Reviews
David Nice
For the first time ever Paavo Järvi has been showing other nations why the Estonian Festival Orchestra is among the world's best – travelling to other Nordic countries after their annual gathering in Estonia’s summer capital of Pärnu, with the big bastions of Vienna and Berlin to come early next year. I caught their first ever trip abroad, a fleeting visit to Jūrmala just outside the Latvian capital Riga, two hours south of Pärnu passing nothing but forests, rivers, lakes and the occasional small settlement. And then it was back to base in the loveliest of seaside towns, and what remained of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Six weeks in and we’ve got to that sweet spot in the Proms season where thematic threads start to knit together, sequences begin to fill out, cycles to finish – when you hear not just the concert in front of you but the echoes of those already past. It’s this cumulative impact, this sense of narrative that gives the festival its particular character, lending weight to even the most workaday midweek concerts.“Cycle” may be too grand a term for Elgar’s two-and-a-bit completed symphonies, but the triptych is still an interesting one, especially when crowned with Anthony Payne’s thoughtful Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hark, is that the call of the earth I hear? In a frenetic urban world, the myth of rural simplicity exerts a strong pull. Surely a simpler life is possible; a more natural rhythm and a slower pace? Oh yes, I can smell burnt peat, and almost scent the deep ploughed soil and farmyard animals, as I walk into the Donmar Warehouse for this dark revival of David Harrower’s 1995 masterpiece, Knives in Hens, directed this time by Yaël Farber. But this story from a mythical old agrarian world is not a nostalgic evocation of the past. It is much more gnarled than that.Set in a stretch of unspecified Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Once upon a time there was a game called Grand Theft Auto that opened the door to free-roaming open-world games. It spawned a whole load of "me too" offspring, mostly bad, some good. Among the more promising relatives were the Saints Row titles, a more cartoon-esque version of GTA, but still resplendent with anti-hero crime drama and the visceral thrill of running or driving around the mean streets, looking for trouble.Fast forward a few and we have Agents of Mayhem, in many ways a natural extension of the Saints Row games – same developer, same 18-rated humour, but this time you’re on Read more ...
David Nice
Everything you may have read about Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla's wonder-working with her City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is true. Confined to a Turkish hospital bed when their first Prom together took place last August, I wondered from the radio broadcast if the extremes in Tchaikovsky weren't too much. In the live experience last night, the miracle of the detail and the justification for even the most startling decisions proved totally convincing. And what a stunner of a programme, too, with plenty of wit in Stravinsky and Gerald Barry (of course) and a lightness you don't often get in Read more ...
David Nice
Reformation Day, Luther 500 - in Proms terms it can only mean Bach, the alpha and omega of music, flourishing roughly two centuries after the Wittenberg Nightingale nailed his 95 theses to the church door. Those of us who headed home on Saturday night reeling from the C major sunburst at the end of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder were happy to hear an even greater blaze at Sunday lunchtime, albeit from only one regal instrument, the Albert Hall organ in the master's E flat major Prelude which the sometime neoBaroque Schoenberg revered and even arranged. But there were many other voices during the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Wondering what on earth to choose between as you tramp the streets of the festival? These are our highlights so far.STANDUPAthenu Kugblenu, Underbelly Med Quad ★★★ Strong debut hour of political and identity comedyCally Beaton, The Caves ★★★★ Single motherhood, autism, sex with women, the corporate world: original and cleverDad’s Army Radio Hour, Pleasance Dome ★★★ Scripts of born-again sitcom classic delivered with real light and shadeDarren Harriott, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★ Extrovert with strong material on politics and personal historyElliot Steel, Gilded Ballroom ★★ Slacker lad's tales Read more ...
David Kettle
Skeletal horses; piles of newborn babies smothered in a bloody sheet; a whole garden centre of prickly pears. There’s no denying that Italian director Emma Dante’s new production of Verdi’s Macbeth, which Turin’s Teatro Regio brings to the Edinburgh International Festival, is visually dazzling, even at times hallucinatory.There’s a nagging concern, however, about what all the visual flamboyance actually adds up to – those perpetually procreating witches, seemingly modelled on the long-haired ghoul from Japanese horror film Ring; the imposing crown-formed decors; the circus fire eaters and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a burning question of western civilisation: what persuades young people brought up among us to walk out on their lives and join the cult of murderous fanatics who call themselves Islamic State? If any dramatist could attempt a coherent answer it’s Peter Kosminsky, who for more than three decades has been telling minutely researched stories – in documentary, drama and a fusion of both – about the big moments of modern British social and political history. His last three films in particular - The Government Inspector, Britz and The Promise – have all had some bearing on Britain’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ingrid Oliver ★★★★ Ingrid Oliver is an old Edinburgh hand as one half of the sketch duo Watson and Oliver, but this is her debut solo show, and a very fine one it is. The set-up in Speech! is that she plays various characters giving speeches – among them a nervous TED-talker, a man leading an improv class, and a boorish student-union activist who wants to no-platform everybody ("As students we shouldn't have to engage with other people's opinions").The highlights are a pitch-perfect routine about a shock-jock radio host not a million miles away from Katie Hopkins, dropping her “truth Read more ...
David Nice
From sunset to sunrise, across aeons of time, usually flashes by in Schoenberg's polystylistic epic. Not last night at the Proms: Simon Rattle is too much in love with the sounds he can get from the London Symphony Orchestra - here verging on a Berlin beauty - to think of moving forward the doomed love of Danish King Waldemar and the beautiful Tovelille. Still, occasional stickings in the gold-studded mud apart, the variety and vividness of the work, the Albert Hall coming into its own as it often does for big chorus-and-orchestra events and the steady addition of more ideal soloists than the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A few days ago we learned that British taxpayers have unwittingly donated around £1m. in aid to the police and court systems of Egypt’s military dictatorship, via an opaque “Conflict, Stability and Security Fund”. That news only sharpens the topical edge of Omar Robert Hamilton’s debut novel, inspired by his own experience as an activist in Cairo during and after the revolution that began in January 2011. Hamilton helped to found and lead the Mosireen collective. During this most media-savvy of mass uprisings, its members shot, edited and posted the filmed evidence of popular revolt and state Read more ...