Ireland
Liz Thomson
Fresh from their triumphant return to the Royal Albert Hall last month, the Corrs – one of Ireland’s great Nineties exports – are back with a new album, the second since their 2015 comeback, White Light, and the seventh since their 1995 debut, Forgiven, Not Forgotten, thought it was Talk on Corners (1997) which made them international superstars. Jupiter Calling is produced by T Bone Burnett who presided over sessions that were, said Caroline Corr, “the most freeing experience we’ve ever had in the studio”. The 13 tracks were recorded as live, with minimal overdubs, an approach that Read more ...
peter.quinn
With their contrasting yet entirely complementary timbres and their ability to create textural palettes ranging from lonesome single notes to fulsome chords rich with harmonics, the combination of pipes and fiddle is surely one of the most potent in traditional Irish music.That was certainly the case at this remarkable concert celebrating the work of the 19th century music collector, Canon James Goodman (1828-1896). A Protestant minister, Irish speaker and uilleann piper from Dingle, Co. Kerry, and later a Professor of Irish at Trinity College Dublin, Goodman’s passion for music saw him amass Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
TV Tube Heart, the debut album from The Radiators From Space, was issued on 21 October 1977, a week before the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks. Each was a punk rock album and one, inevitably, has been subjected to greater historical analysis and many more reissues than the other. Of course, Johnny Rotten and co’s first and only long-player was significant but the other band’s album was important too. The Radiators From Space were the Republic of Ireland’s first punk band –The Boomtown Rats, if they were punk at all, were relative Johnny-come-latelies – and TV Tube Heart remains a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The marvellous National Gallery of Ireland, founded in the 1860s, has opened its doors to its brilliantly revamped, updated and expanded galleries. As a spectacular bonus in its opening summer, Vermeer and Masters of Genre Painting reposes in the enfilade of the newly re-done permanent galleries for temporary exhibitions.After half a dozen years effectively closed for refurbishment, the new National Gallery of Ireland joins a roster of other modernised and expanded institutions. Just a year ago the Switch House opened at Tate Modern, and at the end of June, the V&A will open its massive Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
EastEnders habituees will be familiar with the colourful past of Alfie and (especially) Kat Moon, who have both been AWOL from the mothership since early last year. But they’ve used the time wisely, preparing busily for this new spin-off drama in which they’ve shipped out to the seaside village of Redwater, County Waterford, to track down Kat’s long-lost son. She gave birth when she was scarcely more than a child herself, and the infant was whisked away from her and taken to a convent.It started quite promisingly. It was the summer of 1994 (or so the caption said), and we saw a pair of small Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's the church wot done it! That's the unexceptional takeaway proffered by Jim Sheridan's first Irish film in 20 years, which is to say ever since the director of My Left Foot and The Boxer hit the big time. But despite a starry and often glamorous cast featuring Vanessa Redgrave (in prime form), Rooney Mara, Theo James, and Poldark's Aidan Turner, Sheridan's adaptation of Sebastian Barry's Man Booker-shortlisted novel begins portentously and spirals downwards from there. There's limited fun to be had from watching Mara and Redgrave play two generations of the same unfortunate woman, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
As Imelda May releases her fifth CD, it can’t but help that Bob Dylan has come out as a fan – it was, she wrote, "like being kissed by Apollo himself". No doubt his buddy T Bone Burnett passed him a copy of the album, for he produced it in Los Angeles, where it was recorded over seven days, with guest appearances from guitarist Jeff Beck and pianist and band leader Jools Holland, on whose TV shows May has guested several times.Life. Love. Flesh. Blood is the fifth studio outing for the girl from Dublin’s Liberties, and it's full of emotion, polished and stylised. May has performed with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not all racing drivers are created equal. New world champion Nico Rosberg is the son of a former F1 champion, grew up in Monaco, speaks five languages and turned down an offer to study aeronautical engineering at Imperial College, London.On the other hand, 1980s racer Tommy Byrne was a working-class chancer from Dundalk who was permanently skint and got nicked for stealing. Yet the evidence suggests he was one of the fastest natural drivers who ever sat in a racing car, and who even gave Ayrton Senna a run for his money when both of them drove for the Van Diemen team at the start of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There has been an abundance of celebrity travelogues of late and with each one comes a new USP. Speaking just of Ireland, train enthusiast Michael Portillo nabbed the Victorian Bradshaw's rail guides, while the adventurous Christine Bleakley explored its wild side; and now Ardal O'Hanlon uses another set of Victorian guidebooks to take us on a three-part journey through his homeland.O'Hanlon – beloved for portraying Father Dougal in Father Ted (1995-98), surely the perfect sitcom – proved to be an engaging host. His starting point (but strangely used sparingly during the rest of the hour) was Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Booking a ticket for a show devised by Michael Keegan-Dolan has always required an act of faith, and this is no exception. ‘If I say this is a house, it’s a house,” says the evening’s laconic compere, Mikel Murfi, gesturing with his cigarette to three breeze blocks on the floor. And if Keegan-Dolan says this is Swan Lake you’d better believe it and brace yourself for wrenching tragedy.Keegan-Dolan has form. He brought London audiences the most striking take on The Rite of Spring in living memory as well as a compelling revision of Giselle which cast the title character as an Irish line- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For those new to this Irish crime series, a brief catch-up. Jack Taylor (played by Iain Glen at his world-weary best) is a hard-drinking maverick loner ex-cop who left the Garda Siochána (Ireland's police force) after hitting a politician to investigate cases as private detective. He says there aren't many of his kind in Ireland, as the job is “too close to being an informant – a dodgy concept”. He chases criminals in Galway City, pounding the streets in his old Garda blue greatcoat, and is ably abetted by Kate Noonan, an ex-colleague who passes on information from Garda databases (and who Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Given the horrors lurking in the composer’s more familiar operas, the warning that Maria de Rudenz is “perhaps the darkest of Donizetti’s tragedies” carries no little weight. A Gothic spectacular with echoes of The Castle of Otranto and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Maria’s dramatic excess is tempered by a fine score, full of atmospheric chorus writing and some particularly lovely arias for baritone. Staged by the same team that delivered the ghostly fantasy of a Guglielmo Ratcliff at last year’s festival, the opera is a stylish Halloween hit, welcome as trick or treat candy, but dissolving just Read more ...