Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Quicksilver Messenger Service were central to what emerged from San Francisco as 1966 unfolded – the psychedelic-dance-ballroom scene. They first played the city’s Avalon Ballroom on 13 May 1966, and were there a further 74 times. Before this, the band had been on stage at the also-Family Dog-promoted Fillmore on 26 February, and over 25 to 27 March. Their initial booking for the city’s other main promoter Bill Graham was also at the Fillmore, on 19 March.These early shows – of a band which debuted live in December 1965 – ensured that QMS was moving fast, seemingly as much so as their the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Carla Simón’s latest autofiction disinters the post-Franco plague of heroin and AIDS which killed her parents and that of Marina (Llúcia Garcia), her indefatigable 18-year-old surrogate in this lyrical story of shame, memory and love.Simón was orphaned by AIDS contracted from sharing needles by the time she was six, and Marina shares this biography, being raised in Barcelona by her mum’s family. Discovering a document she requires for a scholarship to study cinema states her dad had no child, she contacts his Galician family for the first time since his death. The quest to correct the legal Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Concertos where the soloist is a member of the orchestra are something of a Scottish Chamber Orchestra speciality. They’re always among their best-sold concerts each season, and there are obvious gains of warmth and communication when the band are playing to support one of their own. This week, the honour fell to Philip Higham, the SCO’s principal cello, and he played Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto with so much involvement and quasi-operatic intensity that it was easy to forget how low down the priority list Schumann’s concertos were until very recently.Higham clearly believes in the work Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the 1920s, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was as famous as it gets really, author of the beloved Sherlock Holmes stories, a polymath and a rare British example of that most continental of figures, the public intellectual. Across The Atlantic, Harry Houdini was a phenomenon, the escapologist showman, personifying The Great American Dream, even making movies.A century on, Holmes and Houdini (both of whom are invented characters, lest we forget) persist as metaphors and memes that require no explanation.Ah, lest we forget. Neither man could, to the extent that memories became pathologised. The writer Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Contrast and variety are as vital in a three-ballet programme as in a well-built sandwich. Typically that might include textural interest, a spicy element and something substantial in the middle. Alchemies, the Royal Ballet’s latest triple bill, ignored that time-tested formula with the result that not one of the three works by Wayne McGregor registered as strongly as it should. Granted, the final item was a world premiere, so management couldn't have known exactly how it would turn out. On paper, Quantum Souls (terrible title), with its wall of onstage percussion instruments surrounded by Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Hallé Orchestra is still in many ways the well honed, burnished instrument created by Sir Mark Elder over his near quarter-century as its music director, and his calm authority over it was apparent in almost every note of this, his second Bridgewater Hall appearance in the present season.Radio 3 listeners – the concert was broadcast live – will have been aware as much as those in the auditorium of the qualities of its playing under its now Conductor Emeritus: incisive articulation, intelligently balanced and unified ensemble, sweet and passionate string playing, rapier-thrust brass Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Those nostalgic for a time when the Haymarket offered big names in well-upholstered plays will have a field day at Grace Pervades, in which David Hare furthers his relationship with Ralph Fiennes. Their partnership includes Straight Line Crazy here and in New York and the solo play Beat the Devil, in which Fiennes actually played the dramatist (15 years his senior) in the tale of Hare's battle with COVID. This play inhabits notionally less troubled times in its story of two titans of the Victorian era, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the latter of whom was the great-aunt of the legendary Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I’m a latecomer to John Robins and Elis James’s hugely popular podcast, having only started to listen during a period of illness last year, when I quickly became hooked. The two (plus producer Dave) have an appealing chemistry that makes them a pleasure to spend time with. Prior to that I was aware of Robins as champion of series 17 of Taskmaster – a perennial favourite in my household – but had not seen his stand-up. Although his stage and podcast persona is of an obsessive neurotic driven mad by the petty obstacles in the path of everyday life, this new memoir narrates the more significant Read more ...
Gary Naylor
For a master dramatist - even for a tyro really - The Price is a strangely uneven play, brilliant psychological insights diluted by clunking structural issues. You wonder what it would be like in the hands of a less talented cast, a less experienced director, performed on a less convincing set - it could unravel very quickly. It was something of a surprise to find that amongst the credits in the programme, its weakest link proved to be its writer, Arthur Miller.We open on a middle-aged NYPD cop rooting through a treasure trove of stuff that you might find presented at an Antiques Roadshow Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Charges that no court has made will be shouted at my head.” And so it proves. Benjamin Britten’s fisherman Peter Grimes is damned before a note is sung – condemned not by a judge, but by his own community. Deborah Warner’s brutal 2022 staging, now back at the Royal Opera for its first revival, never lets us forget this. We don’t even see a courtroom. Instead, the Prologue plays out as a hallucinatory fantasy, a fever-dream in the mind of Grimes himself: his dead apprentice haunts his thoughts, while a mob of dark figures circle like hounds. Grimes is a tragedy of alienation, but this staging Read more ...
johncarvill
Akira Kurosawa coulda been a contender. He used to be canon. Some of the critical sheen flaked off a while back, though. He hasn’t had a film in the top 10 of the Sight & Sound critics’ poll since 1982, the cognoscenti having pivoted to other Japanese masters such as Ozu, or Mizoguchi. Kurosawa is docked points for being too grabby, too Western, too prone to bourgeois sentimentality. His films commit the ultimate sin: they pander.No polemics here, but if you wanted to take up a critical katana on Kurosawa’s behalf, you could do worse than adduce Red Beard. The director himself called it “ Read more ...
David Nice
Serendipity smiled on a lunchtime event you'd have been happy to hear any time, anywhere in the world. Edward Gardner's typically engaging short introduction told us that Royal Academy of Music string students were facing exams in a fortnight, so the brief was to find a programme predominantly for wind and brass. Quite apart from the fact that here were two amazing young soloists, RAM postgraduates, up to the mark of each work, the concertos in question were both created in 1924, both had divided double-bass parts - now that really was a coincidence - and (this bit I'm adding) Gardner had Read more ...