Reviews
David Nice
When tears well up during stretches of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s curious hybrid which you never expected to move you, something special's going on. The magic happened last night in an evening which I didn't anticipate equalling “the Carmelites experience” at Glyndebourne. But, in its very different way, it did, in terms of casting, conducting and a production (by Bruno Ravella) that wasn’t too interventionist but had some powerful ideas of its own.Any country-house production of this “let’s make an opera” charmer would seem to promise pure pleasure – what Brecht called “culinary opera”. But Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Had Blossom Dearie overtly embraced pop, her vocal style could be characterised as along the lines of Priscilla Paris, Jane Birkin or Saint Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell – intimate, a little breathy, oxygenated. However, jazz was her bag and June Christy, Peggy Lee and Norway’s Karin Krog are the closest reference points.After listening to the live material collected on the six-CD box set Discover Who I Am: The Fontana Years London 1966-70 another, incongruous, marker comes to mind. When she speaks between songs – and sometimes while singing – her inflection is similar to that of the New York Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When we consider the storied history of Portuguese television, we naturally think of… er… well, perhaps we'll get back to you on that. But in the meantime there’s Turn of the Tide (or Rabo de Peixe to give it its original title), Augusto Fraga’s surprising and captivating story of a tiny community in the Azores which suddenly finds itself awash with cocaine. It’s set in the titular village of Rabo de Peixe, and centres on four friends who are eking out their uneventful and unpromising lives in the picturesque but remote archipelago (the islands are about 1,000 miles out in the Atlantic from Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Even when Peter Gabriel is bleak, he has reasons to be cheerful. Early on in his set he opined that soon enough “none of us will have jobs anymore”, referring to the ongoing rise of artificial intelligence, although this was followed by him stressing the positives that can be found in such new technology. It seemed fitting, because Gabriel himself, now 73, showed on this evening that optimistic possibilities of the future occupy his thoughts as much as ever.That meant that despite the arena setting he shied away from any sort of easy nostalgia trip and instead half the setlist was comprised Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The French auto-fiction writer Annie Ernaux, now 82, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature last year; now a fascinating new facet of her creative life has been released via her home movies.With her now grown son David Ernaux-Briot (who was three in the first of the films), Ernaux has fashioned a short (63-minute) documentary from the Super 8 footage her then-husband Philippe shot between 1972-81 – short, but rich, Ernaux’s narration lifting the everyday images into the realm of a cultural commentary with profound reach. It’s also a double portrait as these are the years that the Ernaux Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Schubert gave us a winter’s journey for the 19th century: a wandering lover brooding, remembering, fantasising, maybe even dying to the chilly accompanying churn of the hurdy-gurdy man. In Everest, composer Joby Talbot and librettist Gene Scheer recreate it for the 21st.A journey of the mind becomes as much one of the body. Love remains, along with memories and fantasies, but now the human beloved must share their place with something else: the mountain. Obsessive, deceptive, all-consuming desire takes vivid form in this powerful operatic debut.Premiered in Dallas in 2015, Everest – inspired Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The cover versions on Dream From The Deep Well include “I Know Who is Sick,” most familiar from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Maken interpretation, and “Down by the Glenside,” which The Dubliners incorporated into their repertoire. The first opens the album, the second closes it. Between, amongst the original compositions, there is also an adaptation of Tim Buckley’s “I Must Have Been Blind.”Taking these as a way in to the fourth studio album from the UK-born but Irish singer-songwriter Brigid Mae Power is an understandable path to follow, but after Dream From The Deep Well concludes it Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Multi-media meta-layers land fast in Wes Anderson’s 11th film, overriding reality. Here’s Bryan Cranston’s portentous Fifties TV host (pictured below) in black-and-white, boxed Academy ratio, documenting rehearsals for a televised play, whose fictive reality then becomes a widescreen colour train hurtling through the desert. The latter scene's exhilarating cinema still sweeps you up.We spend most of our time in that train’s desert stop, Asteroid City, where Steve Carell’s oily motel manager is on hand to greet the Junior Stargazers convention, including Woodrow Steenbeck (Jake Ryan), his Read more ...
David Nice
The trouble with Trovatore, Verdi’s sometimes barrel-organish, slightly middle-aged troubadour, isn’t so much the silly shocker of a plot, triggered by a gypsy so crazed with vengeance that she throws her own baby on a bonfire by mistake, as the choppy dramatic line, so hard to thread. Under the circumstance, Adele Thomas’s medieval-hell production could have been a lot worse, and the vocal quality is there throughout under Antonio Pappano’s watchful guidance.Two of the cast are officially new to the run, though soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen had already replaced Marina Rebeka in some Read more ...
Guy Oddy
When the Queen of the Goths comes down from her castle to tour the UK, given that she hasn’t played here at all in the last 10 years, people take notice. In fact, on this Summer Solstice evening, the audience at Wolverhampton’s recently refurbished Halls had fans from places as far and wide as Lincoln, Gloucester and Brighton, never mind the West Midlands, and probably even further afield – just to breath the same air and be in the presence of one of the real titans of the Eighties music scene.The first gig of her tour brought a full house for Siouxsie Sioux’s re-emergence and aging Read more ...
aleks.sierz
British theatre is getting a bit timid – is that right? Ahead of the opening of this revival of Martin McDonagh’s unforgettable 2003 masterpiece, The Pillowman, its director Matthew Dunster has spoken of the tendency of playwrights and theatres to self-censor nowadays for fear of giving offence. Everyone is getting a bit worried about being cancelled or trolled or attacked for unacceptable opinions. You can see his point: McDonagh is one of those 1990s playwrights whose best work glories in provocation. But Dunster’s West End revival tries to sugar the pill of offence with a cast which Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The heart sinks (mine does, anyway) as the latest film-to-musical adaptation rolls into town, all with similar sound-worlds, exemplary hoofing and lively stagings. They are handy audience-bait, oven-ready stories. People go to see how the creative team are going to render the film’s main achievements, though not to be that surprised: the show must go on as it did before, with all the familiar tropes.So when the Mrs Doubtfire musical was announced, I bet I wasn’t the only one who wondered a) how all the costume and face changes would be handled live onstage; and b) would the ample Doubtfire Read more ...