ...
mark.kidel
At the start or her show, the white-robed singer Ganavya does something unusual: while other performers usually warm their audience up before suggesting they sing along, she plunges straight in, a minute or so into chanting “a love supreme”, and gets everyone to join her in what can only be described as a communal act of devotion. This is a kind of high-wire daring, and it works, suggesting as well that she's assured of a large group of listeners for whom she can do no wrong.Now well-established as a purveyor of spiritual jazz and traditional South Indian chants, born and raised in New York Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Chiswick Records 1975-1982 - Seven Years at 45 RPM is a triple album marking the 50th anniversary of the first release on the titular label. That record was a four-track, seven-inch EP by the rough, Rolling Stones-ish pub rockers The Count Bishops. It came out in November 1975.Setting the trend for what was around the corner with punk, not only was The Count Bishops EP on an independent label it also came in a picture sleeve. The label was an outgrowth of the Rock On record stall and shop. The folks behind the imprint – Roger Armstrong, Ted Carroll and Trevor Churchill – all had backgrounds Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
ITV continues its passion for docudramas about injustice, which you can’t blame it for after the rip-roaring success of Mr Bates vs the Post Office. The issue in I Fought the Law is, from one angle, of national (even International) importance, though compared to the persecution of hundreds of innocent postmasters, some of whom committed suicide, its cause is a rarer bird.The person fighting the law is Ann Ming (Sheridan Smith), a feisty mother from Billingham, near Middlesbrough, whose daughter Julie, her oldest child, goes missing in 1989. It takes over two months for her body to be Read more ...
David Nice
It’s weird, if wonderful, that vibrant young composers at the end of the 19th century should have featured death so prominently in their hero-sagas. Assume their inspiration came from Wagner’s Siegmund, Siegfried and Tristan. But Sibelius, Mahler and Richard Strauss took very different paths on the route to obliteration. That’s only one of many things that helps to make Hannu Lintu’s three-year exploration of Sibelius in the context of his predecessors and contemporaries so fascinating.The Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s new Artistic Partner (pictured below by Antti Sihlman) not only took on Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Ukraine war is not the only place of horror in the world, but it does present a challenge to theatre makers who want to respond to events that dominate the news. And which make us all feel powerless, including our leaders. Instead of staging a play such as Bad Roads, Ukrainian playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s savage 2017 account of the conflict, the Royal Court has chosen a meta-theatrical and metaphorical response. Adapted from the 2019 book of poems by Ukrainian-American author Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic is a contemporary fable of war, atrocity and resistance. A collaboration Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Laura Benanti has been enchanting Broadway audiences for several decades now, and London has this week been let in on the secret that recently charmed playgoers at this summer's Edinburgh Festival: the comedienne perhaps best known in some circles for her wicked impersonations of Melania Trump can hold her own in a solo show that mixes self-deprecation and determination in equal measure.The first quality is there in the show's faintly damning subtitle, Nobody Cares, which was offered up by one of Benanti's two young daughters - her children so clearly the apple of their mother's eye that you Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata is enhancing its reputation for pioneering with three performances featuring Nick Martin’s new Violin Concerto, which it has commissioned, two of them in art galleries rather than conventional music venues.So the concerto had its world premiere in The Whitworth, Manchester’s university-linked gallery, with the second performance at The Hepworth in Huddersfield. There’s a reason for that: Martin has taken his inspiration from “a carved torso-sized, cradle-like form, in elm, with nine strings of fishing line” by Barbara Hepworth: it’s called Landscape Sculpture.In it ( Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I never abandoned you,” says Jule (Ophélia Kolb; Call My Agent!) to her 10-year-old daughter Claire (Jasmine Kalisz Saurer), setting a fairly low bar as far as motherhood is concerned.Swiss-American director Jasmin Gordon’s first feature, with a screenplay by Julien Bouissoux, is a compelling, though too mysterious, portrait of a single mother versus society. Set in a wealthy town in the mountainous Lower Valais in Switzerland, Jule, a woman on the margins, gazes out from her window at the murmuring trees that, in a hypnotic, recurring motif, seem to offer a portal for escape.She lives in a Read more ...