21st century
stephen.walsh
The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group does star concerts, which fill (or nearly) the CBSO Centre; and they do old-fashioned New Music concerts, which don’t quite empty it, but leave one wondering who exactly – if anyone - some of the works being played are intended to reach. Their latest offering was of this latter kind. The performers came and went, the audience clapped politely, the electric keyboard went wrong, luckily near the start of Enno Poppe’s Salz, so that we didn’t have to hear too much of it twice. The instrumentalists, brilliant players as one knows, communed with some pretty Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Easier with Practice is a film about phone sex based on a short story that appeared in GQ magazine. It’s enough to make any right-thinking filmgoer not in the Will Ferrell/Chuck Palahniuk/American Pie core demographic head for another screen – any other screen. But peek under the covers of this indie debut from writer-director Kyle Patrick Alvarez, a decorated hero of this year’s festival circuit, and you’ll find an unexpectedly tender meditation on intimacy – a film set to do for phone sex what 2007’s charming Lars and the Real Girl did for sex dolls.Easier with Practice is a film about Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A 70-minute song cycle for soprano and violin, the Kafka Fragments is the magnum opus (the irony of its miniature forms seems entirely deliberate) of György Kurtág, a composer known for the inscrutability of his music. His lines arrive at the ears fully armed, unwilling to surrender their meaning. A performance of the Fragments at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 2008 famously drove a musically literate audience from the room, so can Peter Sellars's staged interpretation really offer a more engaging experience? Up to a point.The fragment: embodiment of an absent presence, encoding loss while Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Offbeat in more than just their rhythms, jazz musicians have always had an affinity to the extraordinary, living lives syncopated against the regular tread of society. Maybe it was the informality of their training, or the influence of brothels, bars and back streets that were their concert halls, but the likes of Buddy Bolden and Django Reinhardt have left a legacy of autobiography every bit as bold and unusual as their music. It is in this legacy that Alessandro Baricco’s fictional pianist Novecento claims his share, in a 90-minute monologue that riffs on the unlikely melody of his life to Read more ...
judith.flanders
It is one of the enduring mysteries of Leon Kossoff’s art. How does someone who uses such thick, impastoed paint and such muddy, earth-toned colours make his work so light, so delicate, so filled with grace? The more you look, the more mysterious is becomes.
Kossoff has long been known for his paintings of architecture – Christ Church, Spitalfields (main picture, above) and the Kilburn tube station - or railway sidings, or building sites, using repeated visits, repeated canvases to create a way of depicting not merely changing light but changing moods and emotions. His long love affair Read more ...
Mark Kidel
When Tony Harrison transposed his version of Molière’s The Misanthrope from the 17th century to the early 1970s, he managed with his characteristic and brilliant combination of savagery and wit to make the play feel totally contemporary. For Andrew Hilton’s new production at the Bristol Old Vic, Harrison has tweaked the play into the 21st century, with characters clutching iPhones and boasting of their connections with Sarkozy. Molière’s masterpiece is about human failings and the reason this classic makes us laugh today is because we recognise ourselves in the characters' parade of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The business end of 1980s BBC sitcom, the Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister series delivered political body-blows while sporting a dapper suit – satire with a gracious smile. In today’s era of muscled political heavies like The Thick of It, the Jay/Lynn brand of PG humour seems as antiquated as a blunderbuss – particularly when translated to the stage – but with just a few tweaks proves to be surprisingly effective.Global warming, the financial crisis, terrorism, the decline of the BBC – in the years since Jim Hacker and his staff last paced the carpets of No 10, Britain has only sunk Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The pairing of Philip Glass and Franz Kafka is a natural one. A shared fascination with obsession, with developing a simple premise to its most densely worked-out, most logical conclusion is evident in both, and it is only perhaps surprising that it took until 2000 for Glass to produce In The Penal Colony. Exploiting the minimal surroundings of the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre to maximal effect, this UK premiere production forgoes inference and suggestion in favour of all-out confrontation, etching its message brutally into the audience.Adhering to the outlines of Kafka’s original Read more ...
judith.flanders
Visit the room in the Louvre where the Mona Lisa hangs, and all you will be able to see is a glass-covered rectangle and hundreds of camera phones held high. Certainly you will be unable to examine the woman in the picture, or contemplate the work of the artist who painted her. Yet they - sitter and artist - are, finally, what matters: that one day, the (probable) Lisa Gherardini, wife of a silk-merchant, sat down in front of an artist, who began to paint her. Five hundred years later, another sitter, the art critic Martin Gayford, sits down in front of an artist, Lucian Freud, who likewise Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Here we go again. Art takes on capitalism, round 4,598,756. The blissful life of Harry Joy, ad exec extraordinaire, beloved father of two, is (surprise, surprise) not quite what it seems. His wife is having an affair, his daughter is fellating his son for drugs and his business clients are spreading cancer. He thinks he's in hell. But this ain't hell; it's the greedy, bourgeois reality of a capitalist West. Stalin would have been mighty proud of Australian Brett Dean's new opera, Bliss, which was receiving its European premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival. Having said that, Stalin Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Presteigne Festival, which has just ended after a packed long weekend of events of various shapes and sizes, is a music fest with a profile very much its own. Presteigne is one of those enchanting pocket county towns that proliferate along the Welsh borders (Monmouth, Montgomery and Denbigh are others): towns whose municipal status seems to belong in some child’s picture book, and is in fact a thing of the distant past.Even Presteigne’s county – Radnorshire – is no more, long since swallowed up by the huge, Celtic-sounding, but geographically meaningless Powys, then regurgitated as one of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Australia has many fine exports – wine, women, gap year anecdotes – but increasingly it is her orchestras that are setting the standard. With a magnificent Proms performance from the Australian Youth Orchestra still fresh in the ears (as well as a significantly reinvigorated Sydney Symphony courtesy of Ashkenazy), last night it was the turn of the smaller and still-deadlier Australian Chamber Orchestra to fly the national flag, in what may well prove to be the finest concert of the summer.Peteris Vasks is hardly the name on everyone’s lips, but the music of this contemporary Latvian composer Read more ...