Alfred Hickling
RLPO/Wilson - review
George Gershwin never realised his ambition of studying harmony with Maurice Ravel. When the French composer heard how much Gershwin was earning, he replied: "You should give me lessons." He did become Arnold Schoenberg's tennis partner in Hollywood, howe
The Likes of Us by Stan Barstow - review
Barstow's stories are set in a monochrome West Yorskshire mining town where men devote their lives to evading domestic imperatives Stan Barstow might seem a curious name to appear among the canon of great Welsh writers, but the fact that the Yorkshirem
The Glass Menagerie - review
Octagon, Bolton David Thacker has unfinished business with The Glass Menagerie. In 1981, he was due to direct the play with the Hollywood star Gloria Grahame playing the role of Amanda Wingfield, the delusional southern belle based on Tennessee Willia
Rogue Herries - review
John Buchan believed Hugh Walpole's Rogue Herries - the first of an epic tetralogy charting the fortunes of a down-at-heel Cumberland dynasty - to be "the greatest English novel since Jude the Obscure". Since then, few novels have become quite so obscur
The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna - review
A theme of civil conflict and recent horror rings as true in a small Croatian town as it did in Sierra Leone In 2007 Aminatta Forna gained the slightly double-edged accolade of being named by Vanity Fair as one of Africa's most promising new writers .
The Firework-Maker's Daughter - review
David Bruce is a composer who enjoys playing with fire. Last year he produced a promethean oratorio for large choir and accompanying pyrotechnic installation in the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral. Now he has created an operatic version of Philip Pullma
Northern Sinfonia/Fischer - review
The Northern Sinfonia's progress through Beethoven's symphonies more closely resembles a slalom than a cycle, with the works presented in no particular order, under a variety of conductors. Thus far there's been a slightly underpowered Seventh under Ilan
Refugee Boy - review
For the poet and playwright Lemn Sissay, adapting Benjamin Zephaniah's 2001 novel about a 14-year-old Ethiopian-Eritrean boy's turbulent passage through the British care system seems so apt as to be almost inevitable.
Sugar Daddies - review
Alan Ayckbourn is not the first to suggest there's something a bit sinister about Santa Claus. Even so, this cautionary tale about a young woman's friendship with an apparently harmless elderly gentleman in a red coat and cotton-wool beard seems designed