Reviews
David Nice
It could have been the most electrifying week of the musical year. Alas, Heathrow meltdown kept me from two of Klaus Mäkelä’s Sibelius concerts with his Oslo Philharmonic in Hamburg. But there was still what should have been the grand finale, the heavenstorming Fifth Symphony following Mahler and Lise Davidsen in Berg (and more Sibelius). The euphoria I’d experienced in one live Oslo concert and the Sibelius symphonies on Decca was rekindled.An ecstatic if hardly packed Barbican audience obviously agreed. Acoustic differences on a tour are always going to pose problems, and this hall's Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
As Bloc Party singer Kele Okereke noted at one point in this gig, his band have now been visiting Glasgow for nearly two decades. Yet few of the shows played in that 18 year span, which have touched upon nearly all of the city’s main music venues, have been as contrasting as this one. By the night’s end, when the band blasted out a rare outing of their very early single “Little Thoughts”, the audience were a jubilant and sweaty throng, but it was hard work getting there.Okereke noticed it as well. Clad in a bright multi coloured shirt that possessed more vibrancy than the early part of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Beverley’s was an ice-cream shop and restaurant on Orange Street in Kingston, Jamaica. Records were on sale too. In 1961, an aspiring singer-songwriter named James Chambers turned up there with a song he’d written called “Dearest Beverley.” If it was recorded, it’d give its creator a leg-up on the music scene and also might be good promotion for the business.One of the ice-cream concern’s owners agreed. James Chambers became Jimmy Cliff and with Leslie Kong, who turned his attention the business of music rather than ice cream, founded the Beverley’s label. Over 1961 to 1971 – the label ceased Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The scene is Monte-Carlo, around the beginning of the last century: a carefully observed world of cloudless skies, glittering seas, high society and careless privilege shared with Death in Venice. John Cox’s staging works in cool harmony with the timeless, dangerous comedy of sexual politics devised by Mozart and da Ponte – and with the specifically English culture of country-house opera.The first night on Thursday was slow to ignite, a touch clunky in transition from casino table to hotel suite, conducted by Tobias Ringborg as if dotting every i in a recording studio. It snapped together Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If your memory of the 1957 John Wyndham novel about an alien invasion of an English village by chilling children with blonde pageboy hair is still pin-sharp, probably best to back-burner it before you watch Sky’s new adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos. The bones of the original plot are still there, but tricked out in concerns of a more contemporary kind. A brief prologue sets up the stakes: a couple trying to escape the family home are intercepted by an eerie child, who wags a reproving finger at them. Then the opening credit graphics roll, picturing a long vaginal tunnel of trees, at Read more ...
David Nice
If you sought a spectacular shrugging-off of jubileemania last night, you could have done no better than this programme to coincide with Italian Republic Day from our own national treasures Antonio Pappano – Knight of the British Empire, if you’ll pardon the expression – and the London Symphony Orchestra.Vivaldi, Puccini and possibly Gabrieli would be known to all; probably not Goffredo Petrassi other than as a name, nor Victor de Sabata other than as a conductor. The revelation of a uniquely original sequence, Petrassi’s Concerto for Orchestra No. 5, stems from the 1950s when he was turning Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s graceful, intriguingly open-ended seventh feature, and her English-language debut, is set on Fårö, the island that Ingmar Berman loved.“This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your innermost imaginings of form, proportions, colours, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections,” he wrote. He lived on the island for 40 years and made several films there, including Through a Glass Darkly, Persona and the TV series that inspired millions of divorces, Scenes from A Marriage.In Bergman Island, the Swedish director is an inspirational presence, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Wagner, in his medievalist, pan-European, 19th century way, wanted Parsifal to be a blend of abstract and religious experience for his audiences at Bayreuth, calling it a “festival play for a stage consecration”. Questions for those performing it today include how to do justice to its philosophical baggage as well as its marvellous music, and whether to introduce new elements in the visual staging that the composer never thought of.Directing Opera North’s first-ever performance of the work, Sam Brown’s approach has avoided getting it mired too deep in the philosophy and restricted Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
When Natalia Osipova comes a-calling, a choreographer doesn’t say no. The Bolshoi-trained ballerina, having commandeered all the prime roles in her nine years at the Royal Ballet, is always looking to conquer new territory. In a string of self-curated solo shows she has made forays into contemporary dance as well as staking out her supremacy as a dance-actress, often commissioning new work.Most memorably, in 2019, she starred in The Mother, a contemporary telling of the pitch-dark story by Hans Christian Andersen, about a young woman prepared to fight Death itself to save her baby. Osipova Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Camera Is Ours features films made from 1935-1967 by women like Marion and Ruby Grierson, Evelyn Spice and Margaret Thomson, whose names should be engraved in the history of British film-making.Ever heard of them? Probably not as, surprise, surprise, they’ve been overlooked – until now, that is. This BFI two-disc DVD release includes 10 newly restored shorts along with interviews with Sarah Erulkar and Kay Manders and a feature on Jill Craigie, better known as the wife of labour leader, Michael Foot.“We were a movement,” Manders tells Barney Snow. “We had ideas in common. We thought we Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Side Two of A Child’s Chant for a New Millennium opens with “Wrenbird,” a consideration of whether it’s possible to have a bird’s freedom of mobility. “Anywhere but here,” sings Wren Hinds. He may not be happy where he is, but the accompanying soundtrack is enough to make anyone stick around.During its four-and-a-half minutes, “Wrenbird” shifts from an acoustic guitar-accompanied reverie to incorporate strings, brushed drums and flute-like keyboard lines. By the mid-point, it’s epic – albeit in a restrained way. When wordless vocals appear towards the end, there’s a hint Hinds may have taken Read more ...
Katie Colombus
he first part of one of ABBA’s most famous lyrics, “You can take the future, even if you fail”, has been bought to life in Pudding Mill Lane, in a musical event that has completely re-defined the possibilities of the future of live music – and has put to bed the latter part about failure.Because the band who effectively birthed pop music as we know it today, who embody the idea that "fail" stands for first attempt in learning, who have made generations of people laugh and cry and sing and dance, are here with us in the room. Not exactly in the flesh, but when the screen rises, we are Read more ...