Herefordshire Entertainment news, what's on, films and events from the Hereford Times

Blood Brothers works its magic again in Malvern

1:08pm Tuesday 2nd March 2010

THE legendary Blood Brothers can be seen until Saturday, March 13 in Malvern, with Lyn Paul again in the lead role of Mrs Johnstone.

Haunted at Malvern Theatres

1:49pm Tuesday 23rd February 2010

LIVING up to its title, Haunted, with its palpable sense of loss, regret and desire, lingers in the mind long after the final curtain call.

Forever in Your Debt at The Courtyard

12:21pm Tuesday 16th February 2010

WHEN there’s no way out and no way back, there’s always a trip to Long Tall Sally, a high rise office building on the edge of town, the last resort of the desperate who choose its roof as the launch pad for a journey into the debt-free, stress-free hereafter.

World-class ice-dance and giant skating tulips - Holiday on Ice is back

12:50pm Wednesday 10th February 2010

DRAMA, spectacle, glamour and excitement - Holiday on Ice, produced by artistic director Robin Cousins MBE and choreographer Karen Kresge, has got the lot and then some. This year’s show, Spirit, has a title that allows the producers, choreographers and costume designers to take inspiration from a breathtakingly wide array of sources, including the four elements of fire, air, earth and water, to create a series of truly spectacular performances.

Alfie charms his Courtyard audience

11:32am Friday 5th February 2010

ALFIE is no saint, but he’s got charm and an easy way with words that lures women into his orbit and into his bed. But that’s as close as he’ll let them get. Talking’s not his thing - talking, he reckons ‘is more intimate than the other’, and love is certainly not in his vocabulary.

Uplifiting Christmas Oratorio at Hereford Cathedral

1:28pm Monday 1st February 2010

MUSIC lovers are spoilt in Hereford. There is no other cathedral choir in the country that does what ‘our’ cathedral choir does, namely sing Bach’s three great choral works regularly; the two Passions alternately each year just before Easter, and the Christmas Oratorio early in the New Year. Last Saturday evening – joined by four excellent soloists, accompanied by Marches Baroque, and directed by Geraint Bowen – a very large and appreciative audience heard a fine performance of the six cantatas that make up the Christmas Oratorio, and which Bach performed for the first time in Leipzig in 1734/5.

A display of sheer brilliance

1:43pm Friday 29th January 2010

All music was once modern music. The best music of the high Baroque period was imaginative, cutting edge stuff, designed to entertain and inspire, to delight and enthral. One of the stars of the age was the flamboyant Venetian composer and violinist Antonio Vivaldi. An ordained priest, he devoted his life to music, achieving near rock-star celebrity throughout Europe, where he became known as “The Red Priest” because of his flame-red hair.

Pride and Prejudice - more com than rom

1:23pm Tuesday 26th January 2010

PARING down Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice for the stage presents a major challenge and the sacrifice of both text and subtlety of character.

Five star panto at The Courtyard

11:13am Thursday 10th December 2009

OF all the impressive things about this year’s Courtyard panto, perhaps the most impressive is how cleverly writer Lyndsay Maples has introduced a pantomime dame to a show that doesn’t usually include the broad humour associated with the role.

Art concealing (He)art

12:24pm Wednesday 9th December 2009

Holy Trinity Church , Hereford was the scene for the most intensive schooling of every element of the compendious world of concert-pianism, where one of the world’s greatest artists, Martino Tirimo continues apace, his monumental traversal of the complete solo piano works of Chopin. This most recent odyssey opened up hitherto undreamed of depths of existential despair as a transcendental C minor Nocturne Opus 48 the like of which have never been dreamed of in anyone's philosophy (unequivocally the finest rendition this reviewer has ever heard), a series of the tortuously difficult Opus 10 Etudes worthy of Cortot or Plante, and a final Opus 53 A flat Polonaise which was redolent of the inimitable Artur Rubinstein striding out and giving his concert-tails-coat that typical ‘pre-performance-pull’. Among such an immense treasure-trove of every conceivable element of the million-and-one things that go into the making of an artist, it is impossible to overlook Tirimo’s clarifying the disparate polyphonic strands of the immensely difficult G major nocturne Opus 37 which the great Chopin exponent Vladimir de Pachmann said took him 50 years of practice, in Tirimo’s beautiful hands, looked like the merest child’s play.