Reviews
Roderic Dunnett
Valery Gergiev is a human dynamo. Even before embarking on the latest tranche of his (slightly curious) pairing of Szymanowski and Brahms with the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he has been principal conductor since 2007, at the Barbican, the man who is arguably not just a musical but a socio-political force in his native country and music director of the most famous opera and ballet company in the world was down that morning at the Russian Embassy in London, promoting his plans for a whole new complex (Mariinsky 2), which from May next year will dramatically enhance the prospects of an Read more ...
Ismene Brown
They should use the whole Yeats line: "A terrible beauty is born". The programme, A Beauty is Born, being terrible, I mean, rather than the Beauty, which is Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty, his latest dance work, which isn't terrible at all, just a mite disappointing. And it strives a great deal higher and with more aim to stimulate than Alan Yentob did in this stock documentary from the BBC's flagship arts strand. Is Yentob the most uninterested specialist presenter on TV?With that morose stare, he's a terrible advert for arts-loving for a start, leaving a chill as he wanders among the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Thanks to its unalloyed Dickensianism and Alastair Sim’s wondrous Ebenezer, 1951’s Scrooge is the definitive adaptation of A Christmas Carol – so richly atmospheric it has rendered all other versions irrelevant. Forcefully presenting Boz’s themes – the spirit of Christian charity should be universally embraced at Christmas and it’s never too late for a humbugging old misanthrope to change his attitudes – Brian Desmond Hurst’s movie may seem unsophisticated alongside The Magnificent Ambersons and It’s a Wonderful Life, but it is, undoubtedly, the best British Yuletide movie.Noel Langley (who Read more ...
howard.male
Reading How Music Works feels a bit like breaking into David Byrne’s house and randomly nosing around the Word files on his computer. First there’s some stuff about whether specific types of music were subconsciously written with certain acoustic spaces in mind, then there’s a biographical bit about Byrne’s experiences as a performer. But just as you’re enjoying becoming immersed in vivid descriptions of what a dump CBGBs was, or the inspiration behind that white suit, the book suddenly makes a sharp, left turn into a potted history of music technology and its influence on what records sound Read more ...
David Nice
Rolando Villazón at 40 is back on reasonably stylish form, as far as the voice will allow him to go – which is not always up and volume-wise only just as far as the Covent Garden Balcony. John Copley’s Royal Opera Bohème is two years younger than the Mexican tenor. It burns less warmly than the faltering stove in the first act, casts a pall over collective attempts to reanimate the naturalism which is all there in Puccini’s perfect score, and needs a second interval to drag its weary bones back up the stairs to the students’ attic in Act Four.The late Julia Trevelyan Oman’s sets still have Read more ...
Laura Silverman
It sounds unlikely but The Dance of Death makes the perfect Christmas play. Half a minute with Strindberg's squabbling couple makes the ordinary family row over underdone/overdone turkey seem like a parlour game. Need a reminder that your relatives are rather charming? This is the play for you.In Strindberg's unsentimental work, Edgar and Alice are approaching 25 years of marriage. Boredom with each other and their lives has intensified into bitterness: every observation has become an accusation, every remark a provocation. They are united only in their hatred towards everyone else. They are Read more ...
graeme.thomson
David Bowie already had a bit of previous with Christmas, of course, after pa-rum-pa-pumpum-ing through the tinsel with Bing back in 1977. He plays a very different kind of drummer boy in Nagisa Oshima’s uneven but oddly haunting 1983 film, in which he stars alongside Tom Conti (last seen in Miranda, of all things) and Ryuichi Sakamoto.Bowie is Major Jack Celliers, one of four military men, each one trapped in very different ways, in a Japanese POW camp on Java in 1942. While Conti's John Lawrence is the film's moral compass, his rancour laced with decency and respect as he clashes with Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You don’t need to know that Bernard Rose’s Boxing Day is an adaptation of the Tolstoy story Master and Man, but it does help - somewhat. You may well know it anyway, given that it’s the third film in a loose series that Rose started just more than a decade ago with Ivansxtc, a dark satire on Hollywood’s agenting world and human burnout based on the writer’s lacerating The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The Kreutzer Sonata followed (less successfully, I thought) from Tolstoy’s story of the same name about the corrosion that jealousy brings to a relationship. All have Danny Huston in the lead role.They Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Splendid summer, cataclysmic autumn. In the last six months, the BBC has tested to the limits the meaning of the phrase “good in parts”. The people at the top of the Corporation – and by March there’ll be a fourth rump in the DG’s hot seat within seven months – will have been looking forward to this seasonal beanfeast with more than usual avidity. There being no journalistic scoops to botch, no skeletons in the cupboard, no Panorama waiting in the wings – and for once no pictures to buy in from Sky - here was a chance for the BBC to cut a few shapes.And this year, for reasons which need no Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“You don’t put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there.” It’s a maxim that has guided a writing career that, insect-like, has made itself at home among the lived detritus of autobiography and memoir. In Alan Bennett’s 2001 Hymn and his latest short-play Cocktail Sticks the author sets out in search of himself once more, finding on his quest not only his own history but that of a generation and an age at an ever-increasing remove from our own. It could be cosy, it could easily be glib, but for the most part it’s just funny, and terribly, terribly poignant.To anyone familiar with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the early years of the talkies, they sure did a lot of talking, and no actor mastered the tricky art of gabbling on screen quite like the young James Stewart. The Shop Around the Corner (1940) was a perfect vehicle for the versatile but somehow always gawky all-American everyman who had starred most recently as Frank Capra’s leading man in You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939).And it's all talk here. Ernst Lubitsch took a frothy 1937 stage play by Hungarian-born naturalised American Miklós László, known in English as Parfumerie, and turned it into a Read more ...
David Nice
Much more regularly than the seven years it takes the Flying Dutchman's demon ship to reach dry land, the Zurich Opera steamer moors at the Southbank Centre. None of its more recent concert performances up to now has branded itself on the memory as much as its 2003 visit, when chorus and soloists stunned in Wagner's Tannhäuser. This one will, though: and the wonder of it is that Bryn Terfel's surely unsurpassable Dutchman, condemned to the seas for all eternity unless saved by the faithful-until-death love of a good woman, had other singers to match him.In the first act, the great Wagnerian Read more ...