Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Another day, another few million bucks for Taylor Sheridan. Hot on the heels of Marshals, his latest Yellowstone spin-off, his inexorable march through the TV schedules continues with this saga of the Clyburn family. Previously they called New York home, but thanks to a sudden catastrophe they find themselves moving to the huge spaces and epic scenery of Montana's Madison River Valley. You could call it melodrama, and at times it threatens to go the whole hog and turn into soap, but The Madison does have the gift of watchability. It also delivers a hefty jolt of star power, in the shape Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s disquieting, as a bloke, to hear 2000 female voices singing about the sexual frustration caused by premature ejaculation. A noisy chorale, heartfelt, behind Lily Allen’s 2009 hit “Not Fair”, cascades from two tiers of balconies. “And then you make this noise, and it's apparent it's all over.” Lily Allen isn’t even on yet. Just this celebratory femme-centric congregation around the joys of dating a one-minute man.It’s the first half of the show – and make no mistake, this is a show, touring theatres, not a gig – and it’s a simple set-up. Three female cello players, clad in black, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This programme – of Weir, Bartók, Finzi and Stravinsky – was right up my alley, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo delivered on its promise, with performances that ranged from the grandly ceremonial in the Weir to touchingly intimate in the Finzi. In addition there was an enjoyable concerto for South Korean star Yeol Eum Son and, to finish, one of the great orchestral showpieces, The Firebird, or rather some of it. I have known Judith Weir’s The Welcome Arrival of Rain forever, but performances in the concert hall are sadly few and far between. But it is great to hear it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Jazz,” exclaims an audience member just after Plantoid launch into “Ultivatum Cultivation,” tonight’s second song – also the second song on the band’s recent second LP Flare.He’s got a point. What’s emanating from the stage at East London’s Moth Club is more a candidate for a description as jazz rather than the math rock – or even the prog rock – tags often cropping up when trying to pin down Plantoid. Jazz: in this case a take on the genre fusing a Miles Davis Bitches Brew sensibility with, in contrast, softer things; things suggesting a familiarity with Gary McFarland’s Sixties Read more ...
David Nice
The master pianist and pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus impressed upon Elisabeth Leonskaja the maxim "don't look for yourself in the music, but find the music in you", something she says she reflects upon daily. Which is how she seems to channel the essence, shedding ego but retaining personality. More recently she's given us one-composer marathons - Beethoven's and Schubert's last three sonatas above all - so to be reminded of what genius there is in her more diverse programming was a special pleasure in last night's recital of Beethoven, Schoenberg, Chopin, Webern, Schubert and Mozart. The Read more ...
theartsdesk
We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.Our fundraiser is rolling towards hitting the halfway mark, and it’s already raised enough to repair our ageing site and ensure its survival. But just as important to all of us have been the messages of love and support from our readership. It’s not just the morale boost of being praised either – though let’s be honest, the warm glow is pretty Read more ...
David Nice
When the joyful energy at the final curtain - love briefly triumphant in the power-dominated world of Wagner's Ring - is as insanely high as it was at the end of a dizzying first act, that killer of a forging scene, you know this is a winner. Andreas Schager is a battle-hardened Siegfried, knowing no fear at full pelt but having to work harder on softer tones now, and his still-boyish enthusiasm learns all the febrile, physical lessons director Barrie Kosky asks of him in the third instalment of his challenging new Royal Opera Ring. It's a combustible meeting.We also witness Kosky developing Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If you’ll forgive me the first of two tiptoes into Gonzo Journalism, a few weeks ago I found out that I have a faulty gene - not a romantically tragic Romanov one, but a defect on the double helix that had already manifested itself in a condition affecting my family and that I may have passed to my sons.That crucial medical knowledge leads to early diagnosis and allows for preventative treatment if required, but what if I had known about it 30 years ago, just before my DNA was shuffled at conception's roulette wheel? What if its impact were greater, life-altering, even life-threatening for Read more ...
Heather Neill
Gorky's satire is set in the summer of 1904, between the opening of The Cherry Orchard and Chekhov's death that year, and the first Russian Revolution early in 1905. Summerfolk has echoes of Chekhov, The Seagull as well as The Cherry Orchard, to which it could be a sequel. Gorky's folk, lazily holidaying in their summer dachas, might be inhabiting the new development which Lopakhin was to build in place of the cherry trees chopped down at the end of Chekhov's last play. The closeness of the relationship is explicit here: there is a reference to trees having been cut down to make space for the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mother Pearl is not direct. While sixth track “Checking In,” with its rising-falling cadences and verse-chorus structure, is its most immediate, the dominant impression of the new LP by the Iceland-born Gyða Valtysdóttir is that it’s about creating an atmosphere and then nurturing it to generate an enveloping aural milieu.According to Gyða, quoted in the promotional material, “Mother Pearl is a seed, is potential, is a gift, is an aragonite, is a jewel created from an irritation from a grain of sand, is iridescent, contains all the colours, is vibrant, it is a fertile egg waiting to become.” Read more ...
Robert Beale
The members of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, on an intensive tour of the UK and Ireland which sees them right now performing daily after long journeys, are heroes by any standard.They are also musicians of high calibre and with a distinguished tradition. The programme they offered in Manchester was designed to link Britain and Ukraine symbolically, but it was – as with all its variants on the tour – built around Beethoven.For a symphony orchestra, their numbers on tour are modest, with 34 string players and 15 others, but it’s a contingent that works very well for Beethoven – Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. Er… another nostalgic play about growing up in a Yorkshire post-industrial city?Hard on the heels of John Godber’s Leeds-set Do I Love You? running last week at Wilton’s and Kat Rose Martin’s marvellous Bradford-set £1 Thursdays at the Finborough (my best new play of 2023), we take a 30-mile trip south to Doncaster (Donny to friends) for Children of the Night. Is it something in the air? Besides the coal dust of course.
Image
If those earlier productions traded primarily on the Read more ...