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New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Barry Millington's rating
Reader rating
Description: James Levine leads a cast that includes mezzo-soprano Yvonne Naef and tenor Marcello Giordani as they perform Berlioz's The Damnation Of Faust. Sung In French.
Phone: 0207589 8212
Website: www.royalalberthall.com
Trains: Tube: High Street Kensington 
, Tube / Bus: 9, 10, 52, 360 
Extra info: Food, Pub
Bernard Haitink: Slow build up with a powerful climax
Can there be a more thrilling, a more cathartic experience than the final pages of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony? As the massed choral voices and thundering organ echo to the rafters, it seems almost as if the Albert Hall was built to accommodate the mighty peroration.
It was a painstakingly won climax, however. Bernard Haitink is not a man to be hurried, and the course he plotted with the BBC Symphony Orchestra through the five-movement epic was a spacious one.
Nor is he a man of dramatic instincts. His response to the work is not to its programme - once outlined by Mahler - of the hero's "titanic struggle against life and destiny", the folklike marches and dances, the climactic grave-opening apocalypse.
Mahler may have advised younger colleagues to "study less counterpoint and read more Dostoyevsky", but Haitink is not of that persuasion: he is interested less in the angst, more in the architecture.
From the start, the structural outlines were more prominent than the "titanic struggle". Rather than plunging us into the maelstrom, Haitink's measured opening movement laid out the grand scale of what was to come. There were moments of beatific vision, glimpses of heaven, though the overriding impression was of tremendous power unleashed, with the promise of even more.
Less convincing was Haitink's deliberate plod through the country dance second movement. True, it is supposed to evoke happiness in retrospect rather than the present, but Haitink's lack of charm and geniality projected a dour, cerebral temperament.
More ponderous tempi in the Scherzo suggested little of the grotesquerie that underlies it. But finally in the fourth and fifth movements, the unhurried progress came into its own. Urlicht was fittingly rapt, with Christianne Stotijn a deeply expressive mezzo soloist. Susan Gritton was an equally impressive soprano soloist and the BBC Symphony and London Symphony Choruses raised the roof with their climactic choral affirmation.
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