Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Any period drama that crops up on Sunday nights is now automatically billed as a potential replacement for Downton Abbey. Any Human Heart has duly been described thus, but isn't. Converted into a four-part series from William Boyd's 2002 novel, with a screenplay by Boyd himself, it's the story of the writer Logan Mountstuart, whose long life spanned the major events of the 20th century while bouncing around between various continents and relationships. In accordance with the timespan and the authorial notion that every individual becomes several different personalities en route to the grave, Read more ...
howard.male
In theory, AfroCubism should have been one of the most exciting world-music releases of the year; how could you go wrong with a supergroup composed of Cuban and Malian musicians working towards combining their musical styles in a new and exciting manner? In fact, originally this get-together was meant to take place 14 years ago for what became the multimillion-selling Buena Vista Social Club album. But passport problems prevented the Malian musicians from being able to take part.The fact is you can’t go wrong exactly, but you could end up with something that really isn’t that much greater Read more ...
neil.smith
It is not uncommon for opportunistic film-makers to put together a flashy promo in the hope it will attract enough investors to turn it into a full-length feature. When Robert Rodriguez made the Machete trailer for 2007 double-bill Grindhouse, though – an all-action spoof featuring striking bit-part actor Danny Trejo as its titular knife-wielding protagonist – he had no intention of taking this parodic in-joke any further.Watch the original Machete trailer:Three years on and countless fan entreaties later, Rodriguez has expanded that earlier gambit into a 104-minute opus whose “strong bloody Read more ...
David Nice
From discreetly poisoned violets at Covent Garden to buckets of man-dog blood in St Martin’s Lane has been quite a leap this week. True, the bourgeois plastic surgeon of Mikhail Bulgakov’s scabrous, long-suppressed 1925 novella goes about singing Aida while implanting testes and pituitary glands. But such melodies are only satirical snippets in Alexander Raskatov’s febrile newish score. And that needs the jumpy fantasias of Complicite style, not the lavish historical realism of David McVicar: which means both ENO and the Royal Opera are currently excelling in what they do best.For make no Read more ...
judith.flanders
Christmas rolls around, and so does Cinderella, a welcome alternative to the seasonal dance-critic bah-humbug that is The Nutcracker. First, the good news. The good news is Marianela Nuñez. Always a lovely dancer, in Ashton she just glows. No one could be more suited than she to Ashton’s fiendishly difficult petite batterie, those tiny, beaten, viciously fast steps; no one could be more suited than she to Ashton’s light, bright jumps: with her sunny temperament and lovely punchy ballon Nuñez rises (literally) to the choreography’s demands.She is not an effortless dancer, not one of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In 1932 English pianist Harriet Cohen commissioned the best of Britain’s composers – Vaughan Williams, Ireland, Walton, Howells – to produce transcriptions of Bach for piano. The result, A Bach Book for Harriet Cohen, is a true document of its time, no less fascinating for its rather conservative contents. Conservative is not an adjective that could be directed at Angela Hewitt’s 20th-century reinvention of the project however. With composers including Brett Dean and Robin Holloway, and works inspired by Bach alongside straight transcriptions, it makes for a joyously diverse programme; last Read more ...
marcus.odair
"Being asked to introduce this artist”, began the compere, “is like being asked to introduce God." Fans of Eric Clapton, of course, might beg to differ. But in jazz terms, Sonny Rollins, self-proclaimed “saxophone colossus”, has indisputably been on the all-time A-list since his early work with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. He is also on a particularly exclusive part of that list of jazz greats: those still alive. Yet even amongst those few, whose resilient ranks include both Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, Rollins’s London Jazz Festival performance represented a quite remarkable feat of Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Halvard Solness and Hilde Wangel have stalked each other among the shadow goblins of Henrik Ibsen’s extraordinary symbol-laden drama in two major productions this year. In Chichester, Philip Franks’s staging and David Edgar’s new version of the text gave us a shivery, haunted-house interpretation. Now comes American director Travis Preston’s modern-dress offering, starkly designed by Vicki Mortimer, but performed with such over-deliberate mannerism and stylised Expressionist movement by Stephen Dillane in the title role that it sometimes manages to be both po-faced and faintly ludicrous.The Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Because it was the capricious Finn who got us going and provided us with the evening's only chunks of nourishment. His performance of Rodion Shchedrin's Fourth Piano Concerto was joyous and thrilling. I wasn't expecting a great deal from Shchedrin after the critical drubbing the opening salvo in this mini-celebration received on theartsdesk. But, despite passages that stewed in a vat of concentrated Shostakovich for far too long, I was pleasantly surprised overall.The piano voice of this Fourth Concerto is quite unlike any other. Soaked in Carnatic flavours and free-form jazz, it emerges into Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The renaissance enjoyed by Leonard Cohen over the past few years is not only thoroughly welcome and entirely justified, but also partly a testament to the strange and powerful alchemy that sometimes occurs when the defiantly high-brow is swallowed whole by popular culture. The adoption of Cohen’s 1984 song “Hallelujah” by everyone from Jeff Buckley and Shrek to a parade of desperate X Factorettes made it an “Angels” for the noughties; the only point, I'd be willing to wager, where Cohen and Robbie Williams will ever find communion.More prosaically, the decision – forced upon him by the Read more ...
james.woodall
The sense of occasion around flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucía’s return to London was palpable. The Royal Festival Hall was heaving. Queues at the bars before the show and during the interval were three or four deep. Spanish was everywhere. And that was good to hear. Paco de Lucía is a hero in his country as much for interesting political reasons as he is for purely musical ones. London-based compatriot fans were not going to miss this.De Lucía emerged as a golden solo talent at the end of the 1960s from the many flamenco competitions that kept the art alive when the garbage put on for Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cannes d’Or-winning fifth film replaces Hollywood’s blaring emphasis with a story of gentle transitions. Supernatural and natural, human and animal and life and death blur as Uncle Boonmee expires in the haunted forests of north-east Thailand. It expresses the director’s Buddhist belief in the transmigration of souls, and of cinema as a man-made equivalent, creating lives and memories that will outlive us. In this earthily transcendent film, the sex scene between a princess and a catfish is a bonus.Boonmee is based on a man who saw past lives that Weerasethakul Read more ...