Reviews
aleks.sierz
Playwright Mike Bartlett is, like many writers, a chronicler of both contemporary manners and of the state of the nation. In his latest domestic drama, which premieres at the Donmar Warehouse, he examines our anxieties about food, farming and the environment in a play of ideas that, despite its energy, is more cerebral than emotional.Set in Juniper Rise, a north-west Oxfordshire farm, the story concerns Ruth, a middle-class 40-something who now owns the land together with Lip, a dope smoking radical whose family has farmed in this area for generations. At the start of the action we are Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Does the orchestra that sways together play together? Quite apart from their (reliably gorgeous) sound, the tight-packed strings of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig made quite a sight at the Proms as they collectively surged through key passages of Dvořák and Sibelius as if staging a succession of seated Mexican waves. That, of course, was merely the visible token of the seamless integration that their music director, Andris Nelsons (pictured below), sought and found in this concert that brought the Leipzigers’ legendary focus, density and polish to the Royal Albert Hall. All that fabled Read more ...
Jon Turney
Composers and musicians explore acoustic space. Generally, they have got by with combinations of readily accessible sounds, with occasional novelties as instruments improved, bit by bit.In the 20th century that changed radically. New technologies offered almost unlimited increase in the sounds that could be conjured up on stage or in the studio. And conceptually, the range of sounds some considered musical expanded just as much, abolishing the boundary between music and noise, and even – thanks to John Cage – permitting the composer to propose no sounds at all.Elizabeth Alker dives into this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
During the opening seconds of Mirra, an unusual sound leaps out – a grunting. It’s integral to a shifting aural pallete which also features a bowed violin and chiming percussion along with a recurring grind like that of a rotating waterwheel. The mood is chilly, suggesting an environment where unalloyed nature has the upper hand, a place where the seasons define what comes to pass.It turns out the grunting is a recording of a wild reindeer. Norwegian hardanger fiddle (the hardingfele) player Benedicte Maurseth’s thematically related follow-up to 2022’s Hárr interweaves recordings of the Read more ...
David Nice
How often is an orchestral concert perfect in every texture, every instrumental entry, every phrase? Wednesday's Phiharmonia Prom struck sound-spectrum gold, but its chief conductor, Santtu Matias Rouvali, could do with more humanity. My colleague Rachel Halliburton found his fellow Finn Klaus Mäkelä challenging in Mahler’s Fifth on Saturday night, but on Sunday afternoon neither he nor his fellow musicians put a foot wrong; indeed, feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.Mozart might have been a style challenge for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra's chief conductor elect, most familiar Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Gathered Leaves is set on the tectonic plates of a middle-class family menu reunion, in which three generations grapple with the shifting values of an indifferent world. Adrian Noble’s sensitively observed production investigates what happens when a tyrannical patriarch starts to succumb to dementia, making disorientating demands on a family that till this point has been more concerned with protecting a son suffering from autism.Ten years ago, The Gathered Leaves played at this same venue with a cast that included Jane Asher and her real life daughter Katie Scarfe and Alexander Read more ...
David Kettle
There is, let’s be honest, a certain self-congratulatory self-satisfaction among some particularly well-heeled sections of the Edinburgh International Festival audience, event-goers who’ve forked out a fortune to be fed high culture carefully curated for them, and who either reside in some of the city’s most well-off districts or have perhaps travelled hundreds, even thousands of miles for the pleasure.Heck, a group in front of me were even discussing the merits of the city’s various private members’ clubs, and the intricate exclusionary processes for admission, while waiting for their Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Two chimney sweeps sit by a window. The boss (Thorbjørn Harr) recounts a dream meeting with David Bowie, who disconcertingly looks at him like he’s a woman. Funny thing, his friend (Jar Gunnar Røise) replies. Yesterday, a male client asked him to have sex, and he did. It felt good. He hasn’t told anyone else, apart from his wife.Sex opened Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy in Norway, and closes it here, forming an appropriate climax to his distinctive MO. The nameless sweeps’ 15-minute break-room conversation at its start, panning from widescreen one-shot to two-shot with sometimes Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Klaus Mäkelä teased out all the fragility and the sense of impending mortality in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, revealing a vision that was as intricate as it was quietly luminous. Famously Mahler almost died from an intestinal haemorrhage in the year that he started composing the work, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s sensitive, nuanced performance conveyed his heightened awareness of a world that could suddenly disappear without warning.Mäkelä will become Chief Conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2027, and this performance was a good demonstration of the supple intimacy that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Conceived and written by Matt Charman, whose CV includes an Oscar nomination for his work on Steven Spielberg’s film Bridge of Spies, Hostage is a rather puzzling mix of political thriller and domestic drama which can never decide whether it’s serious or not.In the lead role of British Prime Minister Abigail Dalton, Suranne Jones is called upon to do political battle with the French president Vivienne Toussaint (a cold and frosty Julie Delpy), and their fraught power-women exchanges give the show some of its best moments. Especially the bit where Toussaint bounces Dalton into a policy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“What's the New Mary Jane” is a nursery rhyme-like song, one of John Lennon’s most peculiar offerings. It was recorded for late 1968’s double album The Beatles (i.e. the White Album) but, literally, did not make the cut. Nonetheless, John Lennon would not let it go.A year on, he moved ahead with getting “What's the New Mary Jane” onto a single. That too did not happen. The first official release came with 1996’s Beatles’ archive set Anthology 3. Now, the thoughtful and well-packaged What's The New, Mary Jane album is dedicated to multiple versions of “What's the New Mary Jane.” Nothing else. Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Handel probably wrote his cantata Clori, Tirsi e Fileno in 1707 while he was in the service of the Marquis of Ruspoli in Rome. It tells the story of the shepherdess, Clori, who has two lovers that she plays off against one another to no great effect, everything culminating in an ending that’s suspiciously neat even by Handel’s standards.The Dunedin Consort (pictured below by Andy Catlin with John Butt in an earlier concert) are the best conceivable advocates for it, with their silky strings and star soloists, particularly Matthew Truscott’s fiendish violin obbligato and Toby Carr’s beguiling Read more ...