Reviews
Peter Culshaw
This one sounded implausible. Frida Kahlo, the great (and fashionable – collected by the likes of Madonna) Mexican painter interpreted by Indian classical music at the Elgar Room in the Royal Albert Hall. It was, however, entrancing, made a curious sense, and was a different way of immersing yourself both in the music and paintings.Presented by the enterprising Saudha Society of Poetry and Indian Music, the director TM Ahmed Kaysher, a Leeds-based poet was perched stage left and briefly described his own relation with Kahlo at a time in his life when he was suffering from depression Read more ...
David Nice
Had Claudio Abbado conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a major Elgar orchestral work – and to my knowledge he never saw the light about the composer’s due place among the European greats – it might have sounded something like last night’s “Enigma” Variations. Yes, John Wilson and his superband Sinfonia of London really are in that league. Elgar’s cavalcade of character-studies, both inward and extrovert, is the ultimate test, the most varied of masterpieces in a various programme.Perhaps it was a slightly over-long one. I’d have jettisoned Bax’s Tintagel in favour of a pleasing symmetry in Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Sweetness never lasts too long at a Haim gig. No sooner had Alana Haim, the youngest of the Californian siblings, finished a speech about her delight about being back in Glasgow by announcing she was going to “smell the f****** roses” then bass-playing elder sister Este piped up with “I’m smelling my armpits. They are ripe.” It summed up a chat-heavy show that at times felt like part gig, part stand-up comedy try-out.For all the banter, which reached such an amount that Alana quipped at one stage she felt all they’d done was talk, the trio have an assurance about playing large venues. An Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sikisa is a new name on the comedy scene, but trust me you'll hearing and seeing a lot more of the south Londoner with Barbadian roots. Twerk in Progress, her in-progress version of her debut show Life of the Party, is a winning mixture of autobiography and social comment.She is an energetic performer and barely pauses for breath in the hour – even in the dance breaks she's exerting herself across the balloon-strewn stage – as she delivers her thoughts on house parties, feminism, dick picks and much more.Sikisa is, she tells us, the life and soul of parties, and the show is about the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the middle of a pavement-cracking, railway-melting heatwave, what could be more refreshing than a visit to the bleak but bracing landscapes of the Faroe Islands? This 18-island archipelago midway between Norway and Iceland is where BBC Four’s latest Nordic drama is situated, and its themes of murder, conspiracy and ecological awareness strike a topical note. A Danish-German-Faroese-Icelandic co-production, Trom doesn’t display the schizophrenic (or quadrophrenic) characteristics that might imply, but instead is a methodical thriller deftly played by a cast which is always unflashily Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As either a producer or songwriter Gary Usher worked with The Beach Boys and The Byrds, the two most consequential California bands of the Sixties.When he co-wrote “409” with Brian Wilson for the Beach Boys’s first Capitol Records single in mid 1962, he teamed the hot-rod fad with surfing in popular culture for the first time. By his own reckoning, Usher wrote and recorded more than 50 car songs in one month in 1963.Any of this would make Gary Usher a significant figure in pop music. But, of course, there’s a lot more. Much more. Getting to grips with his world means that bands or studio Read more ...
Nick Hasted
You can’t simulate nostalgia, or the dusting of urgent magic which made The Railway Children so immediately poignant. Lionel Jeffries wrote and directed the 1970 film with the same special affinity for vintage childhoods he showed in his heart-piercing ghost story The Amazing Mr Blunden (1972).It was his emotional investment which made generations unquestioningly sympathise with the film’s privileged family fallen on hard times – a standby of middle-class children’s literature revived as recently as Mary Poppins Returns.That belated sequel proved you can better a beloved original, and poured Read more ...
David Nice
Any sensitive festival planner knows to begin the return to a new normal with something soft and elegiac – reflecting on all we’ve lost and mourned these past two years, as well as what we’re facing in the world now. Just over a fortnight ago, at the East Neuk Festival, the Elias Quartet led us gently by the hand with James MacMillan’s Memento. The 2022 BBC Proms began pianissimo, massed forces at the ready for the intermittent blazes of Verdi’s Requiem.It should have been a moving start to a Proms season which is rightly celebrating the big and the awe-inspiring. But those two years have Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Perhaps 2021 was not the most propitious time to launch a new festival, but composer and conductor Josh Ballance did it anyway, and the High Barnet Chamber Music Festival has returned in 2022 – as it will, I hope, in 2023 and beyond. Still modestly proportioned, the programming doesn’t lack ambition, and I was particularly drawn to last night’s programme by the ensemble Mad Song, featuring a wealth of new and newish music.“Chamber music” is a term that conjures up polite string quartets and piano trios, and while the festival includes Mendelssohn and Beethoven, it also embraces Elizabeth Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Can a comedy have too many jokes? That may seem an odd question, but one that applies to this latest high-octane, eager-to-please outing by Richard Bean, which flies out of the hanger at such high velocity that it’s in danger of crashing before it leaves the runway.If the play is guilty of trying too hard, and is a tad one-dimensional, it’s also fair to say that once it breaks through the clouds and we’ve taken our seat belts off, Jack Absolute Flies Again does settle into a veritable hoot. With a skilled and hugely likeable cast, it’s genuinely funny and charming, spectacularly, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Buxton International Festival’s opera scene is clearly back on track for 2022, and its most substantial production a taut and tension-filled presentation of Rossini’s La Donna del Lago.Jacopo Spirei’s production, with design by Madeleine Boyd, has just one basic set: it changes from Act One to Act Two by removing two evocative visual elements (a hearth and a panel of generally rustic appearance) and replacing them with geometrical and electrically dazzling shapes, and it has a binary contrast of costumes – ragged rebel Highlanders and sophisticated, techno-style royal loyalists.So, from the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Remember how, back in the summer of 2020, we all wondered if large-scale symphonies would be back in the repertoire any time soon? I pessimistically predicted a decade of slow orchestral reconstruction.Yet right at the beginning of the 2021-2 season, the Philharmonia kicked off with two Strauss blockbusters. The Proms, having made last-minute readjustments to the 2021 programme, had inserted Sibelius’s Second Symphony into a magnificent first night from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Dalia Stasevska. But only this year are the great visiting orchestras back - and how.You may question Read more ...