Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
A previous visit to the Wigmore Hall saw the Jerusalem Quartet make headlines for all the wrong reasons, after political protestors disrupted the live-broadcast concert. Last night however all was mercifully calm and music-focused for the start of the first three-concert sequence in the quartet’s Shostakovich cycle, though audience members did have to brave the rather incongruous bouncers, lined up in their casual-with-just-a-hint-of-don’t-even-think-about-it chic outside the hall doors.Working chronologically through Shostakovich’s chamber repertoire, the quartet’s triptych of concerts gain Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
In several of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories, reference is made to something called "a knockabout cross-talk act". It's a two-handed sketch, usually performed at a village hall smoking concert or similar, in which the protagonists put on fake beards and terrible Irish accents to become "Pat" and "Mike". They then proceed to trade nonsensical insults and bust each other "over the bean" with umbrellas. This farce continues until they are removed from the stage, most often by one of Wooster's ever-ready phalanx of outraged aunts, to wild applause from the audience.It might not be Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
With his debut as a writer/director, the cute, cuddly, only-one-down-from-Gosling star Joseph Gordon-Levitt goes to bat against cold, casual sex and hits one into the mid-field for meaningful sex - even possibly older-woman sex - in Don Jon. This drama-comedy about compulsive sex and porn addiction is an uneven, bouncy story featuring characters that are admittedly stereotypes, but a storyline that could be a little too close to the truth for many and a wonderful scenario of a well-rounded life… that is headed to failure.Will she catch him making love to his laptop? Gordon-Levitt stars Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The Southbank’s artistic director Jude Kelly was out in force at this penultimate weekend of The Rest is Noise festival, delivering little triumphalist, Ryan Air-like fanfares, reminding us how pioneering they had been to programme composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten and Philip Glass - composers who no one had ever heard of before they'd bravely decided to put them on. She also proclaimed that two-thirds more tickets were sold than is normal for contemporary classical concerts, which could have been true had the festival actually contained any Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes TV doesn’t need to be “challenging” or “groundbreaking” to be thoroughly worthwhile. The first episode of Sky Arts' new “…talks music” series saw the familar format of a live, seated interview applied to one of pop music’s highest achievers: Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac. TV producer Malcolm Gerrie led proceedings in an attractive theatre in front of an audience of students. Most memorable were some blistering live demonstrations of Buckingham’s craft.Gerrie’s interview style may have been a little more One Show than Parkinson but still he kept the singer/guitarist well at Read more ...
David Nice
How many reviews of War Requiem do you want to read in Britten centenary year? This is theartsdesk’s fourth, and my second – simply because though I reckon one live performance every five years is enough, Rattle’s much-anticipated Berlin Philharmonic interpretation fell almost entirely flat, and I wanted to hear at least one good enough to move me to tears.Last night’s under the special circumstances of Remembrance Sunday wasn’t just good; it hit the heights and plumbed the depths, with no weak link in any of the soloists, choirs, orchestra or instrumental soloists. So much so that the tears Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Raw fear is horror’s ideal state. The vertiginous drop through a trapdoor into primordial, gasping helplessness usually only lasts for the split-second length of a cinema-seat jolt. Jeremy Lovering’s debut aims to scare us for much longer. Unusually, he wanted to scare his actors too, feeding them just enough script to get by as they filmed on Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor (standing in for rural Ireland) at night, and he threw shocks at them out of the dark. Fear is his theme and method.The set-up is brutally simple. Tom (Iain De Caestecker) surprises new girlfriend Lucy (Alice Englert) with a Read more ...
Mark Kidel
It’s surprising how a singer with as little obvious presence or charisma as Justin Vernon can carry a live show, but he does. The power is in the otherworldly voice, and haunting songs with mysterious lyrics, carried on a wall of sound in the tradition of those “little symphonies for the kids” that Phil Spector pioneered half a century ago.When he stopped being Bon Iver, the soft-voiced falsetto vocalist launched into a collaboration with a bunch of like-minded Wisconsin experimental folkies: Volcano Choir’s first album Unmap, as its allusive title suggested, explored new and exciting Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So, another series down and what do we know? First up, until this final episode no one had died either by contractual agreement or Fellowesian godlike decree. We’ve had a rape, an unwanted pregnancy, a near abortion, a mysterious disappearance and a spot of senile dementia. Plus not one but two uppity colonial singers have drifted upstairs. If it weren’t for the vowels and the coat-tails, this could be Emmerdale, tackling urgent social issues in a Yorkshire accent and congratulating itself on the column inches the morning after. Why else all the animal husbandry?And still nothing much seems Read more ...
Sarah Kent
This triple bill is of works commissioned for the Royal Ballet: Kenneth MacMillan’s The Rite of Spring was first performed in 1962, Wayne McGregor’s Chroma had its debut in 2006 while this is the world premiere of David Dawson’s first ballet for Covent Garden, The Human Seasons.McGregor’s Chroma (pictured below right) is an oddly pallid affair, given that its name refers to the saturation of pure colour, free from admixtures of white or black. The set by minimalist architect John Pawson is characteristically sparse. Dancers step onto the stage through a rectangular opening; clever lighting Read more ...
Guy Oddy
This year 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of two landmark albums, both of which were composed and recorded by bassist, pianist and all-round jazz colossus, Charles Mingus. Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus is a reimagining of some of Mingus’s tunes from the 1950s in a way that has influenced acclaimed jazz-rock amalgamates such as Get The Blessing. The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, on the other hand, is a spawling, orchestral masterpiece that is often described as Mingus’s greatest work. This autumn, Arnie Somogyi, a double bassist of some repute who's played with the likes of Amy Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Massachusetts-born Bo Burnham first performed in the UK at the 2010 Edinburgh Fringe. The then teenage prodigy, who had come to fame as a YouTube sensation, took the festival by storm and was given the Edinburgh Comedy Awards' panel prize. He hasn't performed here again until this year's Fringe, when his second stage show, What, sold out in a matter of minutes and was again garlanded with rave reviews.He's now doing a short tour of What, and it starts with one of the most astonishingly accomplished opening segments I have ever seen, a combination of rap, dance, magic and physical comedy Read more ...