Reviews
Thomas H. Green
Behind and beside Canadian electronic noisies Crystal Castles are lines of strobes which they use relentlessly from the moment they arrive onstage. It’s hard to even look, such is the visual barrage, and when I do, for as long as my retinas can stand, I only see a manic silhouette, flinging itself around, long hair whipping about like a dervish having a fit. As opening song “Concrete” draws to a close, this proves to be pink-maned frontwoman Edith Frances who now, and throughout the whole gig, squirts bottled water over her head and on the front rows.On one level, it’s surprising Crystal Read more ...
Matthew Wright
There was an Italian flavour to the EFG London Jazz Festival programme at Kings Place on Thursday night. Enrico Rava is an eminent statesman of European jazz, who emerged in the 1960s as a disciple of Miles Davis. He was collaborating with young pianist Giovanni Guidi, also recorded on ECM, though best known for diaphanous soundscapes rather than free jazz at its most raw and bloody. They were joined by electronic music pioneer Matthew Herbert, who now has a distinguished presence across opera, theatre, film and books, as well as improvised electronica. Last night’s gig was the first Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Op. 90, Op. 101 and Op. 106 Steven Osborne (Hyperion)These three Beethoven sonatas are often thrown together as a trilogy; each work seems to lead into the next, the technical demands and scale increasing as they progress. Steven Osborne’s disc places the Hammerklavier first. And it’s phenomenally good; a big-boned, entertaining performance of a vast, unwieldy work, Osborne capturing the grandeur along with the passages of whimsical introspection. There’s a racy scherzo and a beautifully sustained slow movement. And what a finale: Beethoven’s peculiar slow Read more ...
graham.rickson
French horn players active in jazz are thin on the ground: there’s the long-deceased John Graas, and composer and polymath Gunther Schuller’s career took in collaborations with Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. Unlike most brass instruments, the horn’s bell faces backwards, potentially creating balance and coordination problems. Bandleader Stan Kenton tried to solve the problem by using an unwieldy hybrid instrument called the mellophonium; you can hear its piercing roar on his West Side Story album.Ex-RPO horn player Jim Rattigan solves any balance issues with discreet use of amplification, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Name seven students in Ravenclaw. Which 14 subjects are on the syllabus at Hogwarts? Create a shopping list of 20 different types of magical sweet. In her Harry Potter stories JK Rowling conjured up an almanack of wizarding facts and figures which, for parents, proved extremely useful during long car journeys or steep mountain climbs (even if this parent didn’t know all the answers). A handy staple was “List 16 magical creatures”. It would keep them going for hours because, if memory serves, Rowling created only 14 of them. That all changes in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
At the conclusion of a year in which Britishness has come so resoundingly to the fore of the national debate – and with a play that at the time of its writing, 1605-6, was engaging with that concept no less urgently – the first impression made by Gregory Doran’s King Lear is how far removed it looks from any traditional sense of "British".That's the case not least in Niki Turner’s design, which moves from an introductory tableau of hunched figures and a noise like the rumbling of a ship’s engine room to reveal a minimalist, brick wall-backed space. Black dominates – Cordelia’s virgin white Read more ...
Matt Wolf
That old saw about a star being born really is on view at the Noel Coward Theatre, where newcomer Charlie Stemp justifies and then some, the fuss being made about him in this "revisal" of the onetime Tommy Steele vehicle Half A Sixpence. Whether you'll respond as warmly to the show itself may depend on your appetite for nostalgia and the implicit message of a piece at considerable odds with an aspirational climate that long ago left the attitudes on view here in the dust. But stick with Stemp's unforced and genuinely buoyant charm, and as long as he is vaulting with unbridled abandon about Read more ...
peter.quinn
For fans of vocal jazz and fine lyric writing, this 75th birthday concert for the inimitable Norma Winstone offered a treasure trove of riches. From intimate chamber jazz to the gravitas of a full orchestra, the two sets seamlessly blended every aspect of Winstone’s artistry.As Nick Smart, the Royal Academy of Music’s Head of Jazz and our genial conductor for the evening, reminded us in his scene-setting introduction, we were celebrating not one but two anniversaries: it was in November 1966 that Winstone performed her first run at Ronnie Scott's as a band leader in her own right, opposite Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For those new to this Irish crime series, a brief catch-up. Jack Taylor (played by Iain Glen at his world-weary best) is a hard-drinking maverick loner ex-cop who left the Garda Siochána (Ireland's police force) after hitting a politician to investigate cases as private detective. He says there aren't many of his kind in Ireland, as the job is “too close to being an informant – a dodgy concept”. He chases criminals in Galway City, pounding the streets in his old Garda blue greatcoat, and is ably abetted by Kate Noonan, an ex-colleague who passes on information from Garda databases (and who Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jim Jarmusch has made a memorial to the Stooges, more than a celebration of their brutal prime. His Zen rhythms, which roll so movingly through the upcoming Paterson, aren’t entirely equipped for the blunt trauma of Ron Asheton’s guitar, or Iggy Pop’s penchant for sultry chaos. He’s barely adequate journalistically on the band’s early years, but is on hand for their death, as hard living leaves almost no Stooge standing. This makes his documentary a proud headstone for punk’s founding fathers, and one of America’s greatest groups. Ron Asheton died in 2009, before Jarmusch began filming, and Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
So, the Inspector has come calling yet again. Twenty-four years have passed since Stephen Daldry’s graphic revision of JB Priestley’s moral tub-thumper opened at the National, followed by a tour of duty in the West End that seemed to go on forever. The Birling family house collapsed eight times a week at the Aldwych, the Garrick, the Novello and then Wyndhams, and set builders never had it so good.Yet it would be wrong to assume that nothing about this production has changed in that time. For a start, its success has more or less finished off any possibility of staging this period drawing- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The beauty of the past is that it’s a foreign country, and you don’t need a visa to visit it. With the free movement of the imagination you can conjure up life as it might have once been experienced. You can even join a re-enactment society. In the theatre, the evocation of a pre-industrial landscape has a noble lineage, with outstanding examples such as Sue Glover’s lyrical Bondagers (1991) or David Harrower’s haunting Knives in Hens (1995) always on the far horizon. Now it’s the turn of EV Crowe to journey to this enchanting location, and to tell us a bit about what she finds there.The Read more ...