Reviews
philip radcliffe
I’ve seen some double acts in my time, such as the Oistrakhs and the Torteliers, but none quite like that of Storgårds and Hardenberger. Best friends, they took it in turns to conduct the BBC Philharmonic and to take over the soloist's spot. First one mounted the rostrum, while the other gave us a UK premiere as soloist. Then they switched roles, producing a second UK premiere.John Storgårds, the BBC Philharmonic’s Principal Guest Conductor as well as being Chief Conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic back home, is also a virtuoso violinist, his first calling. Håkan Hardenberger we know as Read more ...
joe.muggs
Feast aims high. Very, very high. Steered by experienced and much-lauded director Rufus Norris, five playwrights and one choreographer seek to make a fusion of physical theatre, dance, onstage music, straight drama, abstract poetic dialogue, projected animation and knockabout comedy to tell no less a story than 350 years of the history of the Yoruba people of west Africa. It spans four continents through recurring manifestations of a group of their “Orishas”, or gods, a series of meals, and an ongoing quest for eggs. Yeah, that old chestnut. It has the potential to be a glorious creation, one Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Cage 100 Various artists (Wergo)Wergo’s handsomely produced box set was assembled for last year’s John Cage centenary. Fans will lap it up, and one hopes that curious newcomers will take the plunge and open their ears to this extraordinary, approachable music. Joshua Pierce’s 1970s album of the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano still sounds definitive. Cage’s Table of Preparations is included in the booklet, listing in alarming detail the position, size and orientation of every bolt, washer and screw inserted in Pierce’s piano. Inevitably, you start to wonder if the bell- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We know Sylvester Stallone didn't do this movie for the money, since he's surfing the career revival wrought by the astounding success of The Expendables. Perhaps he wanted to work with Walter Hill, here directing his first movie in over a decade. Perhaps Sly just prefers working to loafing around the pool in between bouts of weight-lifting.Derived from a graphic novel by French author Alexis Nolent, Bullet to the Head is a strange beast, cynically and relentlessly violent but leavened with some incongruously smart wisecracks. It has a decent cast, but they're offered next to nothing in the Read more ...
Simon Munk
They were there at the beginning of video games, now it seems adventure games are back. After all, with so many mainstream releases reducible to running down a corridor shooting, it's hardly surprising there's an audience for a more interactive alternative.The Cave is a side-scrolling adventure game from two maestros of the point-and-click Lucas classics of the Nineties. Ron "Monkey Island" Gilbert and Tim "Grim Fandango" Schafer. Their names together on a bill mean so much to fans of the genre that their next title, codenamed Double Fine Adventure, has been Kickstarted to the record-breaking Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
This production of Old Times is a big deal. It’s the first of Harold Pinter’s plays to be performed in the theatre renamed after him; it marks the reunion of director Ian Rickson and Kristin Scott Thomas, after their exhilarating Betrayal; and it feels like a seminal reading, involving a casting conceit that makes a rich work even richer, even more mesmerising.First produced in 1971, like Betrayal this is regarded as one of the playwright’s “memory plays”. But both could just as easily be called “marriage plays”, since Betrayal essays the infidelity that helps to end a marriage, Old Times the Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
Bruce Nauman is a great synthesizer of art forms, melding the language games of conceptual art with the physicality of post-minimalist sculpture and performance art. Where the minimalists duplicated the serial and repetitive industrial world around them, Nauman’s use of repetition and order have a linguistic basis. Inculcation, jokes, paradoxes and puns form the logic of much of Nauman’s work and these games grew out of his choreographed minimalist performances. Given this trajectory, the psychoanalytical angle taken in this exhibtion feels grafted on.Filling one of Hauser & Wirth’s huge Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The notice saying “table reserved for Lord Chelsea” in Cadogan Hall’s foyer bar instantly signalled this show was likely to be more rarefied than your normal pop concert. It was in keeping with the grandeur of this early 20th century, Byzantine-style former church a minute from Sloane Square. The tone was further elevated by this being a rare, small-venue British outing for Jane Birkin, an actual, proper star.Arriving on stage, head bowed, Birkin began the evening with “Requiem pour un con”, a song her former partner Serge Gainsbourg wrote for the film La Pacha in 1968. Over 90 minutes, she Read more ...
David Nice
Viennese night in Glasgow’s Candleriggs was hardly going to be a simple matter of waltzes and polkas. True, its curtain-raiser was a Blue Danube with red blood in its veins rather than the anodyne river water of this year’s New Year concert from Austria’s capital; one would expect no less from Donald Runnicles after the refined but anaemic Franz Welser-Möst. In Runnicles’s programme, though, extreme contrast was all: J Strauss II spookily echoed by the elegiac 3/4s in Berg’s Violin Concerto, and another 12-tone boy, Webern, exercising restraint in arrangements of Schubert’s German Dances to Read more ...
Laura Silverman
There is never a dull moment in this three-hour historical epic, even if it is not always clear what is going on. Directed by Gregory Doran, of the RSC, Anjin follows the 17th-century story of William Adams, the first Englishman to land in Japan. The production has lines in English and Japanese, with surtitles above the stage and on either side, but it is sometimes difficult to read the words and watch the characters, especially for audience members in the middle of the stalls. This is not a fatal flaw – a well-plotted narrative and bold staging help the unenlightened follow the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The tabloids are getting shriller every day in their warnings about the army of Bulgarians and Romanians about to descend on British shores, so it’s probably lucky that none of their journalists was present last night at the Barbican to witness an Eastern European musical coup of deadly efficiency. Kristjan Järvi and the London Symphony Orchestra may have cleared the path with a little help from Enescu and Kodály, but it was Bulgarian virtuoso performer-composer Theodosii Spassov – playing an instrument no one had ever heard of – who routed us completely. The kaval is a “chromatic, end- Read more ...
geoff brown
The centenary bandwagon always passes some composers by: how many organisations in Britain will be celebrating George Lloyd or Tikhon Khrennikov? Other figures almost get steamrollered flat with attention; Britten, I’d say, is this year’s likely candidate. But who could throw any stones at the birthday cake and bunting created by the Philharmonia Orchestra for that mercurial Polish wizard Witold Lutoslawski? Born 100 years ago last Friday, he’s the subject of a straggling international strand of concerts called Woven Words, stretching from here until late May, with a final Berlin gig popping Read more ...