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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,
Nick Kimberley's rating
Reader rating
Phone: 0207608 8840/8838
Trains: Tube: High Street Kensington 
Tall order: conductor David Robertson
The Albert Hall is a wonderfully theatrical space but the Proms, for understandable reasons, make the orchestral platform as close to a conventional concert hall as possible. Not, though, for Nomos gamma by the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, which requires 98 musicians “distributed among the audience”.
That’s a tall order and David Robertson and the BBC Symphony Orchestra had to compromise, arranging the players around the Prommers’ arena while the rest of us listened in from outside the circle. Not quite what Xenakis intended but the results were explosive, full of grunts, whines and belches as wind instruments, strings and seven hyperactive percussionists took turns to dominate.
Robertson set out the complexities with perfect clarity, as he did in Xenakis’s Aïs. An amplified Leigh Melrose emitted a sequence of pre‑linguistic, almost simian yelps, from which language, in the form of heroically sung texts from Homer and Sappho, slowly emerged.
Percussionist Colin Currie got an energetic workout, pummelling his many instruments one minute, caressing them the next.
Juxtaposing Xenakis with Rachmaninov is perverse but Robertson made the most of the slow burn of The Isle of the Dead, its dreamy waves providing balm after Xenakis’s aural enema. As for Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, it is one of several jokers in the composer’s pack, and, as always , his jokes are double-, even triple-edged: every sweetly lyrical passage heralds a pratfall, and vice-versa. If the humour could have been more abrasive, the players pinned down the many elusive beauties.
www.bbc.co.uk/proms.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
