Reviews
James Saynor
We tend to indulge hagiography when it comes to biopics of pop icons. To get the rights to their music, producers often have to let the icons themselves pull the strings. It’s a pact much like the compromises we make all our lives with the music industry – becoming fans of a world riddled with rip-offs, scams and scandals. We’ll only pay to see the film if we’re given the music, as we’re only half-interested in the life.At the same time, stories of addiction and frailty and romantic fiascos, only to be overcome, are carefully laundered into the movie: they serve to bolster the cool of the Read more ...
Robert Beale
There are few concert experiences as satisfying as hearing cornerstone works of the Romantic repertoire played with energy, commitment and panache, which is what Saturday’s BBC Philharmonic delivered in generous measure.Much of the reason for that must be due to Anja Bihlmaier, the Phil’s principal guest conductor, whose visits are, it seems, always characterized by articulation that’s crafted and intelligent, with widely expressed dynamics and contrast and constant imaginative touches. Add to that the solo violin playing of Bomsori Kim and you have something special.First, however, was the Read more ...
David Nice
Before last night's still-shocking saga of a downtrodden soul began, Southbank Artistic Director Mark Ball came on to tell us that while concerts were mere events, Multitudes, "our multi-arts festival powered by orchestral music", was offering experiences. Rachel Halliburton, who reviewed Bach's The Art of Fugue with acrobats, would agree; Bernard Hughes, though, found Messiaen's Turangalîla ruined by a "tiresome film". I felt the same last year about Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony burdened with a very tangential animation by the usually wondrous William Kentridge.At his best, Kentridge offers Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In Mark Jenkin’s Cornish cinema, lost boats, drowned men and ways of life wash back in with the tide, nothing truly gone. Where his feature debut Bait (2019) tackled the violence stirred by second-home gentrification in a humiliated fisherman and Enys Men (2022) found elliptical folk-horror in tin mine echoes, Rose of Nevada falls through time in a fishing village which is barely hanging on.The new work is Jenkin’s biggest production by far, but still homemade in mainstream terms. Two name actors, George MacKay and Callum Turner, lead his cast for the first time, fitting happily into his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Last year, Paul Weller compiled a collection of his favourite soul tracks. A highlight of That Sweet Sweet Music was Jon Lucien’s affecting “Search for the Inner Self.” Originally issued on 45 in September 1971, it’s a long-time favourite of deep-digging soul enthusiasts. As is Lucien’s dance floor-filler “We got Love.” However, the latter cut was not issued when it was recorded – or even soon after.“We got Love” was first propagated by the DJ Snowboy. He’d played percussion for Lucien at a London show in 1995. Lucien gave him a home-made CD including tracks which had never been issued. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Decades are never neat: they don’t simply go from 1 to 10, or 0 to 9. So it is with the Swinging Sixties, which actually began – like sexual intercourse for poet Philip Larkin – in 1963, the year of the Profumo Scandal, Kim Philby’s defection and the satire boom, all of which signaled the end of deference. Oh, almost forgot, and this is when the Beatles’ first LP, Please Please Me was released, an album whose title has been borrowed by Tom Wright for his play about the band’s manager Brian Epstein. Staged at the Kiln theatre, it is directed by the venue’s boss Amit Sharma.Epstein’s story is Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
I have to confess, I hadn’t been sure what to expect when I heard about The Art of Fugue staged with acrobats. This latest collaborative experiment in the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes 2026 season – the multi-arts festival with orchestral music at its centre – sounded somewhat counterintuitive; one of the Western canon’s most cerebral works twinned with an extrovert celebration of the human body.Yet the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Circa have been collaborating since 2015, and Circa – under the guidance of South-African-born Yaron Lifschitz – is an acrobatic group unlike many others. Read more ...
Katie Colombus
In an era of excessive production for live shows, it is striking to see a band of Big Thief’s stature walk onto a stage this large and offer almost nothing but the songs themselves. No grand entrance, no visual shenanigans, no swag. Just four musicians, a handful of instruments, and darn good songs. But then their appeal has always lain elsewhere – in the frayed and tender edges of their songs, in the way they can make the intimate feel infinite, and the infinite feel as ordinary as a dirt road at dusk. At Brixton, that same hum of nonchalant chill settled over the evening. They came on Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Messiaen’s Turangalîla, his sprawling 10-movement, 75-minute extravaganza, is garish, graphic and glorious. It is a full-bore, Technicolor, over-the-top, spectacular blast of orchestral fireworks from beginning to end. It is, as the kids say, “a lot”. But not enough for the curators of Multitudes, a multi-disciplinary festival at the Southbank Centre this month, who paired the it with a specially-commissioned animated film by 1927 Studios. Bad idea.I’m not sure any film would enhance the experience of Turangalîla live – how can the music alone not be enough? – but this one positively ruined Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
In just over three years Olivia Dean has gone from taking the stage at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow to selling out two nights at the city’s largest venue. Such a leap up in surroundings in a short space of time did not seem to faze Dean though, the 27-year-old Londoner possessing both a honeyed voice and a Disney Princess smile onstage. She was confident enough, in fact, to drop in a cover of the classic “Movin On Up” late on. It was a risky choice that did not totally work, but you could not fault the boldness of it, and you can understand why she has reason to feel such Read more ...
Robert Beale
Ives’ The Unanswered Question remained unanswered when the BBC Philharmonic and John Storgårds performed it in the Bridgewater Hall in January, but on this occasion, with Thomas Adès, it was followed by Kurtág’s even briefer The Answered Unanswered Question. Spatial effects were very much part of the first half of the concert (I say “half”, but there were about 20 minutes of actual music; the rest was spent in platform re-arrangements), beginning with the 118-year-old Charles Ives piece, for which the solo trumpet was positioned in Stygian gloom on the organ bench at the centre of the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Wars in the Middle East provoke furious arguments. Red hot. So why is British theatre so cool, distinctly chilly, about staging new work about these controversial issues? If any proof is needed that current new writing is meek and mild then it must surely be this. Even the exceptions are not exceptional: written by Yousef Sweid and Isabella Sedlak, Between the River and the Sea, first seen at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin last year and now comes to the Royal Court via Edinburgh, is a likeable autobiographical one-man show about Middle-Eastern identity which insistently avoids the Read more ...