Scotland
Thomas H. Green
I remain bemused when bands such as U2 or Coldplay announce they are “going experimental” and are greeted as if they might be. The correct response is: “No, you’re not, you’re as alternative as avocado in a prawn cocktail rather than lettuce.” So here we have U2 and Coldplay’s wet younger sibling supposedly stepping into the wild unknown for their sixth album. In reality this means having a tentative crack at sounding like an early Simple Minds album, albeit firmly filtered through the epic sonic template laid down by those aforementioned older brothers.Snow Patrol’s early history is a story Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Abi Morgan is on something of a multi-platform roll right now. Between writing the Beeb's enjoyably hokey The Hour and scripting The Iron Lady, the Margaret Thatcher biopic which will be hitting our screens shortly before Christmas with all the force of a jet-propelled handbag, comes a new play for the National Theatre of Scotland. An altogether more esoteric offering, 27 raises questions of faith, morality, memory and the role of science by examining the lives of a group of nuns.Mother Superior Miriam and the younger Sister Ursula (“Jackie to her JFK”) belong to a convent in a remote part of Read more ...
David Nice
He's just launched the last of seven phenomenally successful seasons as music director of a transfigured Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Subscriptions for the Edinburgh and Glasgow concerts have doubled, attendances soared, and Stéphane Denève is a popular figure not just in the musical world but also in Scotland's wider cultural scene, not least as measured by his special guest appearance in the Sunday Post's long-running cartoon series The Broons.The charm of his concert presentations to his Scottish chums belies a rigour and a seriousness in a preparation that marries intellect with Read more ...
josh.spero
The overwhelming impression given in television of urban Scotland in the Eighties is of a land where people had discovered neither vegetables nor lightbulbs. The Field of Blood on BBC One last night went no way towards correcting this: as tenebrous as you might expect for a mini-series about child-killing, everything was shadows.There was light in the offices of the daily paper the plucky, plump heroine Paddy Meehan (Jayd Johnson) worked in as a copyboy, but it only served to illuminate her unappealing colleagues: the boozy, sexist, obese, balding, stony-hearted, grandmother-selling Read more ...
theartsdesk
Waiting for a plane has rarely been an amusing, surprising and enjoyable experience - unless a girl takes a flute out of her hand luggage and starts playing Ravel's Bolero. Ignore it, perhaps, but then a man going by pulls a clarinet out of his case and joins in. And then one notices the tapping sounds emerging from the soporific airport buzz. A bloke wheels up a drum on a trolley. Before people know it, they're witnessing a full-blown performance of Torvill and Dean's signature tune played by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in front of their startled eyes.This is an unorthodox and very Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Landscape painting may be dominated by the Dutch. But in music it is the Austrians who know best how to evoke the majesty of the great outdoors. In the first of last night's two Proms, one of the most awesome of Anton Bruckner's snow-capped symphonies, number five in B flat major, accompanied a new high climb through the Tyrol from fellow Austrian Thomas Larcher for two great musical off-pisters: violinist Viktoria Mullova and cellist Matthew Barley.What was most peculiar about this concert was how the 19th-century Bruckner and contemporary Larcher seemed to have switched shoes. It was Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Canadian is making a welcome return to the Fringe after a few years away and the break has served him well, as he's been doing a bit of travelling, and it was an incident when he flew to Indonesia that provides the starting point - and beautifully conceived climax - to No Lands Man. Wool clearly has one of those faces that border guards are attracted to. Not in that way, but they often figure he's concealing drugs, and on this occasion he was given a strip search. A horrible experience for most of us, but comedy gold to a comic, or at least a comic with a vivid imagination.So he Read more ...
theartsdesk
Physically reduced he may have been, but his talents were as expansive as ever, and more than capable of holding a small room captivated with just voice and guitar. Whereas in recent years Leven has released a somewhat bewildering range of music under a variety of noms de plume, often mixing his tales of Serbian prostitutes, Earls Court cab drivers and damaged Dundonian bar-stool philosophers with ironically cheap and synthetic musical textures, on stage he was a far warmer proposition.His live act is as much about the yarns as the songs, and Leven offered up rambling reflections on the “ Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s something elemental in Elizabeth Mitchell and Brek Taylor’s Island – a small-scale British independent film that scores highly on performances and more than relishes the visuals of its setting.The landscapes, shot mainly on the Isle of Mull, are glorious, and speak for the mood of the film’s heroine Nikki (Natalie Press): the emotional undercurrents of the script seem as tempestuous as local nature, especially the surrounding sea. The directors don’t hurry to bring a trace of explanation to their story (based on the novel by Jane Rogers), but it gradually becomes apparent that this Read more ...
geoff brown
Leonard Tanner, my old choirmaster, used to say that Brahms was a composer with his feet in three different camps: the Baroque period, the Classical period, and the Romantic. Possibly he had a fourth leg too, poking into the music of the future. Composers adept at these multiple postures filled Thursday’s sometimes lustrous orchestral Prom given by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and their chief conductor Donald Runnicles. Brahms was represented of course (the Second Symphony); also the great nostalgist Richard Strauss, watering his old age and the wasteland of defeated Germany with his Read more ...
natalie.wheen
Getting to Mull is an improbably romantic journey to classical music-making. One can easily understand why Mendelssohn was so affected by his experiences in Scotland – and Mull. On the three-hour train journey from Glasgow one sheds the habits of everyday life: the train winds through thickets of Forestry Commission plantations, which suddenly open out into wild panoramas of mountains and lochs, or a dramatic ruined castle against the skyline. Then the ferry from Oban passes the heavily fortified Duart Castle on its crag guarding the Sound of Mull, which later will be the scene of elegant Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Thanks to her evergreen bestseller Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson can call on an army of fans to buy her work whenever it appears in print. Its debut on screen is, perhaps, another matter. Will they buy the BBC’s rendition of Case Histories? Those who have not had the pleasure of reading it are less advantageously placed to grumble about hideous revisions, outrageous changes and all manner of infidelities. But even an Atkinson newbie might find it a bit rum that Scotland seems to be entirely populated by people with English accents.Welcome to the BBC casting department's Read more ...