Reviews
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong is continuing to put his own stamp on landmark works of the mainstream repertory with the Hallé. This time it was Beethoven’s Third, "Eroica", Symphony. That’s not to say that his programmes are devoid of novelty for the orchestra’s Manchester audience. He’s made Unsuk Chin the “Featured Composer” for the present season, and her subito con forza, written as a tribute to Beethoven in 2020, represented her in this concert. It’s a piece of which the Hallé gave the UK premiere (in the BBC Proms of 2021, under Sir Mark Elder), but except for those listeners who attended its Read more ...
James Saynor
“We will sacrifice our souls for you!” yells out a class of kids in The President’s Cake, nominally addressing a leader hundreds of miles away – the Iraqi despot, Saddam Hussein. The slogan the children are forced to spew by their paranoid teachers is, on one level, mindless enough. On another, it goes to the heart of this exceedingly good movie: How much do you have to sell your soul in a dictatorship falling apart at the seams?Set in 1990, not long before the first Gulf War, the film follows frantic days in the life of nine-year-old Lamia, who lives in a one-room wicker house on a wicker Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Some 16 or so years ago, I recall hearing what sounded like fireworks from my hotel room in Chișinău, the capital of Moldova. I was aware of the Russian-occupied, unrecognised state of Transnistria, but thought that it was very distant, It wasn’t – and I still think they were fireworks, but I can't be sure.In Tbilisi, I heard stories of Russian tanks lined up just 40 kms or so from the Georgian capital; in Yerevan, Armenia and Baku, Azerbaijan, I was told quiet understated cases for both countries’ longstanding claims to Nagorno-Karabakh. That crash course in the poitical turmoil of the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Lincoln, you have not been a Monday night crowd, they can be a bit funny,“ says Suede frontman Brett Anderson just before then band exit the stage for the final time. “You’re more than just watchers, you got involved.”It’s doubly true. For multiple obvious reasons, Monday can be an underwhelming gig experience for both bands and audiences (I’ve come to almost resent it when bands I like hit town that day). But within this giant, red brick, converted 19th century steam engine shed, the capacity 1500 crowd respond fervently from the very start.It says something about Suede’s partial rejection Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
An infamous international financier, with a contacts book that includes presidents and dictators, a dark dossier on everyone he’ll ever need to bribe or blackmail, and a cold, ruthless heart, spends a long night in downtown New York trying to save his business. And he’ll go to any lengths to do it, including pimping his own son. Terence Rattigan wrote Man and Boy in the Sixties and set it in the Thirties, his evil protagonist partly based on a crooked Swedish businessman finally undone by the Great Depression. But it screams of the here and now, of Robert Maxwell, Bernie Madoff and Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Bayard Rustin is a fascinating but little-known figure in US history: a civil rights organiser who worked behind the scenes on both the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington, as well as campaigning for pacifism (he was on the British anti-nuclear Aldermaston March in 1958) and gay rights. He was also an accomplished singer and lutenist, and advocate for Elizabethan song repertoire. An unlikely but intriguing combination, and one that was at the heart of yesterday’s Night Shift concert by personnel from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the Blues Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Emerald Fennell’s latest film begins with a sly joke. As the production company credits roll, the sound of distinctive creaking overlays them, increasing in frequency and intensity, and joined by male groans that reach a climax. She's at it again, we are being led to think, the gratuitous graphic sex.Well, yes and no. When she cuts to the visuals of the scene we have been hearing, it’s a raucous public hanging, where, as an excitable youth informs the crowd, the rope wasn’t properly placed to break the man’s neck and his slow suffocation has produced “a stiffie” instead. (Close-up of man’s Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
MILES., a two-hander with Benjamin (Benji) Akintuyosi as Miles Davis and trumpeter Jay Phelps in a host of roles, including himself – is a show which works remarkably well.Remarkably, yes. Akintuyosi only made his professional acting debut in this role in a run of the show in Edinburgh last summer. Jay Phelps is above all known as a fine trumpet player and a music producer rather than as an actor. And the subject, Miles Davis – this show is carefully placed just ahead of the centenary of his birth in late May – was a complex and in many ways a disputed figure.One reason why the show is so Read more ...
David Nice
Perfectly at one in matching tone and response, this phenomenal duo who are both formidable solo personalities in their own right also took us through a range of colours and approaches in a cornucopia of masterpieces for both four hands at one piano and two instruments placed side by side, from Bach to Lutoslawski, Debussy to Tailleferre.The first half was typical of their thoughtfulness. The grounding was in Bach, Bartlett providing the spiritual pulse at the start of the Sonatina from the cantata "Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit" in Kurtág's transcription (you always know a true Bach Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The jury was out when Ballet Nights first made its pitch to the dance-curious – a potential audience, the thinking went, that might be nervous about signing up to the full three-act deal in an opera house but could be tempted by something more akin to a variety show, a curated mix of classical and contemporary with a compère to schmooze them through it. With no item lasting longer than 10 minutes and some as little as three, Ballet Nights would be a tasting menu, in effect, and each would be a one-off event. A nice idea, but is it sustainable? Apparently, yes. Three years on, Ballet Nights Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There are always a few drawbacks to being a support act. For Allie X, the biggest issue was simply finding space to stand onstage, with so much ground already filled with covered up props for the night’s headliners. Still, she made a good effort with what she had, working the crowd well, and the clattering electro-pop of “Super Duper Party People” and a wickedly noisy “Off With Her Tits” carried enough verve by themselves that no stage craft was needed.Magdalena Bay had plenty of those songs too, but accompanied them with a stage décor that appeared to be aiming for the stars, or the moons. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
An evening in the company of the smiley Russell Howard always lifts one’s spirits and his latest show, Don’t Tell the Algorithm, proves no exception.But first he’s going to get a few things off his chest as he bounces around the stage – namely, the state of the world. “What a wonderful time to be alive,” he says drily, as in just the first 10 minutes he manages to mention Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Bonnie Blue, ICE agents, Iran and Brooklyn Beckham. It’s a breathless performance and gag-heavy, and sets the tone for the evening – silliness laced with seriousness in a trademark Read more ...