Reviews
judith.flanders
A new Liam Scarlett ballet has become an event, even as, in this case, Scarlett’s home company, the Royal Ballet, is recreating a work he choreographed last January for Miami City Ballet – the young choreographer’s first international commission.In Viscera, Scarlett continues to pay homage to his choreographic masters – previously he has tipped his hat to Ashton and MacMillan. For Miami, directed for so many decades by George Balanchine’s great muse Edward Villella, he not unnaturally looks to the American genius. His choice of music – a piano concerto by Lowell Liebermann – sets the tone, Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Blue Nile: A Walk Across The Rooftops, HatsGraeme ThomsonThe Blue Nile occupy a unique spot in the musical landscape. Formed in 1980 by Glasgow University graduates Paul Buchanan, Paul Joseph Moore and Robert Bell, four albums in 30 years suggests a certain neurotic creative sensibility which resulted in a pretty slim legacy but served the music well.From their first single – 1981’s “I Love This Life”, included on these expanded reissues – to their last album High, in 2004, a dedicated and deliberate artistic ethos has driven the music. Aesthetically, there is something immensely pleasing Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
The Russians are coming next week, when the Moscow company Vakhtangov bring their production of Anton Chekhov’s tragi-comic drama of dissipated lives and squandered love to the West End. But first, London has Linsday Posner’s staging, with a mouthwatering cast and a poised, ruefully witty translation by Christopher Hampton.There’s nothing here to startle, and in some ways that’s rather to the endeavour’s detriment. Christopher Oram’s set, of a timbered dacha that vaguely resembles a giant Swiss cuckoo clock, is so hefty and literal that in the opening scene it seems on the verge of crushing Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s something admirable about the way that The Civil Wars have become quietly, unassumingly massive; packing mid-sized venues the length of the UK and chalking up over 100,000 copies of their debut album sold since its March release on these shores. The double Grammy-award winning, Nashville-based duo seem genuinely appreciative of a rapturous reception, and endearingly humble despite their considerable success.If proximity be enough to transfer some of the band’s considerable good fortune, perhaps by the time their own headline tour rolls around in the new year we’ll see The Lumineers ( Read more ...
graham.rickson
Xavier Montsalvatge: Orchestral works BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena (Chandos)Xavier Montsalvatge (1912-2002) was a Catalan composer who remained true to his regional roots, resisting any stereotypical notions of what Spanish music was supposed to sound like. He was attached to the habanera, but would have pointed out that the rhythm came from Cuba and was brought to Barcelona by Catalan emigrants returning home at the start of the 20th century. Just as certain chunks of Vaughan Williams will always evoke grey skies and boiled cabbage, Montsalvatge’s music at its best suggests a piquant Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“A hurricane didn’t stop me getting here,” shouted Barry from Philadelphia, and there were plenty of hard core World Party fans for whom last night at the Albert Hall was a big deal concert – the first proper tour in 10 years, coming on the back of a brick-like five-CD box of unreleased material called Arkeology.Karl Wallinger (who is for all intents and purposes World Party) had a good excuse – he suffered an aneurysm a decade a ago and for a while couldn’t speak. Last night, though, he was in fine voice. Wallinger never was starry, and certainly doesn’t look it – imagine Griff Rhys Jones as Read more ...
Sarah Kent
"From today, painting is dead" was the forlorn conclusion of French painter Paul Delaroche on seeing a photograph for the first time in 1839. His gloomy prediction was premature, of course; more than 170 years on, the battle for supremacy is still raging.Divided into genres such as Portraiture, The Figure and Still Life, the National Gallery’s first exhibition of photography follows the twists and turns of this ongoing war. The main casualty of the clash turns out not to be painting but engraving, the medium most often used to disseminate images prior to the invention of the camera. One of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
London theatre loves plays about the media. Is this because we spend so much time flicking through magazines, visiting websites or watching television? Or is it because this venue’s trendy metropolitan audience is as cynical and world-weary as a media ad buyer? Either way, Lucy Kirkwood’s lively new play is both a hilarious account of lads’ and girls’ mags, and an indictment of their effect on all who come too close to them. But is her argument so obvious that anyone would agree with it?First, the title: NSFW stands for Not Safe For Work, which means online material that you might not want to Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Something very bad is going to happen on 21 December 2012. The end of the world is nigh, and the only way to stop it is to find the key to the site of an ancient civilisation before the evil Knights Templar get there first. A key whose whereabouts can only be located in the genetic memory of one Desmond Miles, who finds himself once again strapped into the magical dentist's chair that is the Animus.Reliving the lives of Desmond’s ancient ancestors, we begin (in what can only be described as a MASSIVE prologue sequence) by following gentleman/killer Haytham Kenway on his journey from 18th- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This factually-based saga of two feuding families in the woods and mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia might not look too prepossessing on paper, but two episodes in, Hatfields & McCoys is starting to grip like a knotted rope. The combination of powerful acting from all levels of the copious cast and the authentic-feeling depiction of primitive backwoods life in the bleak aftermath of the American Civil War isn't pretty, but it's morbidly compelling.If you're in a sceptical frame of mind, it is possible to categorise the series, as one American critic has, as "a bunch of bibulous Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Benjamin Grosvenor made his Southbank recital debut last night in a sold-out Queen Elizabeth Hall in another milestone in his unstoppable evolution from wunderkind to fully-fledged concert star. It has been a good year for the 20-year-old pianist, during which he added a Classic Brit and two Gramophone awards to a Critics’ Circle accolade, Decca recording contract and tenure on the Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme.Back in 2004, when he won the piano section of the Young Musician of the Year at the age of 12 (losing out to a 16-year-old Nicola Benedetti in the final), his preternatural Read more ...
graham.rickson
And so, after 30 years, Chumbawamba are no more. Leeds’s finest issued an eloquent statement on their website back in July, confessing that “the rest of our lives got in the way and we couldn’t commit the time and enthusiasm that the band demanded… being already involved in the stuff of life that wasn’t the band.” Many musicians keep going to embarrassing effect long past their sell-by dates, but this lot are still brilliantly accomplished performers – witty, energetic, engaging and sublimely musical, with a capella harmonies which make the hairs on your neck tingle.Near the end of this final Read more ...