Reviews
David Nice
After the myriad intricacies and moodswings of Janáček's The Makropulos Case on Tuesday and Thursday - I was lucky to catch both performance, the second even more electrifying than the first - the London Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle seemed to be enjoying a relative holiday last night. They could leave the most fiendish element in Bartók's Second Violin Concerto to the astonishing Patricia Kopatchinskaja, delivering every aspect of a work that might have been written for her, and other poetic extremes to mezzo Rinat Shaham, before letting their hair down in Falla's complete ballet score Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Director Bill Barclay’s new collaboration with the Gesualdo Six – commissioned by St Martin-In-The Fields for its 300th anniversary – brings an opulent intensity to its depiction of a man whose troubled existence was reflected in darkly ravishing music. Gesualdo’s life was in many ways the counterpoint to Christ’s – born into privilege, he allowed himself to be defined by lust and a murderous thirst for revenge. So it’s one of his many disturbing paradoxes that he identified so strongly with Jesus’s suffering. Part of the power of this production comes from the heretical frisson that in this Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the long slide from its imperial economic might, it’s hard to make a case for finding a place for “The UK” and ‘“World-leading” in the same sentence. But we’re pretty good at pop music, particularly once you offset Sir Cliff with Johnny Hallyday. C’mon Europe, whaddya got?It’s taken a while for that to be recognised by The Establishment, eventually getting round to gonging up Sir Macca and Sir Ringo, Sir Elton and Sir Rod, Sir Mick and Sir Tom. But who exactly is Sir Ray? He certainly needs more than one name, so what’s he ever done?That Knight of the Realm is, of course, Sir Ray Davies ( Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The last GP in Britain tries to heal his Rage virus-ravaged country in this sequel not only to Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later but his Olympics NHS tribute. Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) is civilisation’s softly spoken but ferociously principled keeper, stoking its embers even in the monstrous Infected, while confronting evil people visually and morally modelled on Jimmy Savile. We begin with 28 Years Later's flawed Scottish island redoubt behind us and only its boy Spike (Alfie Williams) going on. He’s now in the clutches of fake Satanist messiah Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The pitch for this movie might have been “Heat meets Miami Vice”, and it’s to the credit of writer/director Joe Carnahan that the finished result can stand toe to toe with those two without feeling any need to apologise. The Rip is also noteworthy for bringing back together those two grizzled old Bostonians, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who co-star and co-produce (and also negotiated a special bonus deal with Netflix for the cast and crew, depending on the film’s success).It’s a tough, tense tale of Miami cops battling against not only Colombian drug cartels but also shady goings-on within the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Brendan Fraser’s mournful, basset-hound face finds a loving home in this affecting fable from director/writer Hikari. Fraser plays Phillip Vanderploeg, an American actor struggling to make a niche for himself in Tokyo. He’s the definitive stranger in a strange land – though at least he can speak Japanese – and parts are few and far between (a career highlight was his flying superhero who advertises toothpaste). A solitary Phillip can often be found drowning his sorrows in local bars.But all is not quite lost. Phillip gets an offer he can’t afford to refuse when he’s approached by Rental Read more ...
James Saynor
We might simply call it a dilemma, but Hollywood screenwriters call it a “crisis decision”, or maybe sometimes a “swivel”. It’s when there’s an impossible choice, in movies sublime or ridiculous, whether it’s Rick choosing between Ilsa and beating the Nazis in Casablanca, or – in the latter category – pointless superheroes choosing between a baby and the entire globe in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.Yet the crisis decision to end them all occurs a long way from Hollywood in The Voice of Hind Rajab, a brisk, unbearably fraught dramatisation of an emblematic event in the Gaza war – when a six 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 ...
Jenny Gilbert
No one divides opinion quite like Wayne McGregor, Sir Wayne since 2024. He’s the closest thing to Marmite on the ballet scene. Either you’re excited by the brave-new-world qualities of his work – the forefronting of science and new tech, the diminution of emotion, the physical contortions, legs up past the ears every two minutes – or it leaves you cold. Woolf Works was his first full-length work for the Royal Ballet and is already old enough for the current revival to feature almost none of the dancers who helped create it in 2015. In practice, it feels less one three-act ballet than Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
A new look and new vibe for Grant-Lee Phillips at this pared-back performance, part of the Celtic Connections festival that takes over Glasgow for a couple of weeks every January and February. The fresh vibe was due to this being Phillips first tour entirely seated, as he put it, sitting down and armed only with an acoustic guitar, while the 62-year-old is now more hirsute, having grown a beard.There was little else beyond simple performance here, for Cottiers' converted church setting does not exactly lend itself to any onstage gimmicks. If the plastic chairs of the auditorium gave it all Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a journey Jamie Eastlake’s play has had: his stage adaptation (which he also directs) of Jonathan Tulloch’s book The Season Ticket began life as a three-hander in 2022, when it was performed in a social club on North Tyneside. It has had various iterations since and now – with a greatly enlarged cast and multiple storylines – it has a short West End run.The show centres on “two reprobates from Gateshead", the titular Gerry (Dean Logan) and his best mate Sewell (Jack Robertson), two unemployed young men always on the lookout for a money-making opportunity (and comically, in Sewell’s case Read more ...
Robert Beale
Marketed as “City Noir” to begin with, this programme title was switched to “Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 4” closer to the off, perhaps because the more familiar of the two main items in it would ring more bells with potential attenders. Unsurprisingly, it proved a thing of two halves, with Beethoven in the first, and John Adams’ self-described symphony inspired by Los Angeles, from 2009, in the second.The concerto was imaginatively preludised by another American composer’s evocative thoughts – Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, in John Storgårds’ first Bridgewater Hall programme with Read more ...