Reviews
philip radcliffe
However, to begin at the beginning – the First Symphony in D major, first performed in 1889 in Budapest, with the composer conducting. There’s a lot to be said for giving Manchester its scoop (naturally, we don’t regard it as a dress rehearsal for the Royal Festival Hall performance tonight). In any case, Manchester had its big Mahler feast last year, when the Halle and the BBC Philharmonic joined forces to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. Birth, death, any excuse for more Mahler. Yet Manchester audiences are clearly not satiated, judging by the turn out last night and the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The secrets and lies, delusions and foibles of a group of thirty-, forty- and fiftysomething friends are laid bare in French director Guillaume Canet’s third feature, following his breakthrough international hit Tell No One (2006). This alternately genial and scathing comic drama explores the dynamics of friendship and the fragility of romantic relations. It’s a story fuelled by the friction and frissons between companions, who come together in the aftermath of a tragic accident, and take off on a misguided getaway which becomes a fortnight of reverie and recriminations.Little White Lies is a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Micky Flanagan was a jobbing club comic for a few years before he shot to stardom with his first full-length Edinburgh Fringe show in 2007, for which he was nominated for a newcomer award at the grand age of 42. The show, What Chance Change?, charted his move from working-class herbert (or ’erbert in Flanagan’s deliciously cockney pronunciation) into middle-class ponce, now living in leafy suburbia and au fait with all things delicatessen, including sundried tomatoes and £5 loaves of bread.Flanagan left school at 15, drifted from one dead-end job to another (including a spell as a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Some of the most exciting Western classical music being composed today comes from the Far East. Composers from Japan and South Korea - possibly because they find themselves in a different intellectual cycle to us in the West - seem to be able to do things we can't. The BBC Symphony Orchestra dedicated one of their Total Immersion series to Korean Unsuk Chin, an unconventional Modernist whose relationship to melody and storytelling is refreshingly unashamed, but who, on the evidence of the rows of empty seats at the Barbican Hall (there were quite literally more people on stage than in the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Andy Parsons can do angry, baffled, sarky. He can have a swing and hit a bullseye. Take this, Alan Sugar. Take that, Ryanair. But you wonder, is he too happy for greatness? The title of the show he’s currently touring hints at a cheery disposition. Gruntled, leaving off the negative prefix, begrudgingly suggests an essentially contented world view. So too (without wishing to stereotype) does the loamy accent he carries with him from a childhood spent in the South West. Either I’m misreading the signs – for which I can only apologise - or he is unafflicted by neurosis, egotism and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Read Adam Sweeting's review of "Intelligent Design", the last-ever episode of LewisAlthough its steepling body count is almost enough to rival the trail of carnage in The Walking Dead (which rose from the grave on 5 last night after its original appearance on FX last year), at least Lewis never underestimates the value of a good education. This episode, "Wild Justice", was a crossword puzzle of literary clues, all taking their cue from a lecture delivered at St Gerard's college entitled "Justice and Redemption in Jacobean Revenge Drama".There were recurring appearances by John Webster's Read more ...
judith.flanders
How do simple things get complicated? How do they stay simple once they are complicated? These might, perhaps, be the questions from which choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, starts. But in fact, she starts, as all great choreographers do, with the music. “Music is always my first partner,” she once said. And in Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, three linked duets and one solo, there are indeed three people on stage: de Keersmaeker herself, the wonderful Tale Dolven, and Steve Reich, absent but ever present.All dance is a combination of form (the steps) and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
As Handel’s Messiah is to Christmas so the music of Bach is to Lent. Every Passiontide churches and concert halls are flooded with performances that include everything from dainty consort renderings of the St John Passion to choral societies delivering all but symphonic St Matthew Passions. Mightiest of all, however, is The Bach Choir’s annual concert. Performed on Palm Sunday to a reliably sold-out Royal Festival Hall, it’s a fixture of over 80 years' standing and a rare opportunity to hear the work sung in English. Love or hate the vernacular approach, it’s hard to argue with the sheer Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Once upon a time, Gary Oldman acted in the plays or films of Caryl Churchill, Mike Leigh and Alan Bennett, bringing a deliberately disorienting intensity to whatever the role. But here he is in Red Riding Hood snarling commands like “You will die now, beast!” in a film in which considerable members of the cast – spoiler ahead! – go down for the count. That said, at least Oldman gets to appear in focus, which is more than can be said of the gauzy haze with which the director Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) smothers most of Oldman’s co-stars. This film – let’s be beast-like about it, shall we Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Bernardo Bertolucci was a 23-year-old Marxist intellectual and prizewinning poet with a partner, Adriana Asti, seven years his senior, when he made his lustrous semi-autobiographical second feature, Before the Revolution, in his native Parma in 1963-64. As well as Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, Asti, who's still acting, had appeared in the pimp's tale Accattone, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who employed Bertolucci as an assistant director. (Bertolucci made his directorial debut on the 1962 serial-killer drama The Grim Reaper, written by Pasolini and about to be Read more ...
peter.quinn
The last time I saw Esperanza Spalding live, at Ronnie Scott's towards the end of 2009, the mention of her name would largely have been greeted with quizzical looks. Now, thanks to that astounding Grammy win for Best New Artist and a gazillion disgruntled Justin Bieber fans – seriously, you do not want to mess with those pesky Beliebers - her profile has soared exponentially.Performing songs from her 2010 release, Chamber Music Society, in a single continuous set, Spalding did her utmost to recreate the album's singularly intimate atmosphere – no easy feat in the Barbican. To give some Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It had all the hallmarks of being an almighty car crash of an event. Barenboim? Chopin? Turbine Hall? You might as well have dumped the piano at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Actually, acoustically, it wasn't quite that bad. It sounded as if Barenboim was playing next door. Next door in France, that is. Or Germany. Which was where he and five members of the Berlin Staatskapelle had flown in from. Perhaps it was worth another go. Classical music recitals have never been properly tried in the Turbine Hall before (though similar things have and have failed). Certainly Barenboim wasn't to Read more ...