Reviews
Thomas H. Green
Of all the nostalgia-fests, of all the retro events, those that involve rave culture have the wildest sense of glee. The atmosphere in the Dome tonight, before a note has even been played – just as when The Prodigy hit this city last year – dials the anticipation levels up to delirious. The crowd is mostly fortysomething and fiftysomething, but many are already dancing as the hall fills, while Peter Hook, ex of New Order, spins quarter century-old dance tunes that once graced the speakers of the long-closed, now-mythical Mancunian club mecca, The Haçienda.From the grins, ecstatic gurns and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A quick plot summary might be required here, because how this programme of Schubert, Pergolesi and Webern came into being was far from obvious. Two young soloists, one a violinist in her late twenties, one a singer in her early thirties, both born in Swabia (part of Bavaria), share the same agent and wanted to do a project together. So they are currently on an eight-date concert tour of five European countries. Their company for this journey is a team including some of the elite and most experienced European players of chamber music. And the consequences were...Well, the first, the most Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
There are moments of real atmospheric oppression in this politically themed gun game. When you and your ragtag bunch of freedom fighter recruits are crouched behind a burnt-out car, dodging green scanning lasers streaking through the night sky from a monolithic airship as drones whizz past on a search and destroy mission, you can feel what the developers are trying to achieve. You’re the hunted on home ground. The odds are stacked against you, there’s an urgent insurgency and you’re the main militiaman. Heavy stuff.Homefront: The Revolution channels 80s movie Red Dawn with touches of Read more ...
David Nice
"We're off to Glyndebourne, to see a ra-ther bor-ing op-ra by Rosseeeni," quoth songwriting wags Kit and the Widow. So here it was at the Sussex house after a 34-year absence, the most famous of all his operas which includes the overture’s oboe tune to which those words were set, and it wasn't possible that The Barber of Seville, pure champagne, could ever be boring. Or was it? Never underestimate the power of vaguely-conceived direction to rob musical wit and precision of their proper glory.Cast and conductor have been near-perfectly chosen. Enrique Mazzola is a crisp and elegant master of Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Victorians liked their oratorios long and loud (most of the time), and when Dvořák wrote St Ludmila for the Leeds Festival of 1886 he got the style exactly right. Sir Mark Elder brought his and the Hallé’s celebration of Dvořák to a thunderous close with a performance which deftly abbreviated the score and also unveiled a new English version derived from a working translation of the Czech text by David Pountney.The story is about the conversion of the Bohemian Princess Ludmila to Christianity and her role in the subsequent conversion of Prince Bořivoj and, naturally, the whole nation. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having enjoyed so many Scandinavian dramas created in their own homelands, it feels like taking a step backwards to return (for its final series) to Kenneth Branagh's Anglo-Wallander. Far worse was that this first of a three-part series, The White Lioness, was dull, undramatic and utterly implausible.Henning Mankell's original novel from which this was derived journeyed between Sweden and South Africa in 1992, and involved an elaborate international plot to assassinate Nelson Mandela during the last days of apartheid. A dark and ugly subject rooted in South Africa's existential political and Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Sakari Oramo devised a bold programme for the final concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra season: a new work from a young British composer, a popular but knotty violin concerto and an obscure pacifist oratorio. There were few obvious connections between the works, but all proved satisfying, not least for the excellent playing of the orchestra itself.Joseph Phibbs has had a presence on the London orchestral scene for over a decade, going back to his Last Night of the Proms commission in 2003. His previous London orchestral premiere, Rivers to the Sea, was given by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Benedict Cumberbatch, it turns out, was born to play the blasted, blighted Richard III, as one might expect from an actor whose long-term apprenticeship to both classical theatre and television converged to bring the BBC's Hollow Crown series to a surpassingly bleak if potent finish.Those who associate Shakespeare's "bottled spider" with various excuses through the years for overindulgence and/or camp got instead a portrait of gathering psychosis that was considerably more biting and bitter than has generally been true of this play of late. Along the way, its visual command confirmed director Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A celebration of the power of words and music (leaving aside, briefly, that more troubling business about the Fatherland), Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a natural opener for the summer opera season. Art triumphs over all, but in David McVicar’s production it’s a triumph of peculiarly human complication – a victory that leaves a hero in tears, that crowns some of opera’s most reactionary stick-in-the-muds with laurels, and leaves us asking: did Eva really pick the right man?It has been well over a year since Richard Jones’s Mastersingers came to English National Opera, but it’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Truly, the older Julian Clary gets the filthier he becomes. As he warns us in almost the first line of The Joy of Mincing, which celebrates 30 years in the business, “Are you ready for filth?”He isn’t mis-selling, and the audience at the Congress Theatre in Eastbourne, where I saw the show, loved every naughty minute of it. The combination of the British seaside and ultra-camp comedy from this “renowned homosexual” was a winning one. The two-hour show is less a stand-up routine, more a string of anecdotes – about taking MDMA (twice) by accident, life in the country with his partner Read more ...
Richard Bratby
So this is the end of the Adrian Boult Hall, due to be demolished in a matter of weeks. And to be honest, all but the most nostalgic of Birmingham concertgoers will find it hard to mourn. It’s no architectural masterpiece – nothing like John Madin’s superb Central Library, one of Britain’s greatest postwar buildings, currently being pulverised next door in an act of civic vandalism that’s been compared to the destruction of the Euston Arch.True, it has a decent acoustic and its owner, Birmingham Conservatoire, has tried over the years to brighten it up a bit. And once they did something about Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Over the horizon they come; the anniversaries; joyous, arduous, remorseless.” The opening words of Stuart Maconie’s fine, nuanced essay in the book accompanying this 20th-anniversary reissue of Manic Street Preachers’ fourth album acknowledge the inescapable fact that today’s heritage rock industry is indeed largely about anniversaries and their close cousin the reunion. Bands tour to air one of their past albums in track-by-track order. Others reform to run through their catalogue of 20, 30 years ago. These living jukeboxes seek to revitalise music that was frozen in time, so kept fresh Read more ...