Reviews
Gavin Dixon
You wouldn’t guess it from her name, but Janina Fialkowska isn’t actually Polish. You wouldn’t guess from her Chopin either, which is sensitive and supple, always emotive and deeply idiomatic. The Canadian pianist (her father was Polish) has recently come to wider attention for her Chopin interpretations through a series of well-received albums on the ATMA label, making this all-Chopin Wigmore Hall recital a particularly attractive proposition.There is a directness to Fialkowska’s interpretations that is both disarming and immediately engaging. The melody always leads, with the left-hand Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Scottish play’s traces are faint in this bloody, steamy tale of feminist psychosis. Based on Nikolai Leskov’s Dostoevsky-commissioned novel Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, its 1865 setting is transferred from Tsarist Russia to Northumberland. Little of the isolated, feudal oppression is lost in translation, as teenage Katherine (Florence Pugh) finds herself chattel to the sullen, impotent, older Alexander (Paul Hilton), till lust for a servant sparks her to life, and consumes everything around.Though Katherine is lady of the manor, this is a tale of gilt-edged slave days from a female Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Three teenage boys meet at dawn. One of them, blonde and beautiful Simon (Gabin Verdet), jumps out of his girlfriend’s window and rides his bike through the dark Lyon streets to meet the others in their van. They drive almost silently to the beach, put on wetsuits and catch waves. A grey sea, a grey sky: we can hardly see where foam ends and cloud begins. It’s mesmerising, wordless, and the camerawork is superb, as is Alexandre Desplat’s score. We’re inside the curl of the wave, as immersed in it as Simon. Then the surfer dudes are back in the van, exhausted, on the road home. It ripples Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There is a distinctive look, feel, even sound to a stage production directed by Ivo van Hove, which is becoming rather familiar to London theatregoers after two cult hits, A View From the Bridge and Hedda Gabler. You know you’re in van Hovenland as soon as you see the modishly empty stage which before long one of the characters will trash, leaving everyone to wade through detritus for the rest of the play. Long stretches of dialogue will be underscored by music, looped so that the same cadence comes round and round again like toothache. You will also hear unnerving rhythmic sounds that can’t Read more ...
David Nice
Bomb-dropping is the new black again in Trump's dysfunctional America. Awareness of that contributed to the crackling cloud of dynamic dread hanging over last night's concert staging of John Adams's opera-oratorio - my description, not his - about the July 1945 desert testing of the plutonium bomb under the supervision of self-divided Robert Oppenheimer, an American Faust. But then the music's insistent stepwise descents towards the centre of the earth, in various modes and illuminated colours, the claustrophobic volume of much of the variegated score in the no-escape close-ups of the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Flashes of intense colour pulse rhythmically across the piece, contrasting with delicate washes and pools of watery pigment that seem to quiver plumply, set to run uncontrollably at any moment. Lines drawn fast and bold describe four figures, while more tentative, carefully made marks barely delineate a foot, and a bird in a cage. If Chris Ofili’s new work, unveiled at the National Gallery on Tuesday, offers a glimpse into a dreamlike world of myth and magic, its execution represents nothing short of alchemy, the miraculous transformation of watercolour into tapestry.Commissioned for the Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
"But is any of this normal?," asks poor Beatriz at the end of Act One. Of course not. She and 14 other grand creatures are crossing the space of an aristocratic drawing-room from which, they are coming to realise, there is no escape. At the same time, it’s completely normal. This is opera.What appalling fun Thomas Adès has with the business of opera in The Exterminating Angel, given its UK premiere last night by the Royal Opera. Its conventions, faults, virtues, singers, audiences, even conductors: all are skewered by a pen of poison-tipped invention. Imagine chomping your way through an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Turning the real-life murder of an 11-year-old boy into a four-part TV drama carries obvious risks (might it be exploitative, sick or in bad taste, for instance?), but judging by this opening episode of Little Boy Blue (ITV), screenwriter Jeff Pope has skilfully walked the line. His account of the shooting of Rhys Jones in Liverpool 2007 managed to combine sympathy with objectivity, and laid out the story with a careful restraint which was far more effective than shrill hysterics would have been.The way it’s told here, Jones was the unwitting victim of a local gang war between the so- Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Caetano Veloso is a unique figure in world popular music. As bright as the likes of David Byrne and Brian Eno, but also a genuine pop star, beloved by “chamber maids and taxi drivers” as well as the intellectual liberal élite. In the late 1960s, he reinvented Brazilian pop music with friends like Gilberto Gil in the Tropicalismo movement. He went into exile to London in the 1970s during the time of the dictatorship, played with androgyny at a time when that was subversive, wrote some of the best songs anywhere of the last few decades and has a unique, pliable, immensely expressive Read more ...
Robert Beale
The opening of a new concert hall offers two options for opinionizing: the venue itself – or the performances in it? Review the acoustics – or the music? It has to be a mixture of the two, in the end. Chetham’s School of Music, in Manchester, has just celebrated (and seen opened by HRH Prince Edward) its £8.7m Stoller Hall – a state-of-the-art, 482-seat performance venue in the heart of Manchester, right next to Victoria Station.It’s been constructed, "box in box" style for perfect sound insulation, inside the main new Chetham’s building erected in 2012. The missing ingredient on that Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
François-Xavier Roth is a distinctive presence at the podium. He is short and immaculately attired, and first appearances could lead you to expect a civilised and uneventful evening. But the facade soon drops. His movements are brisk and erratic, as he conducts without a baton and instead shakes his outstretched hands at the players. He often leaps into the air, landing in a fierce pose directed at one of the players, before returning to his repertoire of small, indistinct gestures.Yet the results are impressively detailed and precise. Rhythmic clarity is a hallmark of his interpretations, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 25 years this year since Donna Leon introduced us to Commissario Guido Brunetti, a man who in his way has done as much for Venice as Byron and Ruskin or, in our own time, Francesco da Mosto, like Brunetti a glamorous figure absorbed by the history and culture, not to mention the cuisine, of La Serenissima.Earthly Remains is the 26th novel in Leon’s Brunetti series which has become an international phenomenon, garnering crime writing awards from around the world. Sadly for the locals, there is no Italian edition because the author will not allow it, feeling that as an American in Venice ( Read more ...