Takács Quartet (Hyperion) The group’s new recording of G major quartet is strikingly different from their intense 1997 recording, while the Haydnesque B flat is a model of good mannersThe Takács have recorded the G major quartet, the last and most ambitious of Schubert’s string quartets, before, on a disc released by Decca in 1997. Both the first violin...

Two years after that slap at the Oscars made him persona non grata, the Fresh Prince is making a fresh start with a return to Bad Boys. His rehabilitation seems assured – so long as his films don’t flopIn one of those dumb ironies that can abound in Hollywood, the first Will Smith movie to be greenlit since the slap in March 2022 hinges on an innocent...

This novel is both biting satire and love story, unfolding in a surprising melange of wonder and intelligenceGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailThe synopsis of Ghost Cities, by monolingual Chinese-Australian author Siang Lu, reads like an inside joke. A Chinese-Australian character named Xiang Lu gets fired from his job at the Chinese consulate...

An in-the-round production at the Royal Albert Hall in London features more than 100 performers – including 60 dancing swans. Tristram Kenton went into the rehearsals Continue reading...

Daisy Ridley leads the reductive, if at times stirring, story of the first woman to swim across the English channelBorn to German immigrants in turn-of-the-century New York, Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle crawl-stroked her way through the American dream. In spite of great adversity – a girlhood bout of measles that left her partially deaf, protestations from...

Booth/Glynn (Orchid) Soprano Claire Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn turn to Schoenberg’s early and little known songs in this immaculate recordingSoprano Claire Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn follow their earlier discs of songs by Mussorgsky, Grieg and Grainger with this thoughtfully assembled Schoenberg collection. As they point out in a sleeve...