Reviews
Marianka Swain
Saxon Court joins the growing list of new plays tackling the economic collapse, and while lacking the creative innovation of work like Clare Duffy’s Money: The Game Show at the Bush or Anders Lustgarten’s If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep at the Royal Court, Daniel Andersen’s salty, astute debut proves a solid addition to the canon.It’s Christmas 2011 and the employees of recruitment-to-recruitment company Saxon Court are itching to trade work for partying. Boss Donna (Debra Baker) struggles to get into the party spirit: her co-founder is in hospital and a drop in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Like good wine, some plays improve with age. The first taste is sharp, and tickles the palate; further sips stimulate and impress, but the rich full flavour is only apparent after a few years in the cellar. Such is the case with Piranha Heights, Philip Ridley’s 2008 drama, which has been thrillingly revived by young director Max Barton at the Old Red Lion as the inaugural production of this fringe venue’s new artistic director, Stewart Pringle. As such, it feels like a compelling statement of intent.Set in a top-floor flat of an East End tower block, the play begins as a domestic dispute Read more ...
Thomas Rees
It’s not easy to write about a gig when you’re still shaking with adrenaline, still less so when that gig is the grand finale of the 2014 EFG London Jazz Festival, the climax to a giddy ten days of world-class contemporary music. But it’s a cross I’ll have to bear, because last night’s performance from legendary saxophonist Charles Lloyd and jazz giants tenorist Joe Lovano and trumpeter Dave Douglas demands it.Appearing as part of their Sound Prints quintet, completed by young pianist Lawrence Fields, bassist Linda Oh and the ebullient Joey Baron on drums, it was Douglas and Lovano who took Read more ...
peter.quinn
Imaginatively constructed and endlessly surprising, this world premiere of the complete version of pianist Robert Mitchell's choral work Invocation elicited one of the most moving performances I had the pleasure of hearing at this year's EFG London Jazz Festival. Written as “a personal and universal thank you to life-changing teachers”, the vast, six-movement work skilfully interweaved the improvised with the composed, resulting in a score of quite astonishing richness and variety.The cast included the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and its chorusmaster (and powerful baritone singer) Gavin Carr Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In Concerning Violence Göran Hugo Olsson has created an almanac documentary drawing on material from Swedish television archives, filmed by a number of directors in Africa, largely in the 1970s. It’s fascinating footage, covering a number of perspectives on what was happening in the continent over that decade, from the frontline guerilla wars with the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique, to industrial unrest in Liberia, and apparently matter-of-fact interviews with white settlers in Rhodesia and elsewhere.But Olsson’s masterstroke, which gives this diverse material a uniting context, is Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Kassé Mady Diabaté is one of the great singers of West Africa, a member of Toumani Diabaté's Symmetric Orchestra and, more recently, the Afrocubism all-star line-up. His latest album Kiriké (Horse’s Saddle) on the Parisian No Format label is a beautiful return to his acoustic, traditional roots as a singer, produced by French cellist Vincent Segal and featuring kora maestro Ballaké Sissoko, Lansiné Kouyaté on balafon and Makan Tounkara on ngoni, conjuring up the spirits and messages of centuries-old Bambara songs of the ancient Manding Empire. This music runs deep. The kora of the south, the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Paying homage to the legendary imprint that brought us 'The Finest In Jazz Since 1939', this concert on the penultimate evening of the EFG London Jazz Festival really did have everything, including the unlikely sight of master pianist Robert Glasper pirouetting across the Royal Festival Hall stage. The first half saw Glasper in duo with fellow NYC-based Houstonian, pianist Jason Moran, in an extraordinary, hour-long set that referenced jazz past, present and future.Performing on two Steinway grand pianos, nestled together on a dramatically lit stage, the duo's free, rhapsodic intro Read more ...
Sarah Kent
There is nothing erotic or titillating about The Institute of Sexology, an exhibition the Wellcome Collection plans to keep open for a year. Those expecting a display of fertility symbols, fetish objects, kinky clothing or sex aids down the ages will be deeply disappointed. Just about enough objects and images are included to keep you interested, but the bulk of the show is not dedicated to sexual practices but to the 19th- and 20th-century doctors, anthropologists and psychologists who spent their lives studying sexual behaviour. And therein lies the problem. The exhibition format makes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jon Hassell / Brian Eno: Fourth World Vol. 1 - Possible MusicsIts opening is exotic. The music shimmers like heat haze and incorporates a sing-song instrument which might be a treated trumpet, or a high-register bass guitar reverberating like water on distant rocks and pattering percussion. “Chemistry”, the opening track on Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s 1980 album Fourth World Vol. 1 - Possible Musics, melded the ambient to serialism and what became both electronica and world music.Possible Musics is a stunningly beautiful album. Its reissue on album and CD brings an opportunity to Read more ...
David Nice
A great creative partnership like the one between composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars can endure the occasional wobble. In his peerless autobiography Hallelujah Junction Adams is frank about the information overload in Sellars’ premiere production of the millennial opera-oratorio woven around the birth of Christ, El Niño. His semi-staging of its companion piece The Gospel According to the Other Mary seen at the Barbican last year was, on the other hand, so pure, focused and perfect within Sellars’ usual semaphoring bounds, that I feared the full works might unleash excess again. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An Off Broadway play that largely passed without notice in 2002 is now a movie poised to suffer the same fate, notwithstanding the fact that this starry three-hander marks the film directing debut of the prolific American dramatist Israel Horovitz, at the age of 75. So it's no surprise that the older generation gets championed in a script (adapted by Horovitz from his stage play) that finds Maggie Smith playing a nonagenarian who, she tells us, is too old for subtlety. In which case, someone should have bitten the bullet and told Horovitz that his film is a talky, contrived and a highly Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
If you were to wander in off the streets and catch this band randomly you would be amazed to find such accomplished musicians. But this wasn’t any old gig, it was one of the masters of jazz, Tomasz Stanko. It should have been one of the highlights of the EFG London Jazz Festival and expectations were running high.Stanko is known for his lyrical trumpet playing, reminiscent of mid-period Miles Davis, and has been a towering figure in Polish jazz. For the uninitiated, Poland has been one the centres of jazz since the 1950s. “Jazz was freedom for us, the opposite of communism”, as Stanko pointed Read more ...