Reviews
Peter Quantrill
Idyllic setting, star-rated musicians, the sense of an occasion. Verbier so wholly fulfils the clichés of an international music festival that to the cynical it can seem complacent or arrogant in doing so. To the uninitiated – and this was my first visit to the Monaco of the Mountains – there is more than a sprinkling of magic about the sheer implausibility of the place. Perched 1500m up, yet nestling within a circle of Alpine peaks topped by Mont Fort, a town of hardly more than four main streets draws many of the world’s finest performers for three weeks of almost non-stop music-making.The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A two-bar flurry of guitar lays the table for a skip-along beat, handclaps, and an arrangement and melody akin to Martha and the Vandellas’ March 1964 single “In my Lonely Room”. This though was not a Motown production and did not tell the story of a girl so distraught at her boyfriend’s dalliances that all she could do was take to her lonely room and cry. On “The 81”, Candy & the Kisses sang of a dance craze for anyone “tired of doing the monkey, tired of doing the swing.”Despite being a knock-off of the Detroit sound, the irresistible “The 81” did not sound like a Motown record. It Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“Ooooh, it’s gorgeous!” exclaimed my wife-to-be as we arrived at what had been described as “an oasis in Hertfordshire.” They weren’t kidding, either. The site for the inaugural festival organised by Notting Hill Carnival stalwarts Sancho Panza couldn’t have been more different from West London if it tried. In place of terraced houses there were wall-to-wall trees, the only flyover was the sound of planes headed for Luton across an open sky.Now, full disclosure here, I’ve never been the biggest fan of Carnival. I’ve been unlucky I suspect, but if I want to re-create the magic of Bank Holiday Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Flames of Paris, in Alexei Ratmansky's 2008 reworking, is a ballet of contrasts. Between the first and second acts, so different in pace and quality, between the naturalistic intimacy of certain pas de deux and the stylised posturing of the crowd scenes, between the tedious masque in Act I and the fireworks show-off variations in Act II, between the liquid velvet blood-red curtains and the flat black-and-white line drawing sets.But it works, and that's down in large part to the choreographer's clever transformaton of the Stalin-pleasing Soviet ballet by Vasily Vainonen into something much Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Billie Piper vaults to the top rank of British theatre actresses with Yerma, Australian writer-director Simon Stone's rabidly free rewrite of Lorca's 1934 play that posits its young star as the sort of take-no-prisoners talent whose gifts come not from drama school but from something gloriously unfettered and astonishingly free.Billed as "after Lorca", Stone quickly leaves behind his Spanish source to construct a modern-day story about a psyche in freefall that takes a marriage with it, the occasional directorial modishness soon giving itself over to an unsparing portrait of individual Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Concert halls, as Gregg Wallace might observe if he ever went to one, don’t come much bigger than the Royal Albert Hall, nor violin concertos than the Tchaikovsky. Faced with this awesome combination, the temptation for a soloist is to play up to the occasion. Volume gets louder, vibrato faster, emotions are amped. But not for Pekka Kuusisto. This Finnish violinist has always gone his own way, as likely to be found playing jazz, electronica or folk music as a concerto, and his Tchaikovsky last night was no different.From the long opening melody to the Finale’s boot-stamping dance of a theme, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Butterworth: Orchestral Works BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Kriss Russman, with James Rutherford (baritone) (BIS)George Butterworth died 100 years ago this week. His surviving orchestral music isn’t enough to fill a single disc. But here we get 75 minutes’ worth, the extras and completions all orchestrated by conductor Kriss Russman. The results are unfailingly sympathetic: Russman wisely keeps things light and transparent, making the full-blooded moments more of a surprise. A Shropshire Lad’s “Think no more, lad” is wittily scored, and the string writing in “Is my team ploughing?” is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“A woman’s brain is a mystery,” explains one man to another in Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her. “You have to pay attention to women. Be thoughtful occasionally. Caress them. Remember they exist, they’re alive and they matter to us.” They matter to no one so much as the great Spanish film director. Almodóvar has flirted with exploring the emotional ebb and flow of homosexuality in his work, but for the most part he has pursued his veneration of the fairer sex. “Women are more spectacular as dramatic subjects,” he once explained. “They have a greater range of registers.”The proof is in the film Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary Bobby Sands: 66 Days than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provides the immediate context – an increasingly dramatic one as the countdown of Sands’s hunger strike nears its inexorable conclusion. But the film’s interest is broader, not least in examining his role as a symbolic figure, both in the immediate context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and across a much wider historical perspective.The drama of Sands’ life and death has already Read more ...
Katie Colombus
For anyone who suffers from FIFOMO (festival-induced-fear-of-missing-out), Standon Calling is ideal. It’s like a pocket-sized version of Latitude, borrowing the Big Top and the mix of modern music with nostalgic pop acts, or Wilderness, borrowing the purple domed stage, the need for hot tubs and gastronimical treats. It has the feel of an epic house party, being set in the grounds of a 16th-century manor house 30 miles north of London.An area called "The Lawn" is home to Hartbeeps who hold daily baby raves in front of a yurt for nappy changing, and around the corner from a swimming pool where Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Yes, from life," Nikolai Ivanov (Geoffrey Streatfeild) says in passing of a painting midway through the early Chekhov play that bears his name. But the phrase could serve as the abiding achievement of the largely thrilling triptych of plays that has transferred from Chichester to the National under the banner title Young Chekhov.Here, as Ivanov's fleeting remark implies, is life in all its often despairing amplitude, and if the net result of Chekhov's worldview across eight hours is paradoxically exhilarating, that's because few writers see life so completely in the round. You emerge from Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
What do women want? Ballet plots are not the best guide, since the main desiderata – a well-paying job, coffee dates with girlfriends, not to die young of a broken heart – are rarely the lot of ballet heroines. Comedies at least tend to have the not-dying part covered, but they often fall down on at least one of two other big requirements: that one's family should be supportive, and that one's romantic partner should not be a chump. Pity Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew, which the Bolshoi presented in London last night in Jean-Christophe Maillot's 2014 production for the company: burdened Read more ...