Reviews
graham.rickson
Brahms Beloved: Symphonies 2 & 4, Clara Schumann Lieder Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi/John Axelrod, with Indra Thomas, Nicole Cabelle (sopranos) (Telarc)There’s a glut of Brahms symphonies on disc this autumn, with live recordings from Valery Gergiev and a new Leipzig cycle on Decca from Riccardo Chailly. As an appetizer, you could do far worse than to investigate this handsomely recorded, well performed Telarc set. Conductor John Axelrod believes that each of Brahms’s four symphonies has a distinct character, all directly inspired by his unrequited love for Clara Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We're advised to take off our shoes, as the show will knock our socks off; it's the first of many neatly worked bits of wordplay about how good the show will be - “Is there anybody named Annette in the audience? Good, because this is comedy without Annette” - in a fantastic opening riff before Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez get down to the proper business of the evening. Entitled Just the Two of Each of Us, this is another of their trademark shows of madcap physical storytelling, in which they each play several characters, with the only props on stage being two chairs.The chairs became any Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One of this year’s Oscar contenders, Lincoln, covered the ending of the American Civil War as it played out in the comfortable confines of the Capitol. 12 Years a Slave, an exceptional film that will surely be in the running next year, reveals the “fearful ill” that set the country alight in the first place.It’s based on a true story that is shocking even for antebellum America, of a free man from upstate New York, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. Compared to Steve McQueen’s previous films, Hunger and Shame, the narrative style is conventional Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Jim Jarmusch's characters have always been ineffably cool, whether the slackers of Stranger than Paradise, the accountant lost in the Wild West of Dead Man, or the hit man with samurai pretensions of Ghost Dog. It goes without saying that if he makes a film about vampires, they’ll be dripping with style.From the opening sequence of Only Lovers Left Alive – a spinning camera peering down upon the lounging, elegantly clad, pre-Raphaelite figures of Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston – this gently satiric vampire film has us in a seductive grasp. Adam and Eve are a married couple who, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Without doubt, 2013 has been the year of Rudimental on Planet Pop: a second number one single with “Waiting All Night”; a number one debut album with Home, hugely successful festival appearances, and plenty of TV coverage. It’s no wonder that the youth of the West Midlands (and some of their mums and dads, by the look of things) turned up to see the band in their droves at this O2 Academy show that’s been sold out for weeks. “Eagerly anticipated” doesn’t cover it.Things kicked off early with plenty of warm-up action from Joel Compass and then Shakka’s laid-back grooves and finally DJ Gorgon Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The front rows of an Abandonman gig are not a place for shy people. The core of rapping Irish comedian Rob Broderick’s act has long been to interact with the audience and turn the nuggets he gleans into ridiculous songs. For his latest show, Moonrock Boombox, which he now brings to the Brighton Comedy Festival, he turns the crowd participation into a surreal space adventure. It’s fortunate, then, since we’re sitting in row three, that my girlfriend is not especially shy for she became a key player in Abandonman’s mission across the cosmos.Broderick is accompanied by guitarist James Hancock Read more ...
David Nice
First fanfare had to be for the Royal Opera House’s main gambit in Verdi bicentenary year, staging its first ever Sicilian Vespers 158 years after the Paris premiere. Any of Verdi’s operas from Rigoletto onwards deserves the red carpet treatment, and this unwieldy epic, with its opportunistic grafting of a melodramatic plot on to the Palermitans’ massacre of the French in 1282, has more than enough vintage music to be worthy of anyone’s close attention. What’s more, Antonio Pappano is surely the best opera-house music director in the world to reveal its colours and beauties, and he rose to a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It’s been a good year for the colourful side of classical ballet in England. Anyone who thought the 19th-century greats were all about swans, sylphs and wilis, ghostly in clouds of white tulle, will have reconsidered after seeing two productions of La Bayadère (idols in India) and two of Don Quixote (castanets in Castile), both of which are not so much spectral as full spectrum. Now English National Ballet is adding to the rainbow with its new production of Le Corsaire (premièred last night in Milton Keynes), a piratical yarn of a ballet that has never before been staged in its entirety in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Earlier this year we saw Tobias Lindstrom's A Hijacking, a Danish-made thriller based on true events, about a freighter hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. Featuring familiar faces from Borgen and The Killing, the film skipped the part where the vessel was seized, and focused on the excruciating and seemingly infinite negotiations between the hijackers and the shipping company in Copenhagen. Harrowing and claustrophobic, it evoked the sufferings of the crew incarcerated below decks while businessmen calculated what value they could afford to ascribe to their lives.But Hollywood Read more ...
judith.flanders
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Sometimes, of course, it’s even better to be both. And Birmingham Royal Ballet, in their all-too-brief London season, have been both lucky and good. Lucky, because they have Peter Wright’s little jewel of a production to dance; and good because, well, they’re good in it.The first night cast of Jenna Roberts (right, in a previous performance, as the Lilac Fairy), now happily settled back at full health after a long injury break, and Iain Mackay (below left) is as sleek and smooth and elegant as the production. Roberts’s Aurora is gracious Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
There is something very familiar about Star Command. It's not just that this Kickstarter-funded game has been in development since 2011, nor that the setting superficially resembles Star Trek. It's more that there are several other games that do what Star Command sets out to do and, unfortunately, do it better.In Star Command, you are the captain of a small spaceship that you must outfit with both crew and basic functions, represented in-game as "rooms" that can be built on available plots scattered around the deck. Weapons rooms, shield generator rooms, medical bays and other more Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning A Separation was a marriage of drama, melodrama and social observation that was beyond compare; it’s expecting too much of his new film to equal it. That said, The Past confirms that few can match the Iranian's attention to the psychological minutiae of family relationships. It's riveting.An Iranian, Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returns to Paris to sign divorce papers with his French wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo), four years after their separation. The couple have an easy rapport, with no evident rancour, and Ahmad gets on well with Marie’s daughters from an earlier Read more ...