Reviews
David Nice
Tinseltown's relationship to its more sophisticated, older New York brother is analogous to Ethan Mordden's engagement by Oxford University Press. The presentation is a sober, if slim, academic tome with an austere assemblage of black-and-white photos in the middle; what we get in the text is undoubtedly erudite but also racy, gossipy, anecdotal, list-inclined, sometimes camp and a tad hit and miss.The proviso that this is an ideal seasonal read comes with the knowledge that you can have fun searching YouTube for some of the more arcane musicals in question and find out exactly what Mordden Read more ...
graham.rickson
Adrian Corker: The Have-Nots OST (SN Variations)German director Florian Hoffmeister’s debut film The Have-Nots is a European exploration of the emotional after-effects of 9/11. The score comes from the British musician Adrian Corker. He’s worked with the likes of Antonia Bird and mentions Giacinto Scelsi on his website, so he must be worth investigating. Corker’s palette is dominated by a string quartet, though one including viola da gamba and bass. Luminous string textures are often undercut by ominous crackles, spits and hisses, the effect achieved by recording their parts straight to Read more ...
David Nice
Fiftysomething may well be the new 32, the age Strauss and Hofmannsthal made the central figure of the Marschallin in their "comedy for music" Der Rosenkavalier. Hearts and minds no doubt still move with Renée Fleming, senior doyenne of the role in Robert Carsen's Royal Opera production, but she is mirroring her character in bowing out gracefully to the next generation, and fellow American Rachel Willis-Sørensen is clearly the new Princess Werdenberg on the Viennese block. Even cast one's Octavian, the impassioned Alice Coote, is a known quantity to many of us, cast two's London-trained Anna Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I avoided seeing Art when it was first staged in 1996, even though Matthew Warchus’ production created a huge buzz and won an Olivier Award for Comedy. (On receiving the award, Yasmina Reza joked that she thought she’d written a tragedy not a comedy.)I knew the story involved an all-white painting bought for a whopping €100,000 and, in my paranoia, assumed the play was an invitation to snigger at contemporary art and anyone foolish enough to take it seriously. As a critic valiantly supporting young artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, I’d been made to squirm in front of a guffawing TV Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It could only happen in Halifax. The series' two families, whom we have come to know so well and – with exceptions – love, had arranged a pre-Christmas dinner out, festive-like as Alan, the ever-saintly Derek Jacobi, might put it. Instead there was Gillian (Nicola Walker) all on her tod, nursing a glass, until Caroline (Sarah Lancashire), equally solo, hoved into view. Pity the waiter who approached to ask what they’d like: a smaller table, pronto, and the wine list. The wine list is usually the crucial element when these two get together, though a later scene in the second episode of Sally Read more ...
David Nice
Sheku Kanneh-Mason isn't just BBC Young Musician 2016 - he's the year's top player in my books, a master at any level. Despite a contract with Decca, starting with the Shostakovich First Cello Concerto he played in the competition finale, he looks likely to remain loyal to family and friends, including the Fantasia Orchestra, founded this year, in which he's already played as part of the cello section.You have to pinch yourself to realise the ages delivering this quality. Kanneh-Mason is 17, as was Mendelssohn when he composed the work of total genius which launched last night's concert; Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite being kitted out with a full-scale intergalactic spaceship and all known computerised effects, Passengers is essentially a two-hander for its stars Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. Or you could maybe stretch that to a two-and-a-half-hander, if you include Michael Sheen's oily and obsequious bar-tending android.Perhaps it's part of director Morten (The Imitation Game) Tyldum's point that even if you're surrounded by the most lavish futuristic technology, space is still an infinite and soulless wasteland of nothingness, into which all human life might easily vanish without trace. The Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Classical dancers conventionally have the briefest of all performing careers in the arts, knowing from the very beginning that they'll be lucky to have 20 years of performing at the top of their abilities, after at least 10 years training from childhood onwards. But Dame Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991) was a phenomenon, dancing into her sixties, for reasons that this painful and affectionate programme tactfully explored.Darcey Bussell comes across as someone who in spite of the usual dancer's injuries has remained optimistic and even upbeat on her own trajectory to the top, into retirement from Read more ...
aleks.sierz
How’s this for a Christmas-week story? Joan, a young peasant girl – played in this version by the charismatically attractive Gemma Arterton – grows up in the bleak French countryside. She hears voices. It’s 1429, and they tell her to lift the siege of Orleans and defeat the English invaders. She inspires troops, she inspires the Dauphin. She helps crown him King of France. She is betrayed, captured by the English, tried as a heretic and burnt at the stake. Some 25 years later, the authorities realise that they have made a terrible mistake.You can easily see why George Bernard Shaw’s play Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Time was when the principal conductor of a top orchestra could afford to refine mastery of a small and familiar repertoire, covering a century and a half of music at most. The rest he (always he) would leave to loyal or youthful lieutenants. The days of such podium dinosaurs are numbered. The likes of Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons and Riccardo Muti are outflanked by colleagues, mostly a generation or two younger, who have been trained to view the entire history of Western ensemble music – at least three centuries’ worth – as the right and duty of an orchestra to promote.Daniele Gatti has Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
You couldn’t make him up – a big man in every sense, outspoken, spiky, adored, coming from a black working-class family to move from the proverbial nothing to become so much more than something. How to make a documentary tribute without it being sycophantic or a hagiography? By putting the man centre stage. Arise, Sir Lenny, the subject of a BAFTA tribute.We were given a straightforward chronological narrative from our star, sitting alone on a vast and empty stage, looking to camera, no interviewer visible. His informal monologue was interspersed with clips from stage, screen and television Read more ...
David Nice
Five seconds of cadenza in Mozart's Exsultate Jubilate would be enough to tell you that there's no more magical stylist among sopranos than Lucy Crowe. In an evening of Allelujas, Glorias and heartfelt Amens beautifully modulated by director of sprightly La Nuova Musica David Bates - henceforth David Peter Bates - hers was the central spot, and you wanted it to go on for ever.Even as much as she gave - five consecutive movements in Bach's Cantata Jauchzet Gott for soloist, trumpet (the brilliant David Blackadder) and string/continuo ensemble before the interval, four in the Mozart after it - Read more ...