Reviews
Kieron Tyler
The immediate reaction to Close to the Noise Floor is “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?” This new four-disc set’s subtitle captures its objective in a nutshell: to collect Formative UK Electronica 1975–1984 – excursions in proto-synth pop, DIY techno and ambient exploration. While the stars include Blancmange, John Foxx, Throbbing Gristle and the big cult names Bourbonese Qualk, Legendary Pink Dots and Instant Automatons feature, the less well-knowns Sea of Wires, We be Echo and Muslimgauze are also collected.Close to the Noise Floor sets the moody electropop of Spöön Fazer’s previously Read more ...
Alison Cole
This exhibition – the UK's first major exploration of the history of Sicily – highlights two astonishing epochs in the cultural history of the island, with a small bridging section in between. Spanning 4,000 years and bringing together over 200 objects, it aims to "reveal the richness of the architectural, archaeological and artist legacies of Sicily", focusing on the latter half of the seventh century BC and the period of Norman enlightenment, from AD1000 to 1250.For anyone who has visited Sicily’s ancient archaeological sites of Segesta, Agrigento and Selinunte, which still boast some of Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
It’s always fun to watch the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. As members of a self-governing orchestra, and often soloists in their own right, the players like to do things their way. Come the ripe second theme of the Bruckner Adagio and the cellos were giving it lashings of vibrato; muesli-wearing adherents to pure tone be damned. So were six of the eight basses ranged across the back of the Royal Festival Hall stage. That just left two basses, left-hand fingers resolutely unmoved. They weren’t going to vibrate for Bruckner, for Sir Simon Rattle or for anybody.There are many positive Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Diversity has replaced perversity as a staple of modern drama. Whereas once upon a time an unenlightened viewer might cry – on seeing two men kiss – that they were going to leave the country before homosexuality became compulsory, a scene of mixed-race rutting can still ruffle a dodo’s feathers today. Monday’s episode of Marcella, for example, with Nicholas Pinnock’s bare buttocks pumping away on top of Anna Friel, ploughed a new furrow on peak-time ITV.The fifth episode of Blue Eyes opens with an idyllic scene in which a white mother, Asian father and two cute kids enjoy a sunlit breakfast. Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s a nice dilemma. Cameroonian saxophonist and band leader Manu Dibango, who has a Ronnie’s residency ending tonight, helped create the disco sound with his 1972 single “Soul Makossa”. Since then he has ranged over the extended Afro-soul-funk-jazz family of genres with insouciant ease, his showbusinesslike gift for a glitzy riff leading his influence into pop, too. So how to consolidate this influence? Having blazed so many trails, he seems content to enjoy their warm glow through the rear view mirror on the evidence of last night’s pleasant but slightly underwhelming performance.Though the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Krenek: Piano Concertos 1-3 Mikhail Korzhev (piano), English Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Woods (Toccata Classics)Ernst Krenek? If he's remembered at all, it's for his jazzy Weimar Republic opera Johnny spielt auf. This was an international hit after its 1927 premiere, though swiftly banned when the Nazis came to power. Krenek rubbed shoulders with many 20th century greats, before fleeing to the US in 1938; he remained there, teaching and composing until his death in 1991. He's an important figure, so this disc deserves a warm welcome. Krenek wrote four piano concertos and here are Nos. 1-3, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
If only the Duchess of York had waited two more days, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II could have shared her natal date with St George, Shakespeare and Turner. But the Queen Mother did bequeath a sense of duty (as did George VI) and perhaps of equal importance, a sturdy physicality. She died at 101, in contrast to her chain-smoking husband's demise at 56. And so here is Her Majesty still hard at work and marking the 90th birthday with a sequence of home movies to share with the nation. The royal advisers, and one suspects Prince Charles, whose strangulated speech is the oddest Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Hearing that both Javier de Frutos and rabbit heads appear in the new BalletBoyz bill might give you pause. A choreographer so unafraid of graphic content that he started his career with naked one-man shows, and later made a piece about the Pope so sexually explicit and offensive that he got death threats – do the rabbit heads mean we're in for some kind of furvert orgy?Well, the rabbit heads turn out to be in the double bill's other half, Rabbit by Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidberg, and it's not exactly Like Rabbits. The piece opens and closes with a longing pas de deux, the first Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It was one of those bright spring days when it seemed every other radio station was playing “Mr Blue Sky”. It certainly didn’t feel like 30 years since ELO toured. But the fans at the O2, last night, knew exactly how long it’d been. Some may even have been counting the years. And the anticipation of whether Jeff Lynne could still cut it, was palpable. In the lengthy queues and security checks, conversation naturally turned to how exactly the 68-year-old might manage the energy of those hits.The main man shuffled on just after nine, following a slightly syrupy performance from support act, The Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Vaudeville is having quite the West End moment, with Funny Girl inheriting the Savoy from Gypsy and Mrs Henderson Presents over at the Noël Coward. Gypsy is the pick of the bunch dramatically, delivering theatre history with real psychological heft, but Sheridan Smith’s luminous Fanny Brice gives Funny Girl a fighting chance. She’s such a natural vaudevillian that you begin to wonder if she’s somehow been transported from another age.Smith isn’t a vocal match for original Fanny Barbra Streisand (who is?), though the loss of otherworldly balladry actually makes for a more convincing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Catching the essence of the mercurial, secretive and notoriously abrasive Miles Davis on film might reasonably be described as a mission impossible, but Don Cheadle has put his heart and soul into it. He directed it and plays the title role, he co-wrote the screenplay with Steven Baigelman, and he put some of his own money into it. A jazz saxophonist since his youth, he took tips from Wynton Marsalis about playing the trumpet for the movie.The results are both better and worse than you might have expected. Cheadle succeeds remarkably well at embodying Davis in the different periods in his Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A Pulitzer Prize and numerous walkouts: The Flick, infamously, courts extreme reactions. Yet this latest American import is dedicated to minutiae. In Annie Baker’s slow-burning (three hours-plus), microscopic epic, her lens is trained on ordinary people, mundane tasks, arid pauses and inarticulate speech that trails… off.Though this may initially seem like indulgent anti-drama, the brilliance of Baker’s strategy soon becomes clear. We become so attuned to life in the rundown movie theatre in Worcester County, Massachusetts that the smallest alteration feels like a seismic shift. The Read more ...