21st century
Hughes, Manchester Collective, Hallé St Peter’s, Manchester review - new work and stunning singingFriday, 24 June 2022![]() Manchester Collective were back on home ground last night in the tour of a programme featuring the first performances of a new song cycle by Edmund Finnis, Out of the Dawn’s Mind. Soprano soloist was the amazing Ruby Hughes.It was home ground for... Read more... |
Album: Porcupine Tree - Closure/ContinuationWednesday, 22 June 2022![]() Porcupine Tree’s members have said they don’t know if their 11th album and this autumn’s North American–European tour will conclude their 35-year career. If it does, it would be typical of the progressive rock trio – as averse to standing still as... Read more... |
Album: Nick Cave - Seven PsalmsMonday, 06 June 2022![]() Nick Cave has always been a spoken-word man, and these seven short poems set to music with regular collaborator Warren Ellis are the latest in a genre he explores with exceptional talent. He is an artist driven by a need to create, constantly and in... Read more... |
Cornelia Parker, Tate Britain review – divine intelligenceMonday, 23 May 2022![]() Cornelia Parker’s early installations are as fresh and as thought provoking as when they were made. Her Tate Britain retrospective opens with Thirty Pieces of Silver (pictured below left: Detail). It’s more than 30 years since she ran over a... Read more... |
Album: Mavis Staples and Levon Helm - Carry Me HomeMonday, 16 May 2022![]() There is so much gospel out there that it’s not easy to stand out above the crowd. Mavis Staples, with a distinctive voice that has delivered a gritty contralto for many decades, never stops. This new release, a set of songs that were recorded in... Read more... |
The Misfortune of the English, Orange Tree Theatre review - don't fret, boys, it's only deathFriday, 06 May 2022![]() “We all make history, one way or another.” But some of us make more history than others, and a group of 27 English schoolboys who got lost in Southern Germany in 1936 haven’t made much, unfortunately. Scottish playwright Pamela Carter has brushed... Read more... |
Esfahani, CBSO, Morlot, Symphony Hall Birmingham review - ghostly enchantmentsFriday, 29 April 2022![]() Bent Sørensen has christened his new harpsichord concerto Sei Anime: “six souls”. The six concise movements, written for Mahan Esfahani and a chamber-sized orchestra, are modelled, apparently, on the dance movements of a Bach keyboard suite. But as... Read more... |
Album: Fontaines DC – Skinty FiaSunday, 24 April 2022![]() Incanting, declaiming, and growling, as if actual singing might prettify the Fontaines DC’s post-punk dirges, Grian Chatten has never sounded more aggrieved than he does on the Irish combo’s third album. Disarmingly, he also sounds younger on Skinty... Read more... |
Morbius review – not so superFriday, 01 April 2022![]() Following the much-maligned Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), the third film in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe stars Jared Leto as Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr Michael Morbius. Suffering from a rare blood condition that threatens... Read more... |
Hodges, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - four UK premieres, from random to abundantThursday, 31 March 2022![]() Kudos, first, to Edward Gardner for mastering a rainbow programme of 21st century works in his first season as the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Principal Conductor. Three Americans and a Berlin-based Brit, two women composers and two men, one of... Read more... |
The Worst Person in the World review - confusion becomes herSaturday, 26 March 2022![]() Some British TV viewers who were in junior school in the mid-1960s will recall the imported Australian kids’ show The Magic Boomerang. When the adolescent hero, a sheep farm kid, threw the eponymous piece of wood, he stopped time and was able to... Read more... |
Marianne Eloise: Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking review - bargaining with the devilWednesday, 23 March 2022![]() No mental health condition has become quite as kitsch as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Its tacky shorthands – the hand washing, the germaphobia, the clean freaks – have made their way into everything, from Buzzfeed listicles to The Big Bang Theory... Read more... |
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