Reviews
graham.rickson
Konstantia Gourzi: Music for piano and string quartet (ECM)You rather hope you'll bump into and make the acquaintance of the Greek composer Konstantia Gourzi. And that she'll be sufficiently impressed by the force of your personality that she'll capture it in music. The most immediately engaging work on this disc is Aiolos Wind, a sequence of six tiny piano pieces from 1993, each one recalling an encounter with a different musician. They're like tiny pencil sketches, each one sharply drawn and economic. Helmut Lachenmann's folky rumination is enchanting, and there's a transcendent, pure Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
French actress Marie Rivière had a specially close relationship with director Eric Rohmer. After seeing his work for the first time in the early 1970s, Rivière expressed her admiration in a letter, which led to a succession of parts and culminated with her appearing as heroine Delphine in Rohmer’s 1986 The Green Ray (Le rayon vert): the part was in some way centred on the experiences of the actress, who was allowed to develop the story through almost total improvisation. Rivière herself went on to make a documentary about the director which was finished shortly before Rohmer's death in 2010. Read more ...
David Nice
All happy families are alike, Tolstoy declares at the start of Anna Karenina, but this adaptation of War and Peace stresses how the surviving Rostovs and Bolkonskys went through various hells to get to that enviable state. In this one respect consummate mover and shaper Timberlake Wertenbaker steals a march on her author. Isn’t there a feeling of flatness when we find Natasha and Pierre sunk in seemingly trivial domestic bliss towards the end of the novel? By having them, and the equally contented married couple of Princess Marya and Natasha’s brother Nikolay, recollect with anything but Read more ...
Simon Munk
The videogames industry is rapidly changing. Many of the best and biggest games of the last few years have come from tiny, independent studios – we're back to the days of bedroom coders and quirky ideas. But that doesn't mean there haven't been worthy big budget "AAA" traditional titles.Alien IsolationProbably the most interesting of the big budget titles, this first-person stealth game saw an unscripted, intelligent alien stalking you while you crawled through darkened ducts and hid under tables. Frustratingly difficult and ludicrously uneven – but genuinely terrifying. The most interesting Read more ...
Veronica Lee
And so, after starting life as Miranda Hart's Joke Shop on Radio 4 in 2008, then continuing for three series on the BBC from 2009, Miranda is no more. Its co-creator, co-writer and star, Miranda Hart, has decided to pull the plug on her eponymously named sitcom.Hart follows in good company of writers who realise they have mined all the com they can from the sit and, in the best showbiz tradition, have stopped while leaving their audience wanting more – as did Connie Booth and John Cleese with Fawlty Towers, and Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant with The Office. And, it should be said, while Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
You usually know a good piece or performance when you see one, but sometimes you only identify a great one as such significantly after the fact. What better way to test a work's durability, then, than by seeing what remains of it in the memory after six or 12 months? I admit this "best of" exercise is pretty subjective, but 2014 was such a rich year for dance that I've had to be ruthless: an item only makes my list if I still feel excited when I recall it.This list doesn't sum up the whole year by any means. Some of the biggest events don't get a look in – the Royal Ballet's new Winter's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Filmgoers will either find Denis Villeneuve's latest art-house thriller to be a tantalising head trip or so much celluloid posturing, but there's no denying its contribution to the rise and rise of leading man, Jake Gyllenhaal. Racing up the outside track as a potential Oscar nominee for Nightcrawler even as he is making a (splendid) Broadway debut in the Nick Payne play Constellations, Gyllenhaal here gets to impress twice over and for a simple reason: Javier Gullon's script casts the hirsute star in two different, teasingly complementary parts. Thoughts of Jeremy Irons's career-best Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Birmingham Hippodrome claims to stage the UK's biggest pantomime – a proud boast that highlights its productions' West End-level of investment. And this year's venture, Jack and the Beanstalk, is certainly glitzy and star-laden, while the sets and costumes are fabulous, and there's a 3D sequence as well as a live band, so the claim seems a fair one.Gary Wilmot is Dame Trot, whose three sons Jack, Simple Simon and Silly Billy endlessly get into scrapes. Silly Billy (the excellent Matt Slack, who really connects with the youngsters in the audience) is secretly in love with Princess Apricot Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apologies in advance to fans of The Missing, The Honourable Woman, The Fall, Game of Thrones or House of Cards, none of which feature in the list below, but might well have done. So might The Good Wife, Ripper Street and Peaky Blinders. The fact is, in our teeming everything-everywhere world now boosted by Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Now TV and many more, whittling a whole year down to a handful of nuggets requires the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, and the devious brain of a superhacker. But at least it's no longer feasible to protest that "there's nothing on the telly". Read more ...
David Nice
Offshoots of the Venezuelan El Sistema’s worldwide dissemination as well as other youth and music projects continued to bloom and grow in 2014. The morning after what was the orchestral concert of the year for many who caught it, Alexandra Coghlan (see below) and myself included, players of the European Union Youth Orchestra reconvened in the Albert Hall to workshop three classics with musicians from nine British youth orchestras and London schools.How proud the EUYO's founding music director Claudio Abbado would have been of this ongoing good work (he died, as if we could forget, this year Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Despite appearances, Jeremy Clarkson aspires to be taken seriously, as readers of The Sun and The Sunday Times will know. With this Top Gear Special he managed it, being chased from Argentina into Chile by a stone-wielding mob that appeared to have designs on his personal safety, in an incident widely trailed in the news media at the beginning of the month.The cause of this outrage was the choice of Clarkson’s car for their drive from the top to the bottom of Patagonia, a Porsche with a number plate ending in FKL, letters widely interpreted as a taunt about the Falkland Islands. The final Read more ...