Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
The shadow of the cross falls over James MacMillan’s manger. You may come for his work’s consoling, even transporting, beauty and mystery. It’s there in abundance in his new Christmas Oratorio. Yet what may grip hardest are his passages of crashing dread and horror. For MacMillan, the incarnation in Bethlehem triggers a journey across human suffering that only redemption, through Christ’s crucifixion, can close. Against the unearthly ripple of the celeste, or the playful tenderness of the solo violin (both frequently recur), a terrifying doomquake of timpani stands ever-ready to erupt. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Measure for Measure may be the quintessential Shakespeare “problem” play, but just what has earned it that epithet remains a puzzle. Each generation approaches the matter from its own perspective. The developments of recent years, #MeToo most of all, have given new resonance to one of its central themes, the imbalance of law over nature and the quality of justice, but the play’s “resolution”, if it can even be called that, leaves the questions open.Or is it the imbalance – “balance”, as the title itself makes clear, being a key concept – between tragedy and comedy, between the deathly serious Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester’s oldest chamber orchestra has been gathering a new audience at the Stoller Hall in Chetham’s School of Music since that auditorium opened, and Sunday afternoon’s programme provided an excellent example of where the Northern Chamber Orchestra’s virtues lie.With Chloë Hanslip, the orchestra’s artist in association, appearing as both soloist and director, it also happened to have been selected by the BBC for recording for a radio focus on Manchester music-making, to come in January. (When you listen to that you may just detect some querulous cries and bumps arising from the presence Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The picture seen above doesn’t have quite the same resonance as Art Kane’s 1958 shot A Great Day in Harlem which brought 57 American jazz musicians in front of his lens, but it is nonetheless significant. Here, in 1971, is an evocative, unique record of a moment in West Midlands music history. The shot was taken at the opening of Heavy Head Records, a Sparkhill record shop run by Move/Electric Light Orchestra drummer Bev Bevan. The shop was formerly a toy store run by his mother.In the front, from left to right, are Rick Price, Ozzy Osbourne, Raymond Froggatt, Jeff Lynne, Bev Bevan, Tony Read more ...
David Nice
Two major composers took Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies as the subject for two very different operas. The 19 year old Rachmaninov in 1892 had inspiration but not much sense of dramatic continuity; Leoncavallo in 1912, 20 years on from his deserved smash hit Pagliacci, managed the flow but not the inspiration. Give me Rachmaninov’s memorability any day, but at least Leoncavallo’s hokum had the benefit of the best singers and conducting at Cadogan Hall last night.Quality was assured before the first note of the evening. Carlo Rizzi, here conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, stands Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
When the Canadian Yann Martel went to India as a young adult backpacker he fell in love – not with one person but with the rich imaginative landscape opened up by its religions and its animals. A struggling writer at the time, he channelled this new love into a dazzling idiosyncratic narrative about a shipwrecked Indian boy who survives 227 days at sea with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker.Millions of people have now been swept up in his Booker-winning magical realist odyssey. Director Ang Lee has captured it – not entirely successfully according to Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
How do you picture Gene Kelly? Most likely in his effervescent screen persona, either as the burly ex-GI of An American in Paris, or as the hoofer without a raincoat in Singin’ in the Rain.You’re less likely to picture him peering through a movie camera lens. Yet of the 47 films Kelly made over his 50-year career, he directed 11 of them and was choreographer on 27. His legacy, he believed, was what he delivered behind the camera, not in front of it.He also attained the distinction, in 1960, of being the first American commissioned to choreograph for the Paris Opera Ballet (George Balanchine Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix is sometimes criticised for bringing too much of everything to its online feast, but the way it’s opening up previously under-exposed territories is becoming seriously impressive. Suddenly, South Korea is beginning to look like a powerhouse in the making, with consecutive big ratings hits with Squid Game and now Hellbound.Directed by Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan), Hellbound is derived from the “webtoon” series he created with cartoonist Choi Gyuseok. It depicts a nightmarish society where “sinners” are picked out seemingly at random by a mysterious “angel” and informed that they will Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The opening moments don’t suggest what’s coming. A solo flute is followed by a few spoken phrases from a treated voice. What’s being said? It’s impossible to work it out. Is it a warning? An electric guitar’s strings are stroked with a cello bow. Then, other instruments enter the picture – shimmering electric piano, a trio of saxes, pitter-pat, raindrop percussion, throbbing bass guitar. About five minutes in, a pause arrives after which hard-edged spiralling guitar tops a swirling musical vortex. The storm has arrived. A squall is in the air, and on the stage.“Sun on a Dark Sky” is the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The Courtauld Gallery’s dark corners have gone, and with them a certain apt melancholy, that effortlessly summoned the ghosts of Gauguin’s Nevermore, 1897, – the abused and exploited girls of Tahiti; and Delius, who had this painting in his house at Grez-sur-Loing. In the gallery’s murky half-light, the alcohol-softened face of Toulouse-Lautrec’s In a Private Dining Room at the Rat Mort, c.1899, became still more poignant, and Van Gogh’s Peach Trees in Blossom, 1889, seemed still more luminous.Nostalgia is all well and good, but now that the Courtauld’s impressionist and post- Read more ...
Richard Bratby
As the conductor of English National Opera’s 2018 production of Porgy and Bess, there can’t be many maestros in the UK who can currently match John Wilson’s knowledge of that extraordinary score. And there are surely none who can rival Wilson’s understanding of – and passion for – the work of the great interwar Broadway and Hollywood arrangers (he built an entire orchestra around them, after all). Which is one way of saying that if you’re looking for an interpreter of Robert Russell Bennett’s 1942 “Symphonic Picture” of Gershwin’s opera, Wilson pretty much covers all the bases. So Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The archetypal fascinating male in Jane Campion’s films – whether his allure for a woman owes to his earthy virility or emotional sensitivity, his animal appeal or his soul – has a malign other.That’s true of The Piano (1993), In the Cut (2003) and Bright Star (2009), though in the latter movie’s then atypical triangle, it’s the poet John Keats whom his friend Charles Brown seeks to possess and control, at least intellectually – not Keats’s beloved, Fanny Brawne.Brown's obsessive admiration for the poet anticipated the restrained homoerotic boy-crush that comes to dominate Campion’s Read more ...