Reviews
Sebastian Scotney
There is joy, energy – and no little irony – about the way that Hollywood stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson play and sing the parts of a working-class couple from Milwaukee with big dreams and big hair.Song Sung Blue tells the story of a real-life couple, Mike Sardina (1951-2006) and Claire Stengl/Sardina, who formed a Neil Diamond tribute band in the early 1990s and performed in small venues, becoming local celebrities under the name Lightning and Thunder.The plot is about the pair’s desire to fulfill themselves musically. It’s an aspiration that constantly jolts them – and the viewer – Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
“When it comes to a dance roundup, you surely won’t be able to come up with a Top Ten, will you? Even a Top Five might be a stretch”. This from a naysayer who clearly hasn’t been out much this past year. From where we stand, dance looks to have been doing rather well, and this despite the economic strictures we all know about. While it’s true that international touring is not what it was, and ballet fans can no longer get their summer fix from the Russians (and should probably give up hope of seeing a live performance by the Bolshoi or Mariinsky Ballet ever again), the Royal Opera House came Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s 1952 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, seven years after the Enola Gay dropped a bomb on the Japanese empire, but one skinny New Yorker is still waging war against it, armed with street savvy, a motormouth and a traditional table tennis paddle.This is the unlikely subject of Josh Safdie’s first solo directing release, Marty Supreme, loosely based on elements from the life of Marty Reisman (here called Mauser and played by Timothée Chalamet). Most Japanese sportspeople had to observe a post-war travel ban, but not the low-level celebrities of the table tennis world, which was barely Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Alabaster DePlume, aka Mancunian Gus Fairbairn, has been an antically charming performer, confounding unsuspecting crowds with tenderly comic philosophy, voice Tiny Tim-eccentric yet alive to mental fragility, and attuning listeners to the brave possibilities in their every breath. Operating at a quizzical angle to London’s jazz scene, he surfs his own, sui generis wavelength.Working with West Bank Palestinian musicians during the Gaza War had clearly changed DePlume in gigs in Brighton and Norway’s Moldejazz festival, and A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole. He sometimes found elevated Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
If this time of year should prompt everyone to count their blessings, then one precious musical gift shines brightly over Smith Square Hall this week. For the choral ensemble Polyphony, its director Stephen Layton and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, it’s just a normal Christmas festival in Westminster: Bach’s Christmas Oratorio last night, Messiah this evening.Yet I came away from the Bach reflecting that, four decades or so back, period-conscious Baroque music-making of this quality and commitment would still have struck most listeners as a revolution – perhaps a miracle of sorts Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Peace and Goodwill to All Men outside. Inside, on stage at least, there’s not much peace nor goodwill to be had on the horror-filled Saturday afternoon before Christmas. A high-spirited full house is set to spend a couple of hours with spirits of a very different kind. In every sense, it's a shocking contrast.Of course, this is no original IP, many punters, having seen what they liked in the Paranormal Activity movies, sitting down, drink in hand, bag of merch tucked under the seat, for a new fix, this time in the West End. That said, ghost stories are a Christmas tradition, whether Marley Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Vox Luminis, the vocal and instrumental group based in Namur and led by Lionel Meunier, continued their residency at the Wigmore Hall, hot on the heels of a memorable rendition of Bach’s B Mass at the Spanish Church a few blocks away, with an equally breathtaking evening of works by Bach and his predecessor as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, Johann Kuhnau.There were two wonderfully celebratory Magnificats, the first by Kuhnau, and the second by Bach – his earlier version in E flat Major ( BWV243a). Although not specifically for Christmas, they have both traditionally been associated with the year’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
UK prog-rockers Gracious! acquired their exclamation mark when their first album was released in July 1970. Up to this point, they were Gracious. Barney Bubbles, who designed their LP’s sleeve, added the symbol without asking or telling anyone.The sleight typifies the story of Gracious! The band had breaks, but their path through the music business was bumpy. They recorded a second album between January and March 1971, but split in August that year before it was scheduled for release. When the LP was issued in April 1972 the band were not informed. The label “just flopped it out there with no Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When, in late 2021, I heard the UK premiere of Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio, it truly felt like a heaven-sent gift of musical and vocal splendour after the long famine of our lockdown purgatory. Four years later, with the renewed thrill of large-scale live performance no longer so acute, how does it hold up? For the most part, with undimmed brilliance: at the Barbican, the composer himself conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a signature work that gathers four centuries of sacred music into a 100-minute meditation on the Christmas story. It transcends pastiche to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Whether there really was a poisonous professional rivalry between Mozart and Antonio Salieri, composer to the Imperial court in Vienna, seems less than likely, but the success of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, on both stage and screen, has convinced the world otherwise. In Shaffer’s view, we see a Salieri consumed with envy and jealous rage at the effortless brilliance of Mozart, who seemingly had access to a continual stream of divinely-inspired inspiration. Salieri, by contrast, would be remembered only as “the patron saint of mediocrities”.Sky Atlantic’s adaptation, written by Joe Barton, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The wonderful Mirra exists in its own space.” Back in August, that was the conclusion of my review of Benedicte Maurseth’s then-new album. Living with this “stunningly intense,” “haunting, intense evocation of Norway’s uplands and its wildlife” hasn’t changed this impression. Moreover, over the ensuing months, the impact of this exceptional collection of eight interrelated compositions has increased. Benedicte Maurseth is Norwegian. Her main instrument is the Hardanger fiddle – with its second set of sympathetic, drone-generating, strings. This, together with Mirra’s concern with Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Eugene Jarecki’s forensic investigation concludes that Julian Assange’s character flaws are dwarfed by the high crimes he exposed, and can’t justify the cruel and unusual punishment of his cramped Ecuadorian Embassy sanctuary. This reverses what he sees as self-interested manipulation of the official narrative, which stoked personal condemnation as a smokescreen for state slaughter and surveillance.Character has dominated Assange’s evolving cinema persona, which began with fellow Australian Robert Connolly’s admiring Underground (2012), an account of young Julian the teen hacker in the barely Read more ...