Reviews
Gavin Dixon
Children’s concerts are a tricky business, but the BBC has hit on a good formula with its Ten Pieces project, now in its fifth year. Ten works are chosen for their diversity and accessibility, and these become the basis for education projects throughout the year, culminating in the Proms concerts. This allows the concerts to be more entertainment than education, which is all for the best, and the events remain deservedly popular, performed twice in one day, each time to near capacity audiences.In the first year, 2014, the concert ended with the appearance of a spectacular firebird puppet ( Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Even seasoned veterans can suffer from programme amnesia over the four days and nights of rock, pop, dance and traditional music from around the world to be found at WOMAD, such is the array of choices across its 10 stages, ranging from the main arena through to the Ecotricity stage in Charlton Park’s leafy Arboretum – also home to the World of Words and Taste the World tents, the gong bathers and tarot readers in the World of Wellness.Most of us clearly knew where and when we were when Leftfield headlined on Friday night, reproducing their 1995 classic Leftism live and drawing one of the Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Yes it’s opera, but not as you know it. The circus-tent style structure, pitched on the grounds of Seedhill sports complex and dubbed "Paisley Opera House", was home this weekend to Scottish Opera's incredible, immersive production of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. With the opera itself set both onstage and backstage, it was impossible to distinguish between the audience, chorus, cast and crew. The performance truly enveloped the audience, bringing them right into the magic of the storytelling.At its heart, Bill Bankes-Jones's production sought to be fun for everyone involved. The pre-show Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some contend that this Snowdonia-set mystery was a Scandi hommage too far, a mere recycler of gloom-shrouded riffs familiar from the likes of The Bridge or The Killing. Well yes, there was that element to it, but if you stuck with it it grew into far more than a mere copycat procedural.For a start, it wasn’t your average whodunnit, since the killer’s identity was made pretty clear as early as the first episode. Instead, the eight-part series was more of a whydunnit, as the screenwriters probed methodically into the background, motivation and psychology of Dylan Harris (Rhodri Meilir, pictured Read more ...
Katherine Waters
When Lea is nervous she picks at the skin near the nail of her thumb. When she draws blood the wound repairs instantly because she is a member of the Second Wave endowed with SmartBlood™ and DiamondSkin™. Aside from this tic she is an otherwise apparently perfect lifer in a future New York divided into those who may live up to three hundred and those who can merely hope to attain a hundred at most.To be perfect is a matter of both appearance and being. Her genes predispose her towards longevity but to be eligible for the optimised life-enhancement benefits is a matter of behaviour: drink your Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It might have begun with The Beatles espousal of Bob Dylan in 1964. There was also The Animals whose first two singles, issued the same year, repurposed tracks from Bob Dylan’s 1962 debut album. Before The Byrds hit big with their version of his “Mr. Tambourine Man” in summer 1965, Britain’s pop groups were already hip to Dylan and incorporating elements of his approach into their sound.Some acolytes like Donovan, who emerged in early 1965, even attempted to clone the Dylan look. Other were more subtle. The Searchers’ late 1964 single “What Have They Done to the Rain?” was an adaptation of a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Two of the major themes in this year’s Proms season are the hundredth anniversaries of the death of Hubert Parry and the end of the First World War. This programme brought those two ideas together, with two works by Parry himself, along with pieces influenced by the war and written in its aftermath by Parry’s pupils Holst and Vaughan Williams. The result was an imaginative if sprawling programme, including some interesting new discoveries, and concluding with a memorable reading of Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony.Parry was the most accomplished British symphonist of the 19th century, but Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Religion’s desire to fulfil humanity too often denies it instead. The cruelty of inflexible faith which breaks fallible adherents on its iron rules is at the core of this family drama, written and directed by former Jehovah’s Witness Daniel Kokotajlo. At times it seems a fictionalised, fly on the wall documentary on a secretive sect. More often, it’s a meditation on its female protagonists, observing their struggle in the flytrap of an unusual community.Alex Whitling (Molly Wright) has turned 18 when we meet her, an occasion marked not by wild partying, but her legal confirmation that she Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Beguiling echoes, patterns and symmetries accompanied the Hallé on this Proms journey through the enchanted forests of orchestral sound. Those mellow but irresistible horns that began the evening with the ethereal chug of the pilgrim’s hymn from the overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser returned at the very end to celebrate victory over an evil sorcerer in a glorious finale to Stravinsky’s third Firebird suite. Neatly, the “Dresden” version of Wagner’s overture (which we heard) dates from 1845, whereas Stravinsky finished his final iteration of the music for Diaghilev’s 1910 ballet a century later Read more ...
Heather Neill
Jonathan Munby's production starring Ian McKellen, first seen last year in Chichester and now transferred to the West End, reflects our everyday anxieties, emphasising in the world of a Trump presidency, the dangers of childish, petulant authoritarianism. And while King James I was keen to promulgate the benefits of a united kingdom - having joined England and Scotland under his rule only three years before Shakespeare's tragedy was presented at court in 1606 - the corrosive nature of divisions within the state is equally clear now in the era of Brexit. The Union Flag features frequently in Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The image of a raging, narcissistic tyrant, convinced that he can crush even death into oblivion, has all too many resonances these days. So this visually spectacular National Theatre resurrection of Ionesco’s 1962 play, adapted and directed by Patrick Marber, promises to pack a punch beyond its absurdist proposition of a selfish child-man trying to dodge his mortality.The fact that the punch never quite seems to land is something of a mystery, since the evening features a crack cast, several brilliant one-liners, and a sensational set. Anthony Ward’s design is dominated by a large coat of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a particular quality to light seen from shadow. Think of the surface of the water glimpsed, hazy and haloed, as you swim upwards after a deep dive, or the smudged edges of city lights seen from a night flight. This concert by Ben Gernon and the BBC Philharmonic was an exercise in adjusted perspective. The sunny landscapes of Brahms’ Second Symphony and the smoky, slow-motion horror of 9/11 as viewed through Tansy Davies’ 9/11-inspired What Did We See? share little, but collided as they were here, each reframed the other, repositioned the listener.Premiered by English National Opera in Read more ...