Reviews
Peter Quantrill
Advent is as profitable for choirs as it is tricky to programme. How to delight the palates of carol-hungry audiences while offering them new treats? How to reconcile the fairy-lights of ubiquitous consumption and satiation with the Biblical call of the season as a time to wait, take stock and look forward?Without a "Ding-Dong" in earshot, Siglo de Oro appeared at the Spitalfields Music Winter Festival and brightened up a wet and windy evening in east London with unfailingly polished accounts of Advent antiphons at either end of a half-millennium. Pearls of 16th-century polyphony gleamed in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Cities, the fastest growing habitats in the history of the world, provided the subject for the sixth and final programme in Planet Earth II, the series that came a decade after the original Planet Earth programmes set new standards for television coverage of wildlife and nature.The follow-up confirmed that they are still being set, even though we have become accustomed to intrepid cameramen getting close to subjects never seen before, and tight narrative editing that gives us both visible and verbal comprehensible sequences, all anchored by the comforting familiarity of David Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
This would have been an intriguing recital at any time. But in the context of Brexit, a programme of songs in a second language, of music expressing composers’ fascination with another country, another landscape, another sound-world, had a poignancy that was hard to ignore.We heard German composers tackle Italian, Russians swap their covered vowels for England’s more open ones, and even Italians trying their hand at Scottish folksongs. The results weren’t always fluent, sometimes struggling to manoeuvre themselves into the borrowed culture, but they were telling, especially when delivered by Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
When asked about her most famous short story, "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson said, “I hate it. I’ve lived with that thing 15 years. Nobody will ever let me forget it.” Sixty-eight years later, it’s seared into the American psyche and has been a set text for decades. It was published in the New Yorker in 1948 and generated more mail – about 300 letters, mainly horrified - than any work of fiction the magazine had published.It’s still chilling, this calmly told story of everyday villagers who have a yearly ritual: that of stoning one of the members of their close-knit community to death. Some Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anthologie 1953–2002 is a monster. A 20-disc set spanning almost 50 years, it tracks one of France’s most beloved singers and songwriters. Gilbert Bécaud died in December 2001, but songs from his posthumously released Je Partirai album are included. Fitting, as his music lives on and the release of this box set marks the 15th anniversary of his death.Outside France, Bécaud is less well known. Though his “A Little Love and Understanding” single charted in Britain in 1975, he did not make a Charles Aznavour-style crossover to mainstream recognition in the Anglophone world. He’s never been given Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It’s television, not theatre, that has real power. Real cultural force. Cultural muscle. Take the case of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one-woman show, Fleabag. First staged in 2013 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it has appeared twice at the Soho since then, garnering a shelf-load of theatre nominations and awards along the way.That’s great, but nobody outside the narrow world of the London theatre scene knew much about it. Then, earlier this year, this hour-long monologue was shown on BBC Three as a six-part series – and bang! Suddenly everyone was talking about it. What had started as a piece Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The period before Christmas is, inevitably, when stand-ups rush to market. With so much material now available on YouTube, fewer comics release DVDs nowadays, but some of the best still do. This is theartsdesk's selection of the best live acts caught on film.Billy Connolly: High HorseBilly Connolly, now 74 and suffering from Parkinson's disease and prostate cancer, belies the ravages of his various illnesses. His delivery may be a little less impassioned, but by golly can he still tell a shaggy dog story better than any other comic. He deals frankly and funnily with his condition: “I'm going Read more ...
Matt Wolf
This Chekhov-intensive year comes to a muted climax with a rare sighting of Wild Honey. Michael Frayn's reappraisal of the Russian master's untitled early text is more commonly known as Platonov. There was a scorching production of the play this summer at the National as part of a Young Chekhov trilogy. A separate Broadway Platonov, adapted by Andrew Upton under the title The Present and starring his wife Cate Blanchett, begins previews next week.That's a lot of airings of a supposedly obscure play. It was superlatively well served on the South Bank by the director Jonathan Kent. And here Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
John Donnelly’s play The Pass scored a slate of five-star reviews when it ran at the Royal Court early last year – theartsdesk called it “scorching” – and plaudits for Russell Tovey’s central performance were practically stellar (“a star performance from onetime History Boys student that this actor's career to this point has in no way suggested,” we raved). For those who missed that sell-out, small-stage, seven-week run, Ben A Williams’ film adaptation delivers all the impact of that experience, in an independent British production that manages the transfer from stage to screen more than Read more ...
David Nice
Praise be to the spell cast by top players on great composers. Without the phenomenon that is Leila Josefowicz, John Adams would never have created his often prolix, fitfully hair-raising Scheherazade.2, more "dramatic symphony" for violin and orchestra than a concerto like his earlier work for the same combination (though that, too, is far from straightforward). It has to be experienced in concert to make its full impact: Josefowicz, in both sound and vision, is the very epitome of the proud and defiant heroine whose task is not to charm a murderous husband but to speak truth to power.Adams Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Ebullient, prolific, loquacious and a charmingly enthusiastic historian both in print and for television, Simon Sebag Montefiore has turned his attention to the pivotal city of Vienna, nourished equally by the Danube and its central geographical position in Europe.Images, both interior and exterior, were punctuated by our intrepid explorer-historian, characteristically garbed in bright blue shirt, giving scale to street and landscape, and easily picked out by his trademark jaunty straw hat as he walked through imperial Vienna. It was history experienced on foot, matching intellectual and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There are no cartwheels, and no one does the splits, in the new London revival of that most cherishable of Broadway musicals, She Loves Me, which immediately sets Matthew Wright's Menier Chocolate Factory entry apart from the fresh sighting of the same 1963 show that swept New York last season. What one gets instead is the most deeply felt, penetratingly acted version of the piece imaginable. Following the press night curtain call, the show's 92-year-old lyricist, a spry Sheldon Harnick, took to the stage to pronounce this production the best She Loves Me he had seen. Surely he of all people Read more ...