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Jan 16, 2025 | 
thetimes.com | Daniel Lewis
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Daniel Lewis
Sō Percussion may have formed in 1999, but they have the freewheeling New Wave sensibility of at least the previous decade. Vaguely reminiscent of Talking Heads’ 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, this performance’s quietly quirky stagecraft — conceived by Mark DeChiazza — made it as interesting to watch as to listen to. At first all of the instruments lay under covers, like furniture in the disused wing of a country house.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Daniel Lewis
★★★★★Founded in Budapest in 1975 and on the cusp of its 50th anniversary, the Takacs Quartet has very little to prove. But these players are clearly not content to rest on their (many) laurels. This was a demanding programme of three quartets written to impress, and each was an exacting, engaging, rewarding labour. The first violinist Edward Dusinberre worked particularly hard in the first item, Haydn’s String Quartet in C Op 54 No 2, originally written for a (fittingly) Hungarian virtuoso.
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Nov 2, 2024 | 
reelfilm.com | David Nusair |Bruce Davison |Daniel Lewis |Frances Conroy
Directed by Nicholas Hytner, The Crucible details the chaos that ensues after several young woman, led by Winona Ryder’s Abigail Williams, claim that their small village has become overrun by witches and devilry – with these developments proving especially consequential for Daniel Day-Lewis’ John Proctor.
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Nov 1, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Daniel Lewis
This concert was one of several this season due to be led by the London Symphony Orchestra’s former principal guest conductor François-Xavier Roth. The champion of modern music and historical performance had to step down this year after sexual harassment allegations.
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Oct 27, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Daniel Lewis
The latest winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award, the newly minted Finn Beames & Company, has lived up to the Irish playwright’s legacy and created something rich and strange — and a little baffling. Using one actor and a quartet of string players, Quiet Songs (which has no songs or singing) slowly unfurls the story of a pubescent boy tormented by his body and his peers.
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Oct 20, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Daniel Lewis
The biennial BBC Young Musician competition has come to an end. After a year of auditions and four televised rounds, all adjudicated (in a departure from the usual format) by just three judges — Alison Balsom, Alexis Ffrench and Hannah Catherine Jones — more than 350 UK-based musicians were whittled down to just three for the grand final.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Daniel Lewis
For the sixth time English National Opera (ENO) welcomes Jonathan Miller’s staging of La bohème like an old friend in from the cold, not that it’s been out for very long. The last time it was seen here was in 2022 when it was also revived by Crispin Lord. But it is Puccini’s 100th anniversary. And Isabella Bywater’s economical snow-strewn set, evoking the shabby lofts and cramped cafés of 1930s Paris, is a perfectly bleak backdrop for the exuberance of Puccini’s characters.
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Aug 6, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Daniel Lewis
★★★★★In 1907 Henry James described shelf-bending 19th-century novels as “large loose baggy monsters”. Had he heard Ferruccio Busoni’sPiano Concerto three years earlier, with the composer himself as soloist, he might have thrown it into the same menagerie. Reflecting Busoni’s own voracious musical appetite and wanderlust, the work is one of the longest of its kind, at 70 minutes, with hardly one off for the pianist and with the final 15 verging, if not on the mad, then the hubristic.
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Jul 30, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Daniel Lewis
It’s not unusual to come away from a Wagner opera reminded of just how demanding his work can be, for audiences and performers alike. The premiere of Tristan und Isolde famously (allegedly) did for its star tenor after just four performances.
