Arts
Spellbinding: Herbert Blomstedt’s Mahler 9 reviewed
Ivor Cutler called silence the music of the cognoscenti. But there’s silence and there’s silence, and a regular concertgoer hears…
‘La Scala was maddening’: an interview with John Macfarlane, the finest set designer of his generation
Pantomime season is upon us, and unless your taste in colour runs no further than Smarties, there is no more…
Drunk in a midnight choir
Biography can create the most heightened sense of drama. Just at the moment SBS On Demand is showing a streamer…
Wonderful comedy of manners: Kiln Theatre’s The Purists reviewed
A slice of the ghetto arrives at the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn. The Purists is set on the stoop of…
Radio 3 Unwind is music for the morgue
Soon after the launch of Classic FM in 1992, the then controller of Radio 3, Nicholas Kenyon, asserted that his…
We’re wrong to mock Do They Know It’s Christmas?
‘I hope we passed the audition,’ said an alarmingly youthful Bob Geldof at one point in The Making of Do…
Smart, taut and stunning: Conclave reviewed
Conclave is a papal thriller based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris and it stars a magnificent Ralph Fiennes.…
Kneecap are basic but thrilling
It was Irish week in London, with one group from the north and one from the south. Guinness was sold…
Lovingly designed, touching and immersive: Neva reviewed
Grade: A- There’s a very faint echo of Jeff VanderMeer’s unheimlich Southern Reach Series in the new indie side-scroller Neva.…
Tate’s finances are on the skids and I think I know why
Among the many destructive after-effects of the pandemic, the impact of two years of lockdowns has had serious consequences for…
Deeply impressive and beautiful: Akram Khan’s Gigenis reviewed
After taking a wrong turn culminating in the misbegotten Frankenstein, Akram Khan has wisely returned to his original inspiration in…
A keeper: ENO’s new The Elixir of Love reviewed
There was some light booing on the first night of English National Opera’s The Elixir of Love, but it was…
‘When a work lands the excitement is physical’: William Kentridge interviewed
Watching William Kentridge’s film Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is like being submerged inside his mind, inside the coffee pot maybe.…
Such grandeur in the mind
There’s always something breathtaking about the prices great art can fetch but the sale of Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ at Christie’s…
Avoids the breathless hype of so many podcasts: Finding Mr Fox reviewed
We are all surely familiar with those stories of naive young Brits who travel abroad and are persuaded by a…
Dazzling: Marc-André Hamelin’s Hammerklavier
Grade: A When Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata was published in 1818, pianists were confronted with a mixture of ‘demonic energy and…
Stimulating little exhibition: Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites reviewed
Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites… there’s an obvious problem here: how do you represent one sense by another?…
A spectacular failure: Royal Ballet’s MaddAddam reviewed
Adapting ballets out of plot-heavy novels set in fantasy locations and populated with multiple characters is a rubbish idea. The…
How did Wolf Hall escape the attentions of the BBC’s diversity commissars?
Wolf Hall is one of the few remaining jewels in the BBC’s tarnished crown. Presumably that’s why it was allowed…
What a remarkably bad electric guitar player Bob Dylan is
Finally, a taste of the authentic Bob Dylan live experience. On the two previous occasions that I’ve seen Dylan, in…
Heart-warming but safe biographical drama: Going for Gold, at Park90, reviewed
Going for Gold is a biographical drama about a forgotten star of the 1970s. Frankie Lucas was a middleweight boxing…
Yes, Anora is as good as everyone says it is
Sean Baker’s Anora won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is hotly tipped to win big at the Oscars and…
Why is Fauré not more celebrated?
It is 100 years since the death of Gabriel Fauré, a composer whose spellbinding romantic tunes emerge from harmonies and…
Striving of the individual soul
The Australian Ballet seems to have had a smash hit with Oscar. Not only did the ballet, choreographed by Christopher…
We’ve got Francis Bacon all wrong
You have to hand it to the curators of this excellent survey of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Not only have they…
