Israel
Albums of the Year: Autarkic - Can You Pass the Knife?Thursday, 22 December 2016
2016 has been a big year for Tel Aviv’s burgeoning underground scene. Acts including Red Axes, Moscoman and Naduve have produced endlessly inventive music at an impressive pace and on a range of labels. Of these, Disco Halal, run by Chen Mosco and... Read more... |
RisenFriday, 18 March 2016
It’s unbelievable how hard it is to retell the greatest story ever told. And yet dramatists still feel the urge. The BBC had a big Easter binge a few years ago with the Ulster actor James Nesbitt playing a sort of Prodius Pilate. Now here’s a film... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Pianist Boris GiltburgSunday, 28 February 2016
London has been missing out on Boris Giltburg for too long. He's been playing Shostakovich concertos back to back with Petrenko in Liverpool, and the big Rachmaninov works up in Scotland (see theartsdesk's review today of the latest Royal Scottish... Read more... |
Trio Shaham Erez Wallfisch, Wigmore HallThursday, 21 January 2016
Some chamber ensembles flourish through creative conflict, contrast and tension. Others streamline their approach, not so much relinquishing individuality as allowing the best of each to blend into more than the sum of their parts. The Trio Shaham... Read more... |
Censored VoicesThursday, 15 October 2015
Israeli director Mor Loushy's documentary Censored Voices grapples with the weight of history. It draws on interviews taken by the future writer Amos Oz with Israeli soldiers immediately after the end of the Six Day War in 1967 which were heavily... Read more... |
Crossing Jerusalem, Park TheatreSaturday, 08 August 2015
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not been very prominent in the news recently, but that doesn’t mean that it has gone away. As Julia Pascal’s 2003 play reminds us, religious and cultural tensions can go deep. Very deep. At the centre of her... Read more... |
Matan Porat, Wigmore HallMonday, 27 July 2015
From now until 12 September, when Wigmore darling Iestyn Davies returns to open the new season, the biggest names in instrumental music are to be heard in the biggest venue, the Albert Hall. With all eyes and ears turned by maximum publicity towards... Read more... |
Hostages, BBC FourSunday, 22 February 2015
Hostages certainly whips along. We’re straight into conflict from the very start of the first episode, except it soon transpires that the real action will be taking place elsewhere. And it’ll be tighter, more excruciating than the bash-down-the-door... Read more... |
Dancing in JaffaWednesday, 11 February 2015
Your initial impressions of Hilla Medalia’s Dancing in Jaffa may be influenced by whether you go into it knowing anything about its central character, Pierre Dulaine. His is a name that needs no introduction to anyone familiar with the world of... Read more... |
Touched by Auschwitz, BBC TwoWednesday, 28 January 2015
There’s been a pronounced sense of finality at this year’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz. No closure, of course, but an awareness that the ranks of survivors are diminishing, and that soon their first-person... Read more... |
The Eichmann Show, BBC TwoTuesday, 20 January 2015
Part of a series of programmes marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, The Eichmann Show was a 90-minute account of how the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the SS's most enthusiastic engineers of the Holocaust, became "the... Read more... |
Exodus: Gods and KingsTuesday, 23 December 2014
I wish Mel Brooks had directed this, but instead we've got the sort of stodgy techno-epic that has become all too common from the auteur-ial hand of Ridley Scott. Ridley's 150-minute rehashing of the Biblical story of Moses is often a feast for the... Read more... |
