Reviews
David Nice
John Adams, greatest communicator among living front-rank composers, zoomed into the follow-spot for the second and third concerts of the New York Philharmonic's Barbican mini-residency. Harmonielehre, his first epic symphony in all but name, and The Chairman Dances, preliminary study for the nostalgic-cum-violent foxtrot of the Maos in Act Three of Nixon in China, are already repertoire staples, while Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra is about to become one; this was its third performance in London since 2013. Even so, the spotlighting was bold for a high-profile tour, Read more ...
David Kettle
What to pair with Bluebeard’s Castle? It’s always a dilemma for opera companies. Something lightweight, even comic, provides contrast but also risks trivialising Bartók’s dark, symbolist drama. Something equally brooding risks submerging the audience into an evening of endless gloom. For its collaboration with Glasgow-based experimental theatre company Vanishing Point, however, Scottish Opera has come up with a bold, ambitious solution: to pair Bluebeard’s Castle with a brand new piece, written expressly to complement it.The work in question is The 8th Door, created jointly by Scottish Opera’ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
After a career that initially came to an abrupt end amid sibling fisticuffs on a stage in Canada during the dying embers of the Twentieth Century, the Jesus & Mary Chain have taken some time to ease themselves back into being a real going concern. Reforming a decade ago to tour their old material, it has taken until now for them to take the plunge and release Damage & Joy, their first new album in 19 years.Nevertheless, the wait has been worthwhile, as the reaction to tunes old and new from the crowd at Birmingham’s Institute duly confirmed. While the Reid brothers may have found a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s been suggested that New Order’s “Blue Monday” borrowed from Gerry & The Holograms’ eponymous 1979 A-side. In July 2015, The Guardian ran an article saying “if ‘Blue Monday’ had a starting point, it was ‘Gerry & The Holograms’ by a group of the same name, an obscure Mancunian slice of electronica, released on Absurd Records.” Although the piece noted that members of New Order acknowledged their 1983 single drew on tracks by Kraftwerk, Ennio Morricone, Donna Summer and Sylvester, nothing was quoted from the band to acknowledge the apparent debt to “Gerry & The Holograms”.Yet, Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Like many first novels, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall has a strong whiff of autobiography. It is a revenge comedy in which Waugh – like Kingsley Amis after him in Lucky Jim – transmutes his miserable experiences of teaching in Wales into savage farce.BBC One's dramatisation begins in Oxford, 1928. Paul Pennyfeather (Jack Whitehall), a milk-and-water theology scholar, is sent down from Scone College (full of fruitcakes), for “indecent behaviour”. His crime? To run into braying members of the Bollinger Club who, having already defenestrated a pig’s head (Oink! Oink!), proceed to debag him. Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Alan Gilbert chose a surprisingly low-key programme to open the New York Philharmonic’s three-day Barbican residency, Bartók’s genre-defying Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and Mahler’s modest Fourth Symphony. But it proved an engaging combination, and showed off many of the orchestra’s great strengths. Gilbert himself led with a steady hand, although his tempos were often propulsive, and even if some of the Mahler felt superficial, there were many moments of magic, especially in the last two movements, welcome reminders of the orchestra’s considerable form with this music.Bartók’s Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Olly Murs seems to have monopolised the market on teenage girls and their middle-aged mums - the ultimate X-Factor audience that's followed his journey from the show eight years ago. Doe-eyed kids and their over-zealous chaperones at the O2 are equally doolally when it comes to whooping in response to Olly's laddish flirtation, waving their arms in the air, crooning along, or boogying when invited to "party like it's a Saturday night".Ever the showman, Olly brings an abundance of energy to his set, which is a great mix of his popular chart toppers like "Heart Skips A Beat", "Dear Darling", " Read more ...
David Nice
"È un'immensa pietà" - "it's heartbreaking," rather than "it's a huge pity" - sings consul Sharpless of "Butterfly" Cio-Cio San's fatal belief that her American husband will return to her. Heartbreak is what we expected from Ermonela Jaho after her lacerating performances as Puccini's Suor Angelica at the Royal Opera and Leoncavallo's Zazà at the Barbican, and heartbreak is what we got in the most nuanced of interpretations. How much richer it was, though, in perfect accord with Antonio Pappano, who knows and conducts this most beautiful and, ultimately, most devastating of scores better than Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ben Wheatley’s sixth film in a prolific, unpredictable career is a shoot-‘em-up in the most literal sense. Setting a superb international cast led by Brie Larson and Cillian Murphy down in a big, grim warehouse, he lets them blast bits off each other for 70 of Free Fire’s 90 minutes. After Wheatley’s most obviously ambitious film, his J.G. Ballard adaptation High-Rise, suggested narrative structure wasn’t always his and co-writer/editor Amy Jump’s strength, this locked-room massacre focuses his skills.The set-up is a gun deal gone wrong in 1978’s USA, a period high on lurid disco fashion and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record shops are now doing good business in the UK. Just five years ago, who’d have thought that could happen? So does the current fetishisation of vinyl mark a growing desire to be back to physical formats, rather than disembodied technologies? Almost certainly not but it's of no matter, those that want to enjoy records now can, en masse, and theartsdesk on Vinyl is here to critique the very best sounds on plastic, taking in every imaginable style, as well as a few genres that we didn’t know existed until the needle hit the groove. Dive in.VINYL OF THE MONTHVitalic Voyager (Citizen)French Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In musical performance, if you get the start right and the end right, you can get away with a lot in between. In last night’s LSO concert under François-Xavier Roth there was a mixed bag of more and less successful beginnings and endings, but lots of fine playing sandwiched in the middle.Mahler was only 24 when he began work on his first symphony, but it is a work of astonishing ambition and mastery for such a young composer. It originally had a detailed programme note narrating the story behind the music, and a descriptive name: “Titan”. By the time of the revised version Mahler had thought Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Updating the classics is not without its pitfalls. How can a modern audience, which has a completely different set of religious beliefs, relate to a 17th century morality tale in which the lead character behaves really badly, but gets his comeuppance by being roasted in hell fire? This is the case with Molière’s Don Juan, or The Feast with the Statue, which was originally staged in 1665. In 2006, playwright and director Patrick Marber took this classic and pummelled it into shape as a play for today, complete with contemporary references aplenty. Now it’s being revived, with some rewrites, in Read more ...