Reviews
Katie Colombus
For a self-made band that found success via the creation of quirky, imaginative YouTube videos spread via social media, there's a level of expectation regarding the same kind of creativity in their live shows. But in fact Canadian indie band Walk Off The Earth's REVO tour experience is a very simple one. Starting with "Rule the World", the band seemed understated, even a little unsure. But then came "Walking Off the World Tonight", a song containing lyrics that talk you through the building of a song – rusty old guitars, a shaker and a uke, being that’s all that’s needed to create Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Just a few hours earlier, as helicopters clattered overhead and thousands joined the good-humoured but impassioned March for Europe, an evening of contemporary art felt like the last thing anyone needed. On this day of all days, launching an art festival inspired by the success of Nuit Blanche in Paris felt like an unnecessary application of salt to the wound. While art can provide solace in times of crisis, really good art needs also to do so much more, and it was hard to see how an event conceived many months ago could adequately respond to the extraordinary developments of the past 10 days Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pictured above is the label of an exceptionally important Pink Floyd record issued last November. Only a thousand people bought a copy. That was the amount that hit shops. Pink Floyd 1965: Their First Recordings was a double seven-inch set with a historic importance inversely proportionate to its availability. It was the first ever outing for the earliest recordings by the band and, as such, the earliest compositions for them by its prime songwriter Syd Barrett. He died on 7 July 2006 at age 60, and a look at this hard-to-find yet significant release is a tribute to his memory.The band is the Read more ...
Thomas Rees
£100 – £175 is a lot of money to pay for two hours of music, but that’s what it cost to see Pat Metheny at Ronnie Scott’s this week. The guitar great is in town with his new quartet, a dream team comprising British pianist Gwilym Simcock, bassist Linda Oh (a major name on the New York scene who I first saw performing with Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas’ Sound Prints quintet) and drummer Antonio Sánchez, a long-time Metheny collaborator and the composer of the acclaimed score to Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman.Shoehorned in at the bar, with the rest of the club packed to the rafters, I Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
For some of us, Siegfried is a perfect opera. Like L.627 it stubbornly observes the Aristotelian rules of space and time to cut a generous slice of life. There are almost no set-pieces to break the flow of one-on-one conversations, accusations, confessions, arguments. These encounters are inevitably stifled by a concert staging, where singers address themselves to us, never to each other. Peter Mumford’s video projections set the scene with trees and glowing embers like a piece of slow TV on YouTube or BBC4.Wisdom also holds that Siegfried is the Scherzo of the Ring. Maybe not only for its Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Notes on Blindness is an extraordinary film that wears its original genius lightly. The debut full-length documentary from directors Peter Middleton and James Spinney, it may seem complicated in its assembly, but has a final impact that is luminously simple. And to speak of a film whose immediate subject is the loss of sight – and by extension, of the visual element that comprises cinema itself – in terms of luminousness is finally no paradox at all.It’s the story of John Hull, an Australian-born theologian whose acclaimed 1990 book Touching the Rock recorded his experience of going blind. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Scriabin and Stockhausen: Light Vanessa Benelli Mosell (Decca)Scriabin and Stockhausen are both associated with excess, so it's pleasing to report that Vanessa Benelli Mosell's second Decca disc goes over the top in some areas: there's a bonkers sleeve image and some bizarre photos in the booklet. Due credit is given to Mosell's fashion designer and to Luxury Living magazine, and you suspect that neither composer would have objected. Mosell's set of Scriabin's Op. 11 Preludes is very fine indeed, largely because she's so good at nailing the character of each one. The fireworks present no Read more ...
Alison Cole
The opening image of this new David Hockney exhibition – a sketchily painted portrait of a seated man, slumping heavily forward, his head buried in his hands – could be a portrait of Brexit despair. In fact it is Hockney’s portrait of his close friend and studio manager J-P Gonçalves de Lima – painted at a time when Hockney was himself at a particularly low ebb, depleted by illness, the tragic death of a young studio assistant, and the gargantuan effort that had gone into making his 2012 Yorkshire landscape exhibition at the Royal Academy such a blockbuster success.In this sense, this opening Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Why does Natalia Osipova, one of the world's best classical, dramatic ballerinas, want to start a sideline in contemporary dance in the middle of her career? Two years ago, when she mounted her first self-commissioned contemporary triple bill with her then newly-ex-fiancée Ivan Vasiliev, I was willing to believe that it was for the love of trying new things, pushing her own boundaries, and taking all aspects of her artform seriously.Though that show delivered two utterly forgettable pieces alongside the memorably black Facada by Arthur Pita, Osipova herself admitted that she had Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Recently the television historian Bettany Hughes, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, energetic, enthusiastic and rather astonished, has tramped across the continents on our behalf, making a clutch of hour-long documentary introductions to the individuals with the most profound influence on human society. For this third and final film (made in association with the Religion and Ethics department of the Open University), she had as her quarry the medical man whose insights, however intuitive rather than scientific in the modern sense, formed and still form our view of ourselves.Yes, it was he: Sigmund Read more ...
David Nice
Enter the human - and superhuman demands for at least four of the singers - in the second, towering instalment of Wagner's Ring cycle. It says so much for Opera North's achievement so far that no one fell in any way short of the sometimes insane vocal demands. There were only varying degrees of characterisation and commitment, none of them less than fine.Bad luck, perhaps, that the lower, though not exactly low, temperatures came in the first act as we meet the hero Wotan has fathered as free agent, or so he thinks, and the heroine sister whose incestuous love is a case, as the chief god puts Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Not every Glastonbury can be blazing summer. 2016 was hard work, with real world gloom permeating the already damp party bubble. But, as your teachers used to say, you only get out what you put in. The only way to take things was to go hard or go home, no quarter given and pay later.Thus, this report comes way after the rest. The contemporary media is focused on putting content online as fast as possible. A response after the event is commercial suicide, no longer an option. But how can you smear yourself in Glastonbury’s madness if you spend half your time in the Media Tent, a dead zone of Read more ...