2012
David Nice
Tamino in the operating theatre hallucinating serpents? Sarastro’s acolytes wheeling lit-up plasma packs? From the central part of the Overture onwards – just when we thought we'd escape directorial intervention in Olivia Clarke’s racy conducting - Jamie Manton’s production of Mozart's adult fairy-tale looks distinctly unpromising. But by Act Two, it becomes one of the most moving Magic Flutes I’ve ever seen. Glorious singing and youthful energy help to make it so.So do the high-tech design of Justin Nardella and sometimes deliberately uncomfortable lighting of Charlie Morgan Jones. Neon Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In 2013 the American artist, Noah Davis used a legacy left him by his father to create a museum of contemporary art in Arlington Heights, an area of Los Angeles populated largely by Blacks and Latinos. But his Underground Museum faced a problem; it didn’t have any art to put on display and none of the institutions approached by Davis would loan him their precious holdings.The solution? Davis set about creating clones of famous artworks that feature mass produced items. Collectively titled Imitation of Wealth (pictured below) they now occupy a gallery in his Barbican retrospective. Marcel Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s 2012 and the London Olympics might as well be happening on the Moon for Jen and Stacey. In fact, you could say the same for everyone else scrabbling a living in Bradford – or anywhere north of Watford – and we know what those left-behind places did when presented with a ballot box in 2016 and 2019.Not that such weighty matters concern our two girls, out for a banging (in more senses than one) £1 Thursday night out, living for the sex and booze and rock’n’roll that get them from one week to the next. (Writer, Kat Rose-Martin, wisely keeps other temptations out of arm’s reach, one of many Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Little Mix, currently at another profile peak with their TV talent show The Search, are one of the most successful female groups ever, their tours amongst the highest earning of recent times. Like a CGI-shiny Instagram-age Spice Girls, now newly signed to RCA after years on Simon Cowell's Syco label, they offer teeth-rattling sugar-pop with a girl power motif, although Confetti, as its title suggests, is even more of a frothy frolic than usual.The producer-songwriters on Little Mix’s sixth album are the cream of contemporary chart-pop back-roomers. They include MNEK, who first earned his Read more ...
Sarah Kent
She was “the most important war correspondent of her generation”, says Sean Ryan, her editor at The Sunday Times. And her colleague Paul Conroy describes her as “a complete and utter one-off – exceptionally driven, with a real sense of purpose”. These tributes are for Marie Colvin, who was killed by President Assad’s forces on February 22 2012.Conroy was on assignment with her when she died. He was badly wounded in the attack, but escaped from Syria to write the book which forms the basis for Under the Wire. Speaking directly to camera, he tells the gripping story of their illegal entry into Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s as dazzling as a neon-lit cityscape and nearly as sprawling: Lucy Kirkwood’s epic new drama is rich, riveting and theatrically audacious. A co-production with Headlong, the tirelessly inventive touring company founded by Rupert Goold, it feels like an early statement of intent for Goold’s upcoming tenure as artistic director of the Almeida, which begins this September. Fizzing with wit and intelligent ideas, it’s handled with impeccable flair by director Lyndsey Turner. The results are stunning.The play’s title is drawn from Niall Ferguson’s book The Ascent of Money, in which he Read more ...
David Nice
“I do not believe in miracles,” scoffs Herodias in Oscar Wilde’s - and Richard Strauss’s - Salome. “I have seen too many.” I know how she feels. So it was a bit of a shock to find the highest-kicking of today’s composers, John Adams, and his inseparable genius director Peter Sellars, taking the raising of Lazarus seriously in the first part of their latest opera-oratorio (my term, not theirs, and also applicable to El Niño, Adams’s millennial take on Christ’s birth and its concomitant hazards).What that meant in practice, for me at any rate, was to sit through Act One compelled by every Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With poorly heads and nostalgic hearts it’s time to look back over the year that’s passed. And what a year in film it was! For those who like their movies monolithic or miniscule, epic or slender, noisily spectacular or quietly mesmeric, pea-brained or near-impenetrably intellectual - 2012 delivered. In fact it was the year in which there was a 5-star film for everyone.Perhaps most strikingly, 2012 saw a major return to form for American cinema. US directors fledgling and seasoned gave us films as dynamic and different as The Master, Argo, Martha Marcy May Marlene (pictured below right), Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Mayan calendar recently suggested it was all over. It is now, almost. 2012 was, by anyone’s lights, an annus mirabilis for culture on these shores. The world came to the United Kingdom, and the kingdom was indeed more or less united by a genuine aura of inclusion. Clumps of funding were hurled in the general direction of the Cultural Olympiad, which became known as the London 2012 Festival, and all sorts leapt aboard. Just for a start, those opera companies who had been burning to perform a version of Vivaldi's L'Olimpiade could now finally proceed. At least three did.Not all of what Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Far be it from me to try to impose shape or meaning on the past 12 months of television. You'd need teams of statisticians and psephologists to have any chance of drawing conclusions from the whirling cosmos of TV, and its infinite variety of soaps, shopping, repeats, weird sports, ailing current affairs programmes, forgotten comedies and obscure dramas. Instead, in a spirit of shameless subjectivity, here are 10 of my favourite performances from 2012.Ben Whishaw in The Hollow Crown: Richard II, BBC TwoIn a year saturated in Shakespeare, the Hollow Crown series of history plays stood out for Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
For years there have been pundits predicting that just as our high street restaurants and football teams represent a much more globalised world, surely pop music would follow suit. Fifteen years ago my local high street had a Wimpy Bar, a curry house and a wine bar – now we have Vietnamese, Turkish, Keralan and Mexican eateries to name a few – and the street is much better for it. Pop music, though, has been clinging to its Anglo-Saxon power bases in the US and the UK (the language helps, of course). But in 2012 you could claim that the most significant group and track were outside Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Can’s The Lost Tapes towers over any of the other reissues theartsdesk has covered this year. Although not strictly a reissue – it collected unheard recordings from tapes which had lain in the band’s archive – it rewrote the story of the seminal German band, offering a new perspective on their creative process and what they had issued. More than any of this, its three discs were a great listen and as essential as any of their albums - Soundtracks, Tago Mago and Future Days.Re-reviewing The Lost Tapes is unnecessary, but taking it as a yardstick for the year’s other reissues is, by turns, Read more ...