Not pleasant, and not in tune, but unarguably compelling: Royal Opera's Nabucco reviewed spectator.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from spectator.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The finest Falstaff you'll see this summer spectator.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from spectator.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
She Walks in Beauty
This album features an ageing pop star reciting a selection of her favourite 19th century poems – Byron, Shelley, Keats – while her muso mates conjure an “ambient odyssey” in the background. That might sound like a “bum-clenchingly awful vanity project”, said Helen Brown in The Independent – but when the pop star is the “formidable” Marianne Faithfull and her pals are Warren Ellis, Nick Cave and Brian Eno, you know you’re in for something good. Faithfull makes these “200-year-old visions of beauty, love and death feel as urgent as the latest true-crime podcast”. And the backing – a misty soundscape of waves, birdsong, electronica, street sounds, piano and cello – turns the album into an “unsentimental spine-tingler”.