Reviews
edward.seckerson
It is quickly apparent when you are in the company of exceptional talent. In even the most hackneyed repertoire nothing is quite as you expect it to be: there’s a charge in the air, phrasings take on a different urgency, textures are opened up and newly revealed. And on this night, certain revelations concerning Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony were, under the exciting baton of Vasily Petrenko, no longer conjecture but irrefutable fact.But first there was a Night on the Bare Mountain to endure and if you thought that the tamer Rimsky-Korsakov version of Mussorgsky’s classic had ceased to Read more ...
sheila.johnston
If you would like to wallow awhile in visions of apocalypse this week, where are you going to turn to: the special effects splurgefest that is Roland Emmerich's 2012 (reviewed here) or the remorseless austerity of Michael Haneke'sThe White Ribbon? Their respective audiences may be almost entirely mutually exclusive. But, say what you like about the contemporary cinema (and some say it's going through a mini-Armageddon of its own), nobody can legitimately complain that it's not catering for all tastes.If you would like to wallow awhile in visions of apocalypse this week, where are you going to Read more ...
joe.muggs
Londoners, we know, can be spoilt. Certainly the crowd, predominantly of nerds in rare and expensive trainers, at the Lightbox last night didn't seem to be overly bubbling with enthusiasm despite an exciting lineup of talent and astonishing surroundings. The main dancefloor area of Lightbox lives up to the club's name, being an arched space with the entire wall/ceiling surface covered in colour-changing LED lights that allow pictures and patterns to dance across the room. But the nerds – and a very few women, mainly in equally modernist trainers – seemed almost oblivious to the fabulous Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Lush, romantic storyballets are as scarce as hens' teeth these days, despite the longing of much of the ballet audience to see them. Not because they're too elementary for today's dancemakers, I'd guess, but because to make one with lively dancing characters (male, female, young, old, good, bad, rich, poor), with a flowing story, lashings of set opportunities and an atmospheric score, takes multiple theatre skills few choreographers now develop. David Bintley's Cyrano is one of these rare birds, a truly skilled family ballet with all of the above.His treatment of Edmond Rostand's nostalgic Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Filmed in the same Thamesmead locations in south-east London as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Misfits also features a gang of young trouble-makers in boiler suits. Unlike Alex and his Droogs, who face the fearsome "Ludovico" aversion therapy (after which thinking about violence, or hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, triggers nausea), this bunch are on a fairly slack community service gig. They paint benches between spliffs and indulging in the sort of banter you’d find on any Facebook page not being monitored by the grown-ups.That all changes when a massive electrical storm gives Read more ...
robert.sandall
Martha Wainwright’s decision to perform and record a selection of songs by the late Edith Piaf is a bold, not to say high-risk strategy that made for a fascinating one-off concert at the Barbican last night. Plenty of pop divas from Minelli to Bassey and most recently Grace Jones have covered Piaf evergreens such as “Non, je ne regrette rien.” But none has dared to take the Wainwright route and build an entire concert and live album around interpretations of more obscure items from the soi-disant little sparrow’s giant catalogue.While tribute albums loom ever larger in pop’s rear view mirror Read more ...
David Nice
Bryn Terfel is a good guy. I know; he never forgets a face, and I’ve seen him making the tea for the entire team at a recording session – no one-off, they assured me. Yet the nature of the bass-baritone beast is given over to more villains than noble souls. The "bad boys" of opera and musical theatre are grist to Terfel’s satanic mill in his latest CD-linked tour. Although inevitably given the demands of live performance there’s less than meets the ear on the disc, Bryn as dark god in concert gives far more than those recent short-shrifting divas Fleming and Gheorghiu.What a relief, too, that Read more ...
ryan.gilbey
Cold Souls is a disquieting existential comedy bursting with nutty ideas. The trouble is that most of them belong to Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s game-changing 1999 screwball classic. Paul Giamatti, undisputed king of the sad sacks following his arias of despair in Sideways and American Splendour, plays Paul Giamatti, a discontented actor preparing to play the title role in an off-Broadway Uncle Vanya. After struggling through rehearsals, he reads a New Yorker article about a clinic on Roosevelt Island which performs a soul extraction process to alleviate angst. Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
The last time I saw Andrew Marr in the flesh was at the Independent’s old offices in Canary Wharf, during a savage round of job-shedding in the late Nineties. To address the staff, editor Marr had jumped upon a table, like Keir Hardie addressing striking miners, and his old-school style of speech-making is perfectly in tune with the politics of the first half of the 20th century. Marr, in truth, wasn’t a very natural newspaper editor - he is a much better working journalist. However his truest vocation may be as a TV historian, because Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain is terrific Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The stage of the Barbican is alive with black dudes in wheelchairs going bonkers. It's an extraordinary spectacle. To rocketing afro-funk, backed by a drum-kit of boxes and bells, Staff Benda Bilili's frontmen are rolling their chairs back and forth. Two of them face each other and perform loosely synchronized hand dances, another wearing an ecstatic grin clambers out of his wheelchair.Despite having legs shrivelled by polio to almost nothing, he scuttles round the stage, his arms agile, his movements a surreal breakdance. The audience claps wildly, pockets of dancing breaking out at the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I took advantage of critics’ privileges to see parts of two shows last night - as the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet are sister companies, they shouldn’t quarrel too much, and this way there turned out to be a most revealing side-effect. By missing a dud work on the BRB triple bill, and by seeing the first act of a potentially exciting debut in a major MacMillan work, certainly a better evening resulted - but also by chance a yardstick comparison that we rarely get any more.Seen after an act of MacMillan's 30-year-old Mayerling (for which I skipped Stanton Welch's meagre and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The famously tempestuous Romanian soprano is, we learn, living a separate life from her husband Roberto Alagna. If Opera's Most Romantic Couple is no more, will Brand Angela be terminally damaged? Surely a showcase performance in the South Bank's International Voices season would be just the thing to rally the faithful and reaffirm Ms Gheorghiu's spectacular star quality, but I must admit that by the time we reached the interval, I was beset with gnawing doubt.The performance had begun with a bright canter through Leonard Bernstein's Candide overture, with the Philharmonia Orchestra Read more ...