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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Fiona Maddocks's rating
Reader rating
Trains: Tube: Westminster/St James's Park 
, Tube / Bus: 11, 24, 88, 148, 211 
Phone: 020 7222 5152
Ideal setting: L'Ascension was performed at Westminster Abbey
Messiaen applied a star rating system to his own compositions: one star meant “characteristic” of his style, two meant “very characteristic”. He gave none to L’Ascension (1932-3), an early spiritual work written originally for orchestra and later revised for solo organ.
To anyone else, this half-hour piece, drawing on chorale and plainchant all wrapped up in tone-clusters of intense, mystical colour, seems quintessential of the French master, the centenary of whose birth is celebrated this year. It featured in the Ascension Day Eucharist service at Westminster Abbey — standing room only — interspersed with Poulenc’s ethereal Mass in G, sung by the Abbey choir, directed by James O’Donnell. Usually we hear Messiaen’s major works only in the concert hall (L’Ascension is also being played at the Proms). Yet his single dominant feature is his Christian belief as expressed through music. Experienced in the context for which it was intended, the music’s static, and ecstatic, qualities make perfect sense.
Organist Robert Quinney conjured exquisite variety from the Abbey’s Harrison and Harrison organ, refurbished two years ago and now boasting five manuals and 109 stops.
The congregation was a mix of those who had come for the service, those for the music, with a few non-believers on either side. French Catholic stained glass exoticisms do not necessarily chime with the Anglican soul. Messiaen was robust towards those who complained about his “so-called” dissonances: “I say to them quite simply, I am not dissonant; they should wash their ears out.” Quite so.
Southbank Messiaen Festival continues 10.30am, 11 May, Pentecost Mass, Westminster Cathedral.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
A wonderful 'La Nativite' by Messiaen as part of this year's centenary of his birth, at St Paul's on Sunday evening.
Performed on the renovated organ at St Paul's, with enormous clarity throughout whether pieces of quiet description or thunderous proclamation.
Simon Johnson took us thoughtfully and unhurried through the nine separate contemplations of the Christmas story making up Messiaen's work, interspersed with readings by the cathedral staff. The overall effect for an Advent preparation supported by the magnificence of the building and an incense bomb that seemed to create a mini-Hiroshima in front of the altar - wafting over us several minutes later.
Programme notes (David Gammie 1992) really brought the music together, picking out the descriptive passages from the theological and developmental. Identifiying the fundamental themes of the piece: the Word; Jesus' acceptance of suffering - vivid in the deep strident acceptance played forbidingly and inescapably in the bass; and finally in Dieu parmi nous where the Word of God is incarnate in the baby Jesus, now arrived in this world.
Yet the final chord, so delicious in itself, is not a conclusion seeming still to ask the question 'what now?' - because of course the work of the child had not yet begun and is ongoing still.
- Peter Burrows, St Albans Hertfordshire
