Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
For the first encore of the evening, it was not just the audience but the whole ensemble of Hespèrion XXI that was mesmerised as its leader, Jordi Savall, executed a fiendishly rapid sequence of notes that sent the rosin from his bow rising up like smoke. At the age of 83, one of the world’s most influential viol players continues to demonstrate that his genius for teasing out every nuance of baroque allows him to soar through the music as freely as a bird.This joyful, sharply inventive concert with his group was titled Baroque Revolution, reflecting the innovative spirit of the 16th and Read more ...
Jon Turney
The slightly overwrought subtitle, "How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World and Shapes Our Future", gives a good indication how computer enthusiast Sam Arbesman treats his subject. Software, written in a variety of programming languages whose elements we refer to as code, is ubiquitous.It underlies many parts of modern life, and current efforts look like extending its reach profoundly. And, while we can try to understand it by reading books like this, it’s not clear that we can influence it. Although it is made by humans, it is easy to get the impression (digital Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Mary Halvorson leads the sextet Amaryllis on About Ghosts, instrumentally, she does not place her guitar to the fore. The first time her playing really leaps out on her new album is during second cut “Carved Form,” where it weaves through the arrangement. A guitar solo arrives just over a minute in: precise yet slippery, it complements the early space-age feel of the Pocket Piano synthesiser she also contributes to the track.The album’s cover image aptly captures the interplay defining About Ghosts. Just as the ghosts in the illustration slip through each other, each player Read more ...
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bridge Theatre review - Nick Hytner's hit gender-bender returns refreshed
Helen Hawkins
It’s a sign of the inroads that the term “immersive” has made in theatreland that it now gets jokily namedropped at the Bridge inside Shakespeare’s actual text, when Duke Theseus tells his new bride Hippolyta not to flinch when the Rude Mechanical playing Moon shines a bright light in her eyes: “It’s immersive.”Is it? I prefer the traditional term for this production’s technique of having a “pit” full of standing audience members who are relentlessly shepherded from raised platform to raised platform. Which is “promenade”. It’s as old as the medieval Mystery plays. But predictably, younger Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This thrilling production of Saul takes Handel’s dramatisation of the Bible’s first Book of Samuel and paints it in pictures ranging from grotesque exuberance to monochromatic expressionism. From the earliest flamboyant images, dominated by the disquieting presence of Goliath’s decapitated head, to an encounter with the Witch of Endor that has the starkness of Beckett, this tale of jealousy and betrayal grips you to the bitter end.Barrie Kosky’s darkly subversive take first landed at Glyndebourne 10 years ago – then, as now, it featured Christopher Purves as the belligerent, mentally Read more ...
David Nice
If, like me, chamber music isn’t your most frequent home, there are bound to be revelations of what for many are known masterpieces. Mine in recent years have involved Brahms, a composer I love more the older I get: the Second, A major, Piano Quartet, much less often heard than No. 1, at the 2018 Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, and, last Friday, his First String Quartet from the Cuarteto Casals, also new to me, in an airy room looking out on Dublin’s Glasnevin Botanic Gardens.I missed the first two concerts of this year’s DICMF, arriving on the Friday, but both were greeted with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of The Gold in 2023 was received rapturously, though apparently it only told one half of the story of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery at Heathrow airport. Now screenwriter Neil Forsyth has returned to the scene of the crime to reveal what happened – or might have happened, since there’s a fair bit of artistic licence at play here – to the missing portion of the £26 million quid’s worth of stolen gold.Though this time around we no longer have the likes of Sean Harris and Dominic Cooper in the cast, there are still plenty of sharply-drawn characters to savour. There is, for Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Eva Quartet are four outstanding Bulgarian voices of polyphonic purity and depth, drawn from the legendary choir Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, who guested on Kate Bush’s classic Eighties album The Sensual World.Soprano Gergana Dimitrova, mezzo-soprano Sofia Yaneva, alto Evelina Christova and contralto Daniela Stoitchkova began performing as a quartet in 1995, and are celebrating their 30th anniversary this year with this, their first concert in the UK since 2008’s Balkan Fever festival, at St Cyprian’s, a High Gothic revival church between Baker Street and Regent’s Park.They perform in full Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Bush Theatre is becoming a garden centre. Earlier this year, the venue staged Coral Wylie’s Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew, which featured an abundance of plant life, and now it’s the turn of talented novelist and screenwriter Danny James King, whose Miss Myrtle’s Garden has Wylie aptly listed as its botanical consultant. Directed by incoming artistic director Taio Lawson, it is a study of loss, love and ageing set initially amid the weeds and neglected plants of 82-year-old Miss Myrtle’s garden. She is the widow of Melrose, both being Windrush Generation migrants who have Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Marianne Moore once famously defined poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. Operas also fill, or anyway should fill, their artificial horticulture with genuine beasts – and flowers. And no work demands the population of a fanciful landscape with authentic passion more urgently than Così fan tutte. Mozart transforms this shabby little shocker of a plot – as the meddling know-all Don Alfonso “tests” the two sisters’ fidelity to their sweethearts – into a vehicle for music of exquisite truthfulness that grows from a bed of fraud and lies.At the Nevill Holt festival in rural Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Forest and the Shore” by Keith Christmas is remarkable. In his essay for Gather In The Mushrooms, compiler, author and Saint Etienne member Bob Stanley says it is “as evocative as its title. The song has a deeply wooded sound, like a cross between Serge Gainsbourg’s “Ballade de Melody Nelson” and Ralph Vaughan Williams.” To this can be added the brooding, dramatic melancholy of Scott Walker’s “The Seventh Seal.”Despite the grandeur of “Forest and the Shore” – and the astounding Richard Thompson-esque, Tom Verlaine-predicting guitar solo taking it to its close – Gather In The Mushrooms: The Read more ...
Justine Elias
If you’re horse mad or merely an every-four-years Olympic fan, you already know Nick Skelton’s story. Equestrianism can favour mature competitors, but Skelton was twice the age of his rivals. He'd survived numerous injuries – including a broken neck – by the time he propelled Britain to showjumping gold in 2012. Fifty-four at the London games, he wasn’t done. Both he and his horse Big Star returned to the Olympics four years later to win the individual gold medal.In a handsomely mounted but unrevealing documentary, Big Star: The Nick Skelton Story, admirers from inside and out of Read more ...