Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
Whatever the upsets and uncertainties of this musical season, the return of choral works at full scale and full power has been an unalloyed joy. And sheer, exhilarated, heaven-storming joy branded the Academy of Ancient Music’s reading of Haydn’s The Creation in the Barbican Hall on Tuesday night. The AAM’s incoming music director Laurence Cummings commanded his substantial orchestra, a 26-strong chorus, five soloists and even Alastair Ross’s striking, historically-informed continuo – an 1801 Broadwood fortepiano. They endowed Haydn’s Enlightenment-era vision of a sin-free universe with Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In order to preserve its impact for the millions lining up to see it, it won’t be possible to truly dissect the boldness and significance of No Time to Die until the dust has settled on the box office, and moves to find Daniel Craig’s successor as James Bond go up a gear. For review purposes, the most astounding aspects of the script may as well be redacted. And that’s not such a bad thing. The long-awaited finale of the Craig era is every bit as slippery, emotionally-charged and spectacular as we’d been led to expect; but most striking is the bravado and surprise involved in Read more ...
David Nice
At the heart of Janáček’s searing music-drama, and the pioneering play by another remarkable Czech, Gabriela Preissová, on which it is based, are two strong women trapped in a conventional community whose intelligence goes to waste and whose lives take tragic turns.These are roles for great singing actors, who need space and nurturing from an insightful director and conductor. In Asmik Grigorian as the clever, serious, truthful girl and Karita Mattila, once a leading interpreter of the eponymous heroine, as her stepmother, the village sacristan or Kostelnička who makes an indefensible Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In 2015, an abstract painting by Gerhard Richter broke the world record for contemporary art by selling at auction for £30.4m, and the octogenarian is often described as the most important living artist. But I’ve always found the prices fetched by his work baffling and the claims made about him exaggerated, since his paintings leave me cold.The Hayward Gallery exhibition includes a group of drawings in which Richter employs tactics similar to those used in many of his paintings. A photograph of woodland is partially obscured by areas of grey overpainting. To me, this contrast between abstract Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Christian Gerhaher and a string ensemble led by Isabelle Faust presented here a programme of works with a nocturnal theme. Gerhaher’s voice is an instrument of husky shadings and dark hues, so the night theme seemed wholly appropriate. The impetus for the programme, which the group is touring to several countries, was a new arrangement by David Matthews of the Berlioz Les nuits d’éte, with string sextet accompaniment, but the most interesting work was the first, Othmar Schoeck’s Notturno, op. 47.Schoeck composed the cycle, for baritone and string quartet, in 1931-3. The composer himself was Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s easy enough to see the difficulty Madam Butterfly places your thinking director in. I share her pain. What the whirring brain will quickly see as a penetrating, or at least surface scratching, study of a whole repertoire of modern obsessions – cultural appropriation, colonialisation, child abuse, sexual predation – turns out to be merely Puccini’s latest bout of sublimated girl-bashing, accompanied by some of his most sadistically beautiful music.For Lindy Hume, the director of WNO’s new production, Butterfly is no longer the fragile, accidental victim of a horrid American Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s a lot of going back to the future in theatres just now - shows (like this one) postponed by 18 months or so and delayed still further by co-star Roger Bart being indisposed on press night are bringing the bright lights back to the West End. Once you read all the Covid advice sent in advance (is there an way of making it a bit less intimidating, as it’s never quite the expected blizzard of certificates and glowing QR codes on the door), we’re back to, if not quite 26 October 1985, then 26 October 2019 - and doesn’t that feel good!Doc Brown has pimped up his DeLorean with his time- Read more ...
David Nice
Is there any composer alive who writes more luminously bittersweet elegies than Mark-Anthony Turnage? Taking key lines from memorialising poets through the ages as inspiration, he knows that instrumental phrases must sing, sometimes to invisible words, as well as dance if they’re to pierce the heart.What more inspired choices could there be, then, to frame thornier works than This Silence of 1992/3 for mixed octet and a new Concertino for phenomenal, more-than-just-mellifluous clarinettist Jon Carnac, a musician Turnage loves and admires (he can’t compose unless such affinities pertain). It Read more ...
Alfred Quantrill
Here comes the bride. True to Kero Kero Bonito’s unique musical and visual style, a chaotic but masterfully executed fusion of Japanese kawaii culture, kaleiodoscopic synth and indie rock, the audience at Heaven were greeted by lead singer Sarah Midori Perry entering in a wedding dress complete with bridesmaid, while instrumentalists Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled both played the part of disaffected ushers behind their synth decks. Perry’s veil was lifted to the backdrop of the band’s new logo in the Aztec font of their latest, psychedelically inflected album, Civilisation.The album’s opening Read more ...
Tom Teodorczuk
When Brendan Coyle, playing a modestly magnetic widower and sales rep called John in this revival of Conor McPherson's 2004 play Shining City, first appears on stage, he looks thoroughly bewildered. His eyes dart back and forth as he initially struggles to find his bearings. He has arrived at the office of the therapist Ian (Rory Keenan) whom he has sought out in an attempt to understand why he keeps seeing the ghost of his dead wife.Such confusion seems apt. The intimate, understated Theatre Royal Stratford East, has served up some gems over the years – most recently its 2018 London Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Music in London has faced down plagues, puritans, philistines and planners over the four centuries spanned by the Aurora Orchestra’s season-opener at Kings Place on Saturday. This concert in the venue’s “London Unwrapped” strand filled its main hall without distancing for the first time since the capital’s (and the world’s) latest pandemic struck. Accompanied for several works by the counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, on their own in others, a score of the Aurora’s players were led by their founder-conductor Nicholas Collon on a journey from the first Elizabeth’s city to our own, by way of the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s well worth tracking down one of the September 29 special cinema screenings of Ric Burns' lovingly made documentary portrait of the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, or seeking it out online. Famous for his vivid, insightful descriptions of people living with disabling conditions (Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars), Sacks was born into a brilliant Jewish family of doctors in north-west London in 1933, but after studying medicine at Oxford, spent most of his working life in America. Burns had the luxury of making the film with full co- Read more ...