20th century
RNCM International Diploma Artists, BBC Philharmonic, MediaCity, Salford review - spotting stars of tomorrowSaturday, 21 June 2025
Two concerts in the BBC Philharmonic’s series in their own studio form the climax of studies at the Royal Northern College of Music for a small number of soloists on the postgraduate International Artist Diploma there, and also for some young... Read more... |
Edward Burra, Tate Britain review - watercolour made mainstreamWednesday, 18 June 2025
It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour... Read more... |
North by Northwest, Alexandra Palace review - Hitchcock adaptation fails to flyMonday, 16 June 2025
Older readers may recall the cobbled together, ramshackle play, a staple of the Golden Age of Light Entertainment that would close out The Morecambe and Wise Show and The Generation Game. Mercifully, we don’t have grandmothers from Slough squinting... Read more... |
Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - premiere of new Huw Watkins workMonday, 12 May 2025
Huw Watkins’ Concerto for Orchestra, the fourth new work of his to be commissioned and premiered by the Hallé and Sir Mark Elder, is another beautifully crafted and highly appealing construction.It’s also intriguing in its game-playing with genre,... Read more... |
Mahler's Ninth, BBC Philharmonic, Gamzou, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - vision and intensityMonday, 14 April 2025
There was a change of conductor from the one advertised for this BBC Philharmonic performance at the Bridgewater Hall – but the one who we heard from was an interpreter of extraordinary vision and intensity. Yoel Gamzou is also a composer in... Read more... |
Midnight Cowboy, Southwark Playhouse - new musical cannot escape the movie's long shadowSunday, 13 April 2025
It seems a bizarre idea. Take a pivotal film in American culture that reset the perception of The Great American Dream at this, obviously, pivotal moment in American culture in which The Great American Dream, for millions, is being literally swiped... Read more... |
Small, Hallé, Wong, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - return to Shostakovich’s ambiguous triumphalismFriday, 11 April 2025
Kahchun Wong returned to the symphony with which he made his first big impression conducting the Hallé – and made a big impression with it again.The evening in February 2023 when he conducted Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony was his first concert with... Read more... |
Owen Wingrave, RNCM, Manchester review - battle of a pacifistWednesday, 02 April 2025
It’s quite ironic that the Royal Northern College of Music should have invited, as director of this, Britten’s avowedly pacifist opera, Orpha Phelan – whose version of his Billy Budd for Opera North nearly 10 years ago contained one of the most... Read more... |
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Musical, Theatre Royal Bath review - not a screaming successSaturday, 29 March 2025
In Italy, they did it differently. Their pulp fiction tales of suburban transgression appeared between yellow covers on new stands and spawned the influential Giallo movies of the Sixties and Seventies, gory exercises in an offbeat, highly stylised... Read more... |
Gromes, Hallé, Chauhan, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - new concerto and music of triumphFriday, 28 February 2025
A cello concerto received its UK premiere in Manchester last night – almost 100 years after it was written. It’s by Maria Herz, a German-Jewish composer who had to leave her native land in the 1930s and whose work has remained almost unknown until... Read more... |
Hamlet, Royal Shakespeare Theatre - Luke Thallon triumphs as the state succumbs to stormsThursday, 20 February 2025
The date, projected behind the stage before a word is spoken, is a clue - 14th April 1912. “Why so specific?” was my first thought. My second was, “Ah, yes”.Sure enough, Akhila Krishnan’s video and Adam Cork’s sound floats us on a sea of troubles,... Read more... |
The Lonely Londoners, Kiln Theatre review - Windrush Generation arrive in a London full of opportunities, but not for themFriday, 24 January 2025
As something of an immigrant to the capital myself in the long hot summer of 1984, I gobbled up Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s novel of an outsider embracing the temptations and dangers of London.Written a couple of years earlier and set a... Read more... |
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