Forget Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture with bells, cannons and military bands (most people have, but it was my introduction to the Albert Hall as a child). Respighi's raucous festivals, sparkling fountains and various pines of Rome are where the real spectacular action is, with more music and poetry than Tchaikovsky found in that occasional piece. Who better than John Wilson and his superorchestra Sinfonia of London to urge the cavalcades and weave the magic in the ultimate Proms blockbuster? Surprisingly, it's not the first time the tall and massive order of all three sets of symphonic Read more ...

E Jean Carroll is the all-American modern woman: Miss Cheerleader USA 1964, gonzo journalist, TV counsellor, glossy magazine agony aunt and, latterly, the victor in two civil suits against Donald J Trump. Currently he owes her almost $83 million. Ivy Meeropol’s documentary also shows the price Carroll has had to pay for her choices.Why did this woman in her late seventies decide to sue, 30 years after the assault? The documentary goes a long way towards answering that question, though essentially the answer is that Trump repeatedly defamed her after she made allegations of rape against him in Read more ...

Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s film was a surprise hit at Cannes last year, winning the Critics’ Week Grand Prize. It’s a ghost story that wears its genre trappings lightly, because it isn’t a regular ghost story at all. None of the usual shock tactics are deployed; instead, an offbeat whimsical humour guides the narrative, to an unlikely destination.Boonbunchachoke sets us up in the opening sequence with a key theme: how to handle the past. We see a beautiful sculpted frieze in pale stone taking shape, based on a tableau of people from different walks of life – a soldier, a teacher, a Read more ...

"It was insanely excellent," enthused one of the Järvi Academy Symphony Orchestra's young musicians about the Estonian Festival Orchestra's performance of Nielsen's Third Symphony with its inspirational guiding light, Paavo Järvi. Seated in the balcony behind and above the orchestra, the lucky youthful players rose to their feet the minute the work ended. They earned their laurels, too, in the opening concert under Paavo's father Neeme, 89 – undiminished in his passion for the rich and rare, glowing with the new life the youth orchestra has given him despite a fall at the Estonian Song Read more ...

If a week is a long time in politics, 30 years is an aeon in popular culture. It was in 1996 that Danny Boyle’s film of Irvine Welsh’s novel, Trainspotting, exploded over Britpop Britain, with its frequently horrifying but perversely life-affirming saga of a bunch of Edinburgh junkies. Its opening sequence of Renton and Spud being chased through the Edinburgh streets by a pair of store detectives, with Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” pounding like a steamhammer over Ewan McGregor’s “choose life” monologue, has crystallised in time as one of the all-time classic moments of British cinema.Welsh’s Read more ...

Based on the novel by Marissa Stapley and telly-ised by screenwriter/creator Jonathan Tropper, Lucky is a rip-roaring tale of dysfunctional criminal families, enlivened by a batch of splendid performances from an excellent cast. Front and centre is Lucky herself (full name Luciana Armstrong), a compulsive thief and skilled con artist, played quite brilliantly by Anya Taylor-Joy.As it happens, Lucky is the daughter of another inveterate criminal, her father John Armstrong, and as we see in various flashbacks, she was (as Joni Mitchell put it) raised on robbery. As she admits, her situation is Read more ...

Had you been at John Wilson's Respighi spectacular on Friday, or heard it on BBC Radio 3/watched it on BBC Four, you might have perceived last night's journey up and down Richard Strauss's Bavarian alp as an extension of Albert Hall possibilities, complete with vast orchestra, offstage bands and full-blaze organ. While Wilson skilfully ran the gamut from ferocious blazes to the subtlest watercolour sketches, Edward Gardner encouraged the London Philharmonic Orchestra to go deep beneath the surface of Eine Alpensinfonie and takes its time in the long lines admiring the wonder of nature.  Read more ...

Growing up in Liverpool, it’s usually not long before you visit the vast golden sands of Prestatyn, still the best beach I’ve ever seen, and the dubious arcades of Rhyl to roll a penny between the lines. Your accent and age announces you as someone to be watched - not without cause, most of the time  - and you wonder how the locals can tell, as they seem to have the same one anyway.Not long after, as a Scouser, you’ll hear of a lost underwater city, well, village, the local Atlantis. Nearly 150 years ago, the then thriving city of Liverpool decided that it liked the super soft Welsh Read more ...

You never quite know what to expect from the acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall. It was hard to credit the total focus Kazuki Yamada drew from his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra right from the start of Poulenc's Sinfonietta - a precision which carried through to an exhilarating performance of the Concerto for Two Pianos with a stunning sibling duo. Adams' now-classic choral blockbuster Harmonium, on the other hand, sometimes benefitted from the halo of sound, but the combined masses of the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and the CBSO chorus couldn't give us many of the words of John Donne Read more ...

The reappearance of Gloria Mundi’s I, Individual is a surprise. Most of what related to UK punk – however tangentially – over 1977 and 1978 has been reissued, and has often been around the houses multiple times. But, until now, Gloria Mundi have escaped the attention of those recycling this aspect of the past.I, Individual was Gloria Mundi's first album, originally issued on 7 July 1978. The band were live circuit regulars from late 1976 and split in 1980 after a second, very different, album which came out in October 1979. Image What’s on Read more ...

The air is thick with theatrical smog… then comes prolonged darkness. Gradually, a dull glimmer of warm light reveals a tangle of limbs moving slowly like the coils of a giant serpent undulating in deep water.  As the light slowly increases, a cluster of beings emerges from the gloom moving in oily undulations like tormented souls roiling in the depths of hell. Occasionally they form into brief tableaux, and I’m reminded of The Raft of the Medusa (1819), an apocalyptic painting of a tragic shipwreck by Théodore Géricault, and also of paintings of downtrodden workers by the likes of Read more ...

Can the 1916 Prologue of Strauss and Hofmannsthal added to a revised version of a 1912 opera-within-a-play setting the backstage shenanigans to music ever fail? Yes, alas. It fell horribly flat last night despite some radiant singing. The love story of deserted Ariadne finally being persuaded by young Bacchus in the opera proper is harder to make live and breathe, but it has in the past - notably and most movingly at Garsington in 2023 - and again it didn't achieve anything like its full humanity here, despite so many glorious sounds from stage and pit, fully backed by the supportive Read more ...