Reviews
David Nice
How good it feels, after several decades of Shostakovich quartet series, to be able to say not just “what a tragic life” but also “what ingenious treatment of great ideas, what a range of universal human emotions”. And even, walking on air away from the second concert in the Pacifica Quartet’s Wigmore Shostakovich cycle, “how accepting, how at one with the world”.That light-serious aspect to Shostakovich’s music has usually been a bit booted aside, often by the composer himself. Knowing that Russian quartets like the legendary Borodins understood from personal experience something of what Read more ...
josh.spero
Every year the art lovers of the world assemble in London and burn themselves out during Frieze Week - the fairs, the galleries, the parties - and (if they're anything like me) they vow to take it a bit easier next year. It never happens. The entire art ecology of London takes its cue from the Frieze Art Fair: if you're going to launch something, you may as well do it now, when all the major collectors are in town. And so art lovers and art-lover-hangers-on once again spin around town like dervishes on speed. I don't think we'd have it any other way.Frieze itself opens today, but the VIP/ Read more ...
fisun.guner
Tracey Emin once made a tent for which she gained some notoriety. On it, she’d appliquéd the names of everyone she had ever slept with – including, as a child, her beloved Granny Hodgkins. Sadly, the tent, called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, was destroyed in a fire at Momart, the art-storage warehouse, in 2004. The loss of her tent was keenly felt, and she refused to recreate it. But genealogists in Who Do You Think You Are? gave Emin something to smile about when they dug deep into her family history: Emin comes from a long line of tent-dwellers. When she was shown Read more ...
David Nice
Pundits have always yoked architecture and Bruckner together, touting void and mass at the expense of the dynamic experience music ought to be. Abbado and his Lucerne Festival Orchestra favoured sinuous instability in the Fifth Symphony earlier this week, making the very foundations gyre and gimble. Relatively solid ground last night was due to a more sober conductor and Bruckner symphony: a mixed blessing. The grand design, in fact, came from Leif Ove Andsnes in Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, making overall sense of a work which has always seemed swooningly resistant to it.If that meant Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Björk’s Biophilia is a five-headed organism: the album (itself issued in five different editions), the app, the documentary, the live show and the website. Here in Harpa, Reykjavík’s spanking-new concert hall, Björk is in her home town, delivering the live show, performing the music. She’s playing residencies rather than touring. Instruments have been specially made. A giant spark arcs between two Tesla coils. Four massive pendulums swing.Manchester’s Campfield Market Hall snagged the premiere in June, and now her residency in Reykjavík has begun. Last night – timed to coincide with the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Is there something remarkable about a group of working-class men learning to paint? You may think there is, or you may think there isn’t. You may think that anyone with very little formal education learning to do any of the things associated with High Art – even if the results are quite naïve – is, in itself, astonishing. Or you may not: give someone a brush, paints and a board and, your clear-eyed reasoning might tell you, either genuine talent emerges or it doesn’t. You may find yourself also wondering: is it a peculiar habit of English sentimentality to find the type of story embodied by Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Modern’s lofty Turbine Hall is dominated by a giant CinemaScope screen flipped on its side so it becomes 42ft high and resembles a lift shaft or cathedral window. Instead of angels, saints or sinners, though, the starring role in Tacita Dean’s FILM is given to the building’s east window – the one hidden behind the huge screen. One of the main subjects of the film, then, is the very spot where you are standing – where much of the film was shot.On film, the familiar glass and steel structure plays host to images culled from the outside world such as fountains, waterfalls, lakes, the sea, Read more ...
ash.smyth
Two years ago, Spiritualized reprised their bestselling (one might say "only major") 1997 album, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, in the curiously titled concert series, Don't Look Back. Since then, their frontman (one might say "only notable band member") Jason "Spaceman" Pierce has been constantly promising new material, along with persistent assurances that the band's (would-be) seventh album will hearken back to the glory days of yester-millennium and also have a more-than-usual inclination toward pop. The oft-postponed release is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A movie about advertising and product placement entirely paid for by advertising and product placement? It's a Koh-i-Noor diamond of a concept, and zealous documentarian Morgan Spurlock has applied himself to his task with the efficiency of a Dyson vacuum cleaner and the tenacity of a corporate Salesman of the Month.Spurlock, who survived a 30-day eatathon of McDonald's food despite his liver partly turning to fat and emerged with the splendid Super Size Me, has made one of the most entertaining films of the year, a far funnier one than the stuff that's routinely palmed off on us as " Read more ...
ash.smyth
There is nothing good about The Three Musketeers. Nothing. To list all the ways in which Paul WS Anderson's superfluous remake is crap would require a tome only slightly thinner than Dumas's original novel, and it is impossible, frankly, to imagine how someone could so badly have fisted the simple criteria for a historical action-romp, least of all with a ready-written, solid-gold storyline and a budget of $100 million; but bear with me while I run through just a couple of highlights, and I'll ask you, please, for your own Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Unless one has been misreading the policy stylings of the oddly named "Nigel Farage" and his merry band of isolationists, the general idea behind UKIP is that Nothing Good ever came out of Europe. Party members may therefore wish to pursue a blanket avoidance of decent crime drama, almost all of which comes from our continental neighbours. First there was The Killing which went on more or less forever and was more addictive than crack. Spiral was barely less cultish. And after the entries from Denmark and France, now a succulent Italian crime drama takes its turn to stick around for an Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I wasn’t around to see when Karole Armitage won her spurs in her twenties as a punk ballet choreographer in America in the 1970s and early Eighties, so we must rely on her programme-sheet biography to explain to us that she is “seen by some critics as the true choreographic heir" to George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham. After last night’s dismal showing by her group, Armitage Gone! Dance, at the Southbank Centre, the only possible response is, “Pull the other one” and a firm slap across the hubris.It had started badly with Armitage stepping up in a sparse Queen Elizabeth Hall to lecture us Read more ...