Reviews
Richard Bratby
Left, alone, Hans Abrahamsen’s new piano concerto for the left hand, swirls out of the darkness to a jagged motor rhythm. Piano and orchestra clash and interlock; you’re reminded of Prokofiev and Ravel. Then something happens. A piano plays, but the soloist is motionless. It’s been there all the time, of course – an orchestral piano, up on the percussion risers. But now it’s turned threatening: upstaging the soloist with its full two-handed range and stealing his musical voice, his very identity. And although it doesn’t really intervene again until the last movement, you’re continually aware Read more ...
Jasper Rees
At last, after three series, Line of Duty delivered a denouement that felt like a satisfying jackhammer to the solar plexus. In the first series the bent copper under investigation escaped justice by jumping in front of a lorry. In the second there were more loose ends than are generally produced by a rope factory. It turns out that patience is a virtue and we should all have had faith.Jed Mercurio had long-term plans for Lindsay Denton that even Keeley Hawes knew nothing about. Also for the late Tommy Hunter and, of course, DC Nigel Morton, in which role Neil Morrissey kept hobbling back on Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The recent Alien Day was a contrived event designed to sell as much tat related to the Alien film franchise as possible. However, it had one intriguing side effect. Seventy-five copies of the soundtrack to the second film, Aliens, appeared on liquid-filled vinyl, created by New York artist Curtis Godino. These strange artefacts are pictured above. In theartsdesk on Vinyl record collection, there’s a version of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” by Al Jourgensen’s tongue-in-cheek industrial act Revolting Cocks that originally came in a transparent sleeve containing liquid (until it all Read more ...
Florence Hallett
You wouldn't judge a painting on how it would look in your own home, but textiles are different: in fact it is exactly this assessment that counts. A length of fabric laid flat is a half-formed thing: it needs to be cut, stitched and draped before we can appreciate it, and even then it must take its place within an interior, domestic or public, before we can really understand it. Fabrics need – to coin a terrible, but useful expression – to be activated.There are examples of John Piper’s textile designs, like Arundel (1959, issued 1960), that look rather wonderful framed and treated like Read more ...
David Nice
It is a truth not widely acknowledged in the UK as yet that Robin Ticciati's elder brother Hugo is no less fine a shaper of musical thought. He could, as his solo playing last night richly proved, have had a career as a virtuoso violinist playing with all the world's great orchestras. Instead he chose a much more individual path: inspiring, even electrifying a group of musicians in Sweden, forging highly original programmes in which the so-called "old" – for which read timeless – comes up freshest in the company of the new.As soloist, he had no fear of comparisons here with the ever- Read more ...
David Kettle
And so, it’s farewell to Mark Thomson with his final production as artistic director of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, after 13 years in the job (incoming artistic director David Grieg unveils his new season next week). With Homer’s The Iliad, in a new dramatisation by Clydebank-born playwright Chris Hannan, Thomson is going out with a bang – it’s a big, bold show that tackles one of our culture-defining myths, albeit a lesser-known one (‘the greatest story never told" is how the goddess Hera describes it within the play itself). And while their Iliad has got its flaws, you can’t help but admire Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Nick Payne has carved out a distinctive dramatic territory – neuroscience. In his big 2012 hit, Constellations, he explored the effect on memory of living with a brain tumour, while two years later in Incognito, the story of what happened to Albert Einstein’s brain was married to the case of a man who had parts of his grey matter removed to cure his epileptic seizures. Now Payne returns to the fertile landscape of inner space with a story about a lesbian couple who, when one of them fails ill with a dangerous cerebral condition, benefit from rapid advances in medical science.Set in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The world of antiquity, from Greece to Rome, is both so familiar and so unknown. So it was more than welcome when the immensely knowledgable Professor Mary Beard – the role of the academic, she announced, is to make everything less simple – enthusiastically embarked on this four-part televisual history of Rome and its empire’s rise and fall. Inviting us to share her passionate interest in Roman history, she was almost obsessively determined to ensure that we too can understand why the subject is so compelling and important.The first instalment included examinations of the city of Rome, Read more ...
David Kettle
There’s a great film waiting to be made about the demographic crisis – old-age poverty, worthless pensions, abuse of the elderly, ramshackle retirement homes, disregard from the young. Likeable though it is, this breezy tale of ageing bank-robbing Robin Hoods from writer/director John Miller (with a little help from TV’s Nick Knowles as co-writer/exec producer) isn’t that film.It’s ironic, in fact, to preface the movie with Dylan Thomas’s lines about not going gentle into that good night when the last thing the film does is to rage against the dying of the light. Gentle the film’s good- Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Tim Albery’s 2010 production of Wagner's Tannhäuser is back for a revival at Royal Opera, featuring a different conductor and a nearly new cast, with one notable exception. The production itself is serviceable, visually coherent and with plenty of atmosphere. The sets, by Michael Levine begin with a replica of the Covent Garden proscenium arch in the Venusberg scene, which is then shown in progressive states of decay in the following acts. The Venusberg choreography, by Jasmin Vardimon, is modern and slick, as dynamic as it is sensual.The drama that follows is much more static, however, with Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It's the first night of The Fall's four-night residency at The Garage in Highbury, north London, a suitably small venue to get the full visceral rub of the current group – Elena Poulou on keyboards, guitarist Peter Greenaway, drummer Keiron Melling, and bassist Dave Spurr. It’s the longest-lasting Fall line-up Mark E Smith has permitted in the group’s 40-year history, and they have a fabulous, wildly experimental and rough-at-the-edges new EP, Wise Ol' Man, and one of the best albums of The Fall’s latterday career – one of the best, full-stop – in Sublingual Tablet behind them.Much of the 75- Read more ...
Ed Owen
How would you behave if your wife was killed in a random car accident? In Demolition, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Davis, a wealthy banker, is almost relieved – he can ditch his job, his house, nearly everything of his old life, and shack up with a total stranger.Over the course of his three previous English-language films, Québécois director Jean-Marc Vallée has created successive award-winning tales with stand-out craft, scripts and performances. Whether Emily Blunt in Young Victoria adapting to life as queen, Matthew McConaughey fighting an HIV diagnosis in the Dallas Buyers Club, or Reese Read more ...