Reviews
David Nice
When a great musician pulls out of a concerto appearance, you're usually lucky if a relative unknown creates a replacement sensation. In this case not one but two star pianists withdrew – Maria João Pires, scheduling early retirement, succeeded by an unwell Piotr Anderzewski – and instead we had that most musicianly and collaborative of violinists Isabelle Faust in Schumann, not the scheduled Mozart. Given the superlative credentials already laid down by John Eliot Gardiner in the first concert of his Schumann project with the London Symphony Orchestra on Sunday, the argument for the Violin Read more ...
Saskia Baron
One of the oldest pleasures of cinema is the opportunity it gives us to look at beautiful people in beautiful places, possibly having beautiful sex. Often audiences get exactly what they came for but sometimes it isn’t exactly straightforward. Take The Square, the Oscar-nominated film from Swedish director Ruben Östlund that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year. Its cast includes Danish heart-throb Claes Bang (tipped as a potential James Bond), handsome Dominic West (of Wire fame) and lovely Elizabeth Moss (freed from her Handmaid’s Tale wimple). The setting is Stockholm’s fashionable art Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mild controversy hovers over the new film by Alex Garland, the novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director. Garland’s 2015 directing debut, Ex Machina, was a slow-burning hit which found favour with critics and film festival juries. This follow-up, then, should have been Garland’s giant bound into the big (or at least bigger) time, but instead, after a disappointing theatrical debut in the States, it’s now bypassing cinemas and streaming on Netflix for the rest of the world.However, dark rumours of a science fiction masterpiece cruelly abused by a timorous Paramount Studios, who apparently Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“Would you like a veil?” asked a steward, offering a length of black gauze, and when you’re at a production by Birmingham Opera Company it’s usually wisest to say yes. You get used to it - the frantic Google-mapping to locate the venue; the hike through the broken concrete and mud of Birmingham’s post-industrial fringe to whatever derelict factory the company has occupied this time around; the racing certainty that at some point you’re going to be hustled through a passageway by a bomber jacket-clad Graham Vick. (At La Scala and Covent Garden, audiences watch what Vick has directed. Only in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is a very human crowd at Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography. There are the slightly melancholic portraits of authoritative and bearded male Victorian eminences, among them Darwin, Tennyson, Carlyle and Sir John Herschel. The Victorians invented and eulogised childhood, so we see a procession of children, including the inspirational Alice of Alice in Wonderland and her siblings, bathed in a kind of wondering innocence that is later echoed by some gorgeous young women. It is the Victorian age in full flow, gleaming from the walls of the National Portrait Gallery in the gradated Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It was the work with which Handel conquered London, the Italian opera that finally wooed a suspicious English audience to the charms of Dr Johnson’s “exotic and irrational entertainment”. Three hundred years later, neither Rinaldo nor London’s audience has changed much. The opera is still a musical patchwork of greatest hits loosely stitched together with an outrageous Crusading plot, while the opera-going crowd still doesn’t mind at all, so long as it comes with a good bit of spectacle and some baroque razzle-dazzle – both of which were abundantly supplied at the Barbican by Harry Bicket and Read more ...
Owen Richards
Arnaud Despelchin’s My Golden Days is a strange beast; it is both a sequel and prequel to the gloriously titled 1996 film My Sex Life…or How I Got into an Argument. Yet it tells its own story in the life of Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric). Its original French title Three Memories from My Youth is more interesting and accurate than the bland UK release title, which sounds more like a silver screener starring a selection of British dames.Paul Dédalus is heading back to Paris after many nomadic years as an anthropologist across central Asia. Feeling nostalgic, he first Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They don’t commission many television documentaries like Being Blacker (BBC Two) any more. That is not unconnected to the fact that Molly Dineen downed her camera a decade ago. Dineen began filming in another age, before the arrival of kiss-me-quick multi-channel digiverse, and has kept to the habits she learned back then - to observe and probe her subject over months or even years, wielding her own camera. Those habits are expensive and time-consuming and result in richly detailed films like this which tell an epic story on a miniature canvas.The title refers to Steve Burnett-Martin, better Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Good programming is an art, and Paul Miller – artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre – is clearly on a continuous roll with his inspired mixing of the old and the new, forgotten classics and new voices, revivals and premieres. And he loves to take risks. With this revival of Charlotte Jones's Humble Boy he breaks one of the unwritten rules of programming: never revive a play first put on by a major theatre until at least 30 years have passed. Humble Boy was a massive hit when first staged by the National Theatre in 2001. It was then often revived for a decade in theatres outside London Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Ruthless Jabiru is an all-Australian chamber orchestra based in London. It is the brainchild of conductor Kelly Lovelady, who in recent years has geared the ensemble towards political and environmental concerns. Previous projects have highlighted environmental damage in central Australia and the campaign to end sponsorship by oil companies in the arts sector. For Saturday's concert, Lovelady and her colleagues turned their attentions to the humanitarian crisis of refugees setting out for Australia by sea.It was very much a concept event, with five contemporary works, two of them Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The subtitle of Franz Osten’s 1928 film, A Romance of India, says it all: this Indian silent film is a tremendous watch, a revelation of screen energy and visual delight. An epic love story-cum-weepie with lashings of action and intrigue thrown in, it was an Indian-British-German coproduction (a curious strand of cinema history in itself) that was entirely filmed in India, and glories in having some of the country’s architectural wonders for locations: the Taj Mahal, central to the story, features primus inter pares.German director Osten – he worked in India for close on two decades, making Read more ...
David Nice
Violins, violas, wind and brass all standing for Schumann: gimmick or gain? As John Eliot Gardiner told the audience with his usual eloquence while chairs were being brought on for the Berlioz in the first half of last night's concert, Mendelssohn set the trend as conductor with Leipzig's Gewandhausorchester - though as I understand it, only the violins stood - and some chamber orchestras of comparable size have adopted the practice. But Gardiner didn't need to reason the need; we'd just heard it at work in Schumann's Genoveva Overture - a brighter, more vibrant sound than usual from the Read more ...