Michael Morley
Nelken (Carnations): Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch (Adelaide Festival of Arts 2016) ★★★★★
Over decades of productions in the Festival Theatre, I can recall a handful of experiences that resulted in immediate, unprompted, and collective standing ovations, beginning with the unforgettable journey that was Richard Wherrett's epic staging of Nicholas Nickleby (1983). Pina Bausch's ...
... (read more)The two high-profile theatre productions featured at this year's Adelaide Festival – the National Theatre of Scotland's imaginative and engaging account of the life and times of the three King Jameses, The James Plays Trilogy, and Romeo Castellucci's mostly impenetrable take on ...
... (read more)By now, it is more or less de rigueur to prefix comments on Benjamin Grosvenor's abilities at the keyboard by mentioning his age. Well, yes, it has to be said that, at twenty-three, there is more than a touch of the Wunderkind about what he does. But make no mistake: this is a serious, talented, imaginative, and committed musician who makes some of his more hyped co ...
Leading arts critics and professionals nominate some of their favourite performances for 2014.
... (read more)A Pianist’s A–Z: A Piano Lover’s Reader by Alfred Brendel with Michael Morley
Forbidden Music by Michael Haas & Hollywood and Hitler by Thomas Doherty
Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature by Charles Rosen
The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941–1956 by George Craig et al.
With its opening montage of colliding images – a knife being drawn across a whetstone, television footage of massed crowds, milling soldiers in combat fatigues, politicians alighting from cars, with linking television intertitles and an underlying soundtrack of pulsating drums – Ralph Fiennes’s and John Logan’s take on Coriolanus immediately establishes its connections to contemporary events.
... (read more)