1940s
Damrau, BRSO, Jansons, Barbican review - broad and passionate StraussMonday, 28 January 2019
There is no doubting Diana Damrau’s star power. She is not a demonstrative performer, and her voice is small, but the sheer character of her tone, and the passion she invests, make every line special. She is not one to over-sentimentalise either, so... Read more... |
Magda Szabó: Katalin Street review - love after lifeSunday, 13 January 2019
This is a love story and a ghost story. The year is 1934 and the Held family have moved from the countryside to an elegant house on Katalin Street in Budapest. Their new neighbours are the Major (with whom Mr Held fought in the Great War) and his... Read more... |
The Sound of Movie Musicals with Neil Brand, BBC Four review - genius of song and danceSaturday, 22 December 2018
The movie musical: money making or true art – or both? This was a programme to sing along to, in the company of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard. In this second instalment of Neil Brand’s brilliant three-part history, he... Read more... |
Mrs Wilson, BBC One review - real-life secrets and liesWednesday, 28 November 2018
In which the titular Mrs Wilson is played by her real-life granddaughter Ruth Wilson, in an intriguing tale of subterfuge both personal and professional. The curtain rose over suburban west London in the 1960s, where Alison Wilson was married to... Read more... |
Dietrich: Natural Duty, Wilton's Music Hall review - elegy for oneWednesday, 21 November 2018
Getting the look right is half the battle: in that, Peter Groom's one-time-Captain Marlene Dietrich is a winner from the start. The looks at the audience nail it too, heavy-lidded and lashed but transfixing, charismatic, winning instant complicity.... Read more... |
Overlord review - nightmares in NormandySaturday, 10 November 2018
The trailer for Overlord promises havoc, horror, evil, madness, terror and rage, and to be fair it delivers on most of those. From the fantasy factory of producer JJ Abrams, it’s the ghastly story of an alternative D-Day, in which American... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Hitler's HollywoodFriday, 09 November 2018
Apart from Leni Riefenstahl’s insidiously seductive celebrations of Nazism and the propaganda excesses of Veit Harlan’s Jud Süß (1940), the films that were made in Germany during the Hitler period have been air-brushed out of cinema history, almost... Read more... |
The Rake's Progress, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review - supreme fluency from Eden to BedlamMonday, 05 November 2018
Lightness and gravity in perfect equilibrium have always graced Vladimir Jurowski's Stravinsky. From his first London Rake's Progress at English National Opera, proving that he could do the delicate and translucent after his Royal Opera debut... Read more... |
Fröst, BBCSO, Oramo, Barbican review - blood, sweat and sweetnessThursday, 18 October 2018
Single adjectives by way of description always sell masterpieces short, and especially the ambiguous symphonies forged in blood, sweat and tears during the Stalin years. The Barbican's advance blurb hit one aspect of Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony... Read more... |
The Outsider, Print Room at the Coronet review - power in restraintThursday, 20 September 2018
As the Syrian conflict enters its final convulsions, renewing memories of how the Sykes-Picot agreement – between an Englishman and a Frenchman – would cause more than a century of political resentment in the Arab world, The Outsider seems... Read more... |
Paul Bunyan, ENO, Wilton's Music Hall review - talent cabined and confinedWednesday, 05 September 2018
It's Britten outside-in time for English National Opera. Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, which played host earlier this year to an only partially convincing production of his 1950s masterpiece The Turn of the Screw, would have been the perfect... Read more... |
Cold War review - a gorgeous and mesmerising romanceWednesday, 29 August 2018
Can we ever really know the passion that brought our parents together? By the time we are old enough to hear the story of how they first met, that lovers’ narrative has frayed in the telling and faded in the daily light of domestic familiarity. But... Read more... |
