France
Kieron Tyler
Mehdi Zannad isn’t a familiar name, but he’s issued a raft of albums as Fugu and has been championed by Stereolab. His profile in Japan is good, and he’s composed soundtracks in his native France. Fugue, the first album released under his own name, is co-produced by Tahiti 80’s Xavier Boyer. "Fugue" translates as "break away" – which he has from the Fugu guise. He’s also broken away from English. Fugue is Zannad's first French-language album. Language, though, is no barrier to basking in this summery pop.Zannad was inspired to sing in French after working on the film La France in 2007. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Montréal natives The Arcade Fire sing in English. Yet 65 percent of the Québec city’s population have French as their first language. Les FrancoFolies de Montréal is Francophone Canada’s annual celebration of non-Anglo Saxon music. This year, big draws include French visitors Jeanne Moreau and Etienne Daho performing Jean Genet’s Le condamné à mort with musical accompaniment. Local legend Jean-Pierre Ferland is reprising his seminal 1970 set Jaune, the first Québec album to - controversially - fuse Franco sensibilities with rock dynamics. More than a festival, FrancoFolies is also cultural Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A potiche is a decorative vase but in this demeaning context it refers to a “trophy wife”. In this winsome French farce, from the reliably dynamic François Ozon, the “trophy” in question is the spousal equivalent of the World Cup: Catherine Deneuve. Potiche is jubilantly daft and its sugar-coated female emancipation is loaded with bells and whistles; there’s song, dance and generous portions of bawdy humour, all wrapped up in a gorgeously realised retro aesthetic.Potiche is based on the play of the same name by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy. It’s broadly similar in tone to Ozon’s high Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
What strange goings-on at this year's Spitalfields Music festival. One church is set ablaze by a female laptop trio; another is swamped by 17th-century collectivists; one man opens up a black hole with the back of his guitar; and a harpist becomes a stick insect, taking to his instrument with two bows.
At Spitalfields Church on Monday night, James Weeks and the New London Chamber Choir set about raising our spirits with three early American anthems by William Billings (1746-1800). How vigorous the round Wake Ev'ry Breath felt, as the choir filed in one by one, unleashing the wave upon wave Read more ...
David Nice
Travelling by Eurostar, or plane, to the continent and buying a ticket, all for less than the cost of a Covent Garden stalls seat, might entice if you wanted to see a certain opera, singer or conductor. But to go so far for the look of a staging? Well, the Catalan company La Fura dels Baus’s phantasmagorical ENO production of Ligeti's Le grand macabre has left some of us hungry for more, which so far means going abroad to find it. Ultimately their latest Wagner doesn't always rise to the expected visionary heights, but it does boast world-class music-making and, wonder of wonders, real Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Mammuth the immense Gérard Depardieu hits the road, on both a practical quest and spiritual journey, his enormous form testing the metal of a motorcycle. He is flanked on his travels by the glorious French countryside, wind whipping through his golden mane. It’s an image of unlikely but undeniable beauty.Directed by Gustave Kervern and Benoît Delépine, Mammuth is an uplifting and disarmingly idiosyncratic view of retirement. It begins on Serge Pilardosse’s final day at the abattoir, where he is subjected to a rather stilted leaving bash and an excruciating, scripted speech (“Our country Read more ...
Mark Kidel
All aboard! 4000 visitors a day are queuing up for a voyage in the belly of a whale. Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan, a commission for the Monumenta series at the Paris Grand Palais, is a runaway success, one of those Zeitgeist-attuned mega-installations that double up as fairground attraction and religious experience.The crowd walks straight into the giant inflatable from the entrance, each person admitted to the inner sanctum, one by one, through an air-locked revolving door. The rosy light and foggy atmosphere have an otherworldly quality. The punters are awestruck. Even the camera-phone addicts Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Today’s Britons are a minor miracle of globalised taste. Typically, we are amazingly eclectic: we eat curry and sushi, read Swedish novels or South American magic realists, dress like Italians, drive German cars, listen to world music. Our houses are full of Scandinavian design. Our favourite films are as likely to be made in China or Afghanistan as in Hollywood. So, watching the British premiere of a new play by Norwegian Jon Fosse directed by French theatre legend Patrice Chéreau, one is compelled to ask: why are we so suspicious of foreign drama?One reason must be aesthetics: we are so Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We all knew about the throat problems and the vocal-cord-threatening surgery. But Rolando Villazón's post-operation return to the Royal Opera House last night appeared to reveal heart issues too. At least that was the only way I could explain the endless arm-swinging and chest-clutching. Twenty, perhaps 30, times he clutched and swung. Surely this wasn't Villazón's attempt to characterise Werther's heartache, was it?For the first two acts, it seemed so. It initially blew a hole in the work. Jules Massenet's Werther is an economical drama. The libretto (an adaptation of Goethe's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Australia's cricketers used to call batsman Mark Waugh "Afghanistan", because (compared to his brother Steve) he was the Forgotten Waugh. It was a reference to the Soviet campaign against the Mujahideen during the 1980s. But few wars in recent-ish memory have been so deprived of the oxygen of damaging publicity as France's brutal struggle to hang on to colonial Algeria.It was a conflict that had been bubbling up since the end of World War Two, during which Algerian and other colonial troops had fought with the Free French. They reckoned that had earned them some control over their own destiny Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Manon, Manon, the little minx. Here she comes again - for the 223rd time, last night - and like the legendary ladies of her trade, scrubs up fresh and newly captivating, as if she’d only just skipped off the carriage from the convent. MacMillan’s irresistible bad girl and her gullible, innocent lover have become two of the classic roles in all ballet since the 1974 premiere, when reception was far from friendly, and it’s a sign of what a game-changer its choreographer Kenneth MacMillan was that when you go to Manon, what you come out talking about is how well the character drama was spun Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
At the heart of the creative orgy that was the Nouvelle Vague was one key love affair. A love affair so passionate it wasn't long before it turned into a full-blown hate affair. The friendship and fallout of directors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut is the subject of Emmanuel Laurent's new documentary, Two in the Wave. For any Nouvelle Vague-ist, it ought to have been a joy. And for 50 minutes or so, it was. The story begins with the night of Les quatre cents coups's 1959 Cannes premiere. The night Truffaut the critic became Truffaut the director. The night the Nouvelle Read more ...