Under its master music director, the once-torpid Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has given us some of the most brilliant concerts of the 2023-4 season. Their Prom together changed course from the Elgar/Rachmaninov theme and dared even more, placing together four works in three parts each – two with atmospheric outer sections flanking vivid ceremonials (Ives, Debussy), two placing the lyricism at the dead centre (Ravel, Tchaikovsky).To label it a vintage Prom in form, a new work would have been necessary. But Charles Ives’ Three Places in New England still sounds like one, and its big symphonic Read more ...

“Family-friendly fun” seems to have mutated over the years into elaborate films featuring high-octane animation, starry voicing and often mushy sentiments. In older children’s TV, gone are the days of actual humanoids mucking about with stun guns. Only Doctor Who has continued to deliver the teatime goods.  So the arrival of Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s Time Bandits on Apple TV+ is to be relished. It’s rated PG, I’m not sure why, unless its scary bits are considered just a tad too scary. Having your uncaring parents incinerated into lumps of carbon would strike me as an event Read more ...

The weather is perfect. Rare at a festival in this country. The sun shines. Occasional clouds pass. There’s a light breeze. Flamingods are on the Charlie Gillett stage. They are a London-based unit of primarily Bahraini origin who make psychedelic-electronic rock tinged with exotica and Middle Eastern flavour. Very WOMAD, in other words.All around are iterations of hippy, from gnarled Sixties originals, lined and lived-in, batik-patchwork panted, to psy-trancey youths, half-clad, sleek in bodypaint and retro pink Lennon shades. We jog and nod. The music is likeable, not ecstatic. The vibe, Read more ...

I sometimes think I’ve done the festival thing the wrong way round. When my babies were at their littlest, we did the big ‘uns – Latitude, Wilderness, Blue Dot, and the like – all family "friendly", but with slightly wilder, bigger, more adulty vibes. I figured if I was going to be up all night with babes in arms I may as well be in a field, on the fringes of some great music and colourful experiences.It’s only now that my Small Folk are older – in the realms of teens and tweens – that I’m experiencing the UK’s ultimate family summer festival for the first time. This year the real question Read more ...

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery includes many of the artists’s most iconic political photomontages. Beginning in the 1970s, Kennard created images that by speaking truth to power, gave protest movements like CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), the Anti-Apartheid Movement and Stop the War Coalition the visual equivalent of marching songs.Influenced by John Heartfield who, in 1930s Germany, used his scissors to create lacerating images denouncing Nazism, Kennard has similarly gone on the attack to reveal the hypocrisy of politicians, his revulsion at war Read more ...

Rahul Subramanian is a well-established comic in his native Mumbai, as evidenced by the appreciative audience of Indian expats gathered at Soho Theatre. His sellout dates in London acted as previews to his debut run at the Edinburgh Fringe, which starts on 2 August.Subramanian is one of several South Asian comics Soho Theatre has introduced to London and Edinburgh comedy fans, and it's a mutually productive arrangement; last year, Urooj Ashfaq, another star of the Mumbai standup scene whom the theatre promoted in the UK, made her Fringe debut and walked away with the best newcomer gong at the Read more ...

It’s been a long time since the Whitechapel Gallery has presented three seriously good exhibitions at the same time. Already reviewed are Gavin Jantjes’ paintings on show in the main gallery. He is now joined, in gallery 2, by Dominique White, winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and in galleries 5, 6 & 7, by Peter Kennard.Funded by the Max Mara Fashion Group, the Art Prize provides the winner with a six month residency in Italy and, in an interesting film, White describes the research she was able to carry out during that time. The four powerful sculptures now on show were Read more ...

Still Willing opens with “Upper Ferntree Gully,” a seven and three-quarter minute workout twice as long as most of the other nine tracks on Personal Trainer’s second album. A portmanteau piece, its most direct sections have the chug of vintage Pavement, some stabbing early Tame Impala guitar and chunks of Sonic Youth-like squall. Yo La Tengo also aren’t far.Personal Trainer are based in Amsterdam, and fronted by the Australia-born Willem Smit. As "Upper Ferntree Gully" takes its name from a suburb of Melbourne, the song presumably nods to his past. Equally probable is the surmise that the Read more ...

The conundrum central to library music is that it was not meant to be listened to in any normal way. Yet, in time, this is what happened. What ended up on the albums pressed by companies like Bruton, Chappell, De Wolfe and others was heard by subscribers – the records did not end up for sale in shops or on the record players sitting in the nation’s homes.Those receiving this music were from the advertising, film and television industries. They were looking for material which could feature in their productions without the need to book a recording studio and employ an arranger, composer, Read more ...

What is Englishness? Over the last century the answer has changed substantially. Yet last night’s Prom, which – according to the programme – set itself the task of celebrating “all things English” had a very particular answer.This was an England of Eric Ravilious paintings, Earl Grey tea, the vibrant greens of a hedgerow, the gentle plop of croquet mallets against croquet balls. The compositions spanned more than a century, and their reference points more than half a millennium, yet they all had an elegance and subtlety that evoked a very homegrown pastoral tradition.From the outset, Read more ...

Laura Lippman’s source novel for Apple’s new drama became a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 2019, and director Alma Har’el’s screen realisation has fashioned it into an absorbing dive into various social, racial and political aspects of mid-Sixties America.Set in Baltimore, the story is filtered through separate though overlapping perspectives, personified by the twinned leading characters Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman, in her first TV role) and Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram).Maddie is a Jewish housewife and mother from suburban Pikesville, who seems, superficially, to be Read more ...

There comes a point in I Saw the TV Glow when the repressed high-schooler Owen (Justice Smith) smashes his television’s screen by trying to dive into the box itself, to cross the great divide between his numbed reality and the feminine supernatural fantasy-land of his favourite series.Bursting into the room, Owen’s brutish widowed father (Fred Durst) pulls him from the wreckage. The scene is a metaphor for gender dysphoric Owen’s inability to start transitioning into a girl, a block that will leave him emotionally crippled. That is the nub of Jane Schoenbrun’s dazzling second feature, not so Read more ...