Arts
‘Some pianists make me shake with anger’: Vikingur Olafsson interviewed
At the BBC Proms this year, an Icelandic pianist dressed like a Wall Street broker played a slow movement from…
Maturity and tenderness
So now it is spring and that carnival season with its promise of Melbourne Cups and AFL grand finals hits…
Like The Joker, but less pretentious: The Penguin reviewed
Doctor Who fans may remember that after the show’s triumphant return in the early 2000s, we found out that showrunner…
The fascinating mechanics of striking a deal
If you wish to know how to become a master negotiator, a formidable body of books will now offer to…
Expressive and eloquent: Northern Ballet’s Three Short Ballets reviewed
Ballet companies have become dismally timid about exploring their 20th-century heritage: everything nowadays must be either box-fresh new or a…
A box set for those on the spectrum: Markus Poschner’s Bruckner Symphonies reviewed
Grade: B+ Anton Bruckner wrote 11 symphonies – Numbers One to Nine plus a student exercise and the formidable rejected…
How some of the most derided bands of all time are making a comeback
The fate of the pop musician – at least the pop musician below the top tier of stardom – has…
Baffling and plainly nuts – but worth it: Megalopolis reviewed
Megalopolis, which draws parallels between the fall of the Roman empire and modern-day America, is a film by Francis Ford…
The ethics of posthumous pop albums
‘At the record company meeting/ On their hands – at last! – a dead star!’ Back when Morrissey was more…
The art inspired by the 1924 Paris Olympics was a very mixed bag
George Orwell took a dim view of competitive sport; he found the idea that ‘running, jumping and kicking a ball…
Committed performances – but who was the granny? Northern Ireland Opera’s Eugene Onegin reviewed
It’s a critic’s job to pick holes in the dafter aspects of opera productions, but in truth audiences are usually…
The show belongs to Jonathan Slinger and Ben Whishaw: Waiting for Godot reviewed
Waiting for Godot is a church service for suicidal unbelievers. Those who attend the rite on a regular basis find…
And then there was the voice
It was at Cape Liptrap that the call came through. The setting was almost absurdly beautiful, the sea one way…
Manacorda’s thrills and spills at Prom 72
At a Hollywood party in the 1940s, the garrulous socialite Elsa Maxwell spotted Arnold Schoenberg, then teaching music at UCLA,…
More Airplane! than Speed: Nightsleeper reviewed
Earlier this year, ITV brought us Red Eye, a six-part drama set mainly on an overnight plane from London to…
A massive, joyous, sensational hit: Why Am I So Single? reviewed
Why Am I So Single? opens with two actors on stage impersonating the play’s writers Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss.…
Ten times better than Taylor Swift: Romance, by Fontaines D.C., reviewed
Grade: B+ Almost all modern popular music is afflicted by a desperate yearning for importance, and thus – as it…
Inside the mind of Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh only got one major review in his career, and he was mystified by it. When the critic Albert…
Not for the squeamish: The Substance reviewed
Both horribly familiar and wonderfully shocking, this body-horror film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat does a very traditional thing…
Who should win the Stirling Prize?
The Stirling Prize is the Baftas for architects, a moment for auto-erotic self-congratulation. Awarded by the Royal Institute of British…
My night with the worst kind of nostalgia
American Football are a band whose legend was formed by the internet: some Illinois college kids who made an album…
Tragedy and lighter things
Noni Hazlehurst’s performance in Daniel Keene’s The Mother is a thing of wonder and terror, overwhelming in its power and…
Easy-on-the-eye tosh: Netflix’s The Perfect Couple reviewed
The Perfect Couple is an exemplar of that genre sometimes cynically known as ‘poverty programming’: dramas that train all of…
When is anyone going to properly appreciate what critics have to go through?
The Critic is a period drama starring Ian McKellen as a newspaper theatre critic famed for his savagery and it…
The rise of soapy, dead-safe drama: The Band Back Together reviewed
The Band Back Together is a newish play, written and directed by Barney Norris, which succeeds wildly on its own…
