Reviews
David Nice
Common wisdom has it that the prolific output of 20th century Czech genius Bohuslav Martinů is very uneven, a judgment surely made without a complete hearing. Some listeners shrink from his fidgety polystylism. Many of us on the fringes of the Martinů hardcore, though, have found ourselves giddy with each new discovery of music we didn't know before: last year, string duos on a CD from viola-player Maxim Rysanov, this year piano trios from the Czech label Supraphon and now two one-act operas, this time live from Guildhall students.Before voicing any reservations, it has to be spelled out that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Theseus was a tablet-carrying dictator, Lysander a sweet-faced asthmatic, and Peter Quince rechristened Mistress Quince in the agreeably unexpected presence of Elaine Paige: those were among the innovations of Russell T Davies's larky reworking of what must these days be Shakespeare's most frequently performed play. (A third London production in as many weeks starts performances May 31 at Southwark Playhouse.)On paper, such textual intervention sounds like so much jiggery-pokery, and I could have done without the action-movie theatrics that at one point saw an imperiled Hermia (Prisca Bakare Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rob da Bank’s Faustian pact with the weather gods continues apace with the second year of Common People, which takes place simultaneously in Southampton and Oxford. The forecast for days beforehand had predicted a cold front bearing relentless drizzle but, in the event, wellies were left packed away as the elements chose instead to offer blazing summer sunshine for the 30,000 revellers who attended the festival's second day at Southampton.I went with my two daughters, aged 13 and 18, and the attention to detail, which makes da Bank’s festivals (Camp Bestival, Bestival) so appealing, is Read more ...
Ed Owen
With the Olympic Games starting in three months, it’s time to cash in with those inspiring stories of competition. Jesse Owens embodies the Olympic spirit, winning four track golds at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, comprehensively refuting Hitler’s message of race hate. Owens’s track medal tally remained unmatched until Carl Lewis, 48 years later. It’s difficult to think of a more perfect Olympian.Like buses, Race is the first of three Owens biopics to come along. Disney’s adaptation of Jeremy Schaap’s Triumph is in production, as is another starring Owens lookalike Anthony Mackie. While first out Read more ...
Hugh Pearman
Arts festivals the size of the Venice Biennale are inevitably patchy. The appointed directors are hardly ever given enough time to curate and fill absolutely vast volumes of space. They can exhort the many national and individual participants to follow their lead, and yet they have no editorial control over them. And so for this year’s architecture biennale, with its theme of social responsibility – Reporting from the Front – set by director Alejandro Aravena, consider the newly-built Australian pavilion. This proudly features a swimming pool. Nothing else, apart from some voices.A swimming Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It shows you just how much Kenneth MacMillan changed ballet in this country that 1960's The Invitation, with its onstage rape, sexual grooming and child abuse, can act as the reassuring classic at the heart of the new Royal Ballet triple bill which opened on Saturday. The Invitation should be – and is – a shocking piece, but when bracketed by Wayne McGregor's brand new Obsidian Tear and Christopher Wheeldon's 2012 Within the Golden Hour, two particularly vapid examples of contemporary ballet, MacMillan's ballet de moeurs, for all its darkness, has a comforting solidity. It reassures us that Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Few TV series manage such copious, prominent and skilful trails. There was a “controversy” about doing a handbrake turn round the Cenotaph. There have been endless rumours about new presenter Chris Evans’s relationship with co-star Matt LeBlanc, then more rumours about Evans’s rivalry with former presenter Clarkson. At least this time the attention wasn’t created by Clarkson’s use of offensive racial stereotyping. But the new Top Gear knows the publicity benefits of a good row just as well as the old one.Yet despite a very similar look and feel, that’s where the likeness ends. Unlike its Read more ...
David Nice
Anger and fear in Elgar, introspection in middle-period Beethoven: these are undervalued qualities in each composer’s music. Yet such moods were vividly present in two hyper-nuanced interpretations last night. It was easy to believe that no other solo violinist in the world today strikes a finer balance between sweet tone in the upper register and overall strength than Nikolaj Znaider; and on this evidence it sounded as if Antonio Pappano, a perfect concerto partner and a master of symphonic light and shade, might have made an even better choice of LSO Music Director than Simon Rattle.The Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Painted during his first trip to Paris in 1900, Picasso’s Le Moulin de la Galette is an outsider’s view of an exotic and intimidating new world. Men and women are seen as if through some strange distorting lens, their blurred, mask-like faces indistinct but for red-slit mouths and coal-black eyes. We seem to be in the room with them, and yet we are isolated. Even a woman looking out from the edge of the canvas gazes straight past us: if not invisible, we are certainly inconsequential.The painting is a heavily symbolic start to this exhibition, which tells the well-worn but, to all but the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Beth Orton’s sparsely ethereal new collection Kidsticks has been well received for marking an interesting change of direction. Last night’s Brighton Festival gig gave audiences the best of both, beginning with most of the new songs, then climaxing with some old favourites that evoked her rockier past.Nor was it just the blend of old and new songs that offered an intriguing perspective on her craft. Live, her voice has a grainier, more sensuous quality than on (the new) record. A case can be made for the perfect sheen of the recorded sound. The glassy lacquer was missed on the dreamy waft “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Last May, Malmö trio Death and Vanilla issued the To Where the Wild Things are album and it seemed they had arrived as a fully formed post-Broadcast proposition, harmoniously fusing vintage influences like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Italian giallo soundtracks and The United States of America. With its cover imagery evoking the British Ghostbox label, To Where the Wild Things are could have been dismissed as havng thumbed a ride on a musical excursion begun by others. But the album was so assured and stuffed with such dreamy melodies it transcended the inspirations. Death and Vanilla were Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A Victorian transgender celebrity is a fitting and timely subject for this Brighton Festival premiere. Writer-director Neil Bartlett turns Stella’s scandalous life into a stark horror story, marked by the regular, jarring crash of glass which sounds like splintering flashbulbs, mirror images breaking and jabbing at an older man (Richard Cant) whose hand is already slashed and bandaged, as he awaits a fatal knock on the door. A young man (Oscar Batterham), meanwhile, becomes a beautiful woman expecting a lover. Both are, or were, Stella, telling their tale in intercut, elliptical monologues. Read more ...