The Chineke! Orchestra has won golden opinions for its ground-breaking work and musical achievement, and Manchester caught up to the extent of a visit from the eight-person Chineke! Ensemble to the Royal Northern College of Music.
Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto is a big work in every sense: four movements, plus a solo cadenza before the last one that makes it seem almost like five; a soloist’s role that even David Oistrakh (for whom it was first written) found taxing; symphonic construction and instrumentation which make the orchestral contribution at least as important as the solo one.
For a band as big as Depeche Mode, in a venue as big the 21,000-capacity Manchester Arena, on a tour as big as their current Spirit tour, it almost doesn’t need saying that the pre-gig atmosphere is buzzing.
Four albums in, Detroit’s Protomartyr have built up quite a following over the last five years. From the now-hard-to-find No Passion All Technique to Relatives in Descent, their lauded new album, Protomartyr’s precise post-punk has remained as thunderous as it is rich. As part of their current European tour promoting the release of Relatives in Descent, the band have come to the Deaf Institute, one of Manchester’s coolest mid-size venues, to bathe us in its murky waters.
Intellectual rigour and emotional honesty are the rewarding qualities in András Schiff’s Bach playing. Virtuosity comes as standard, too. And you get value for your money – his programme all but filled two-and-a-half hours, and he was as completely in command at the end as he had been at the beginning.
More so, if anything. If Schiff is not entirely satisfied with the way something comes out, he’ll play the whole section of the music again, just to show what it really can be like.
Manchester Camerata chose All Hallows’ Eve for a concert of (in some part) "holy" minimalism. Arvo Pärt’s Silouan’s Song began it, and his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten ended it. They headlined it "Spiritualism and Minimalism", but I think what they really had in mind was spirituality. No "one knock for yes" or anything like that, anyway.
Juanjo Mena memorably began his tenure as chief conductor at the BBC Philharmonic with a Mahler symphony (the Second), and chose to enter his seventh and last season with them at the Bridgewater Hall with the Third. It was a testimonial to an era at the end of which he leaves with the orchestra in at least as good shape as he found them, and in some ways better still.
Every 21st birthday deserves a party, and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester celebrated the anniversary of its opening with a weekend of fun and "access" events, ending with a recital by four pianists on its four Steinway pianos – playing them all at once, in eight-hand arrangements.
Forget Christopher Eccleston and the Lake District. Two years on, Ed Whitmore’s ready-mix thriller Safe House returns with Stephen Moyer in Merseyside. He plays Tom Brook – not the venerable film critic (Talking Movies is still showing on BBC World), but an ex-cop convinced his successors are making a dreadful mistake.
No cliché is left unturned in this odd-couple action comedy. Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L Jackson are the salt ‘n’ pepper rival bad-boys on the run. Cue shoot outs and high-speed vehicle chases through assorted European cities, interspersed with routine bouts of mutually insulting dialogue before bromance blossoms. Come back, Eddie Murphy/Nick Nolte, Chris Rock/Anthony Hopkins, Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones, Mel Gibson/Danny Glover, all is forgiven.
Ryan Reynolds plays Michael Bryce, a professional bodyguard who loses his élite status when a wealthy client is taken out by a mystery sniper on his watch – this is shortly after we’ve endured a split-screen, pre-title sequence composed of men’s magazine lifestyle-porn shots of Bryce's modernist glass house, foam-packed cases of armaments and special edition Jaguar.
Who knew it was so difficult to shoot a man driving a powerboat on a straight canal?
Reduced professionally to escorting a cocaine-crazed exec (Richard E Grant) out of a London office just before it explodes, Bryce is then enlisted by ex-lover and Interpol agent Amelia (Elodie Jung) into protecting professional hitman, Darius Kincaid (Samuel L Jackson) from Manchester to the Hague where he’s needed as a witness in the war crimes trial of Dukhovich, an evil Belarus dictator (Gary Oldman). Dukhovich has sent hitmen to terminate Kincaid before he can get to the court. At this point, I found myself Ionging for the days when Gary Oldman did more than put on a dodgy eastern European accent and some prosthetics and was allowed to show his real acting chops.
Throughout the film an iPod shuffle soundtrack is deployed drawn from the Grand Theft Auto playlist, turning every action sequence into an oh-so-ironic music video. Foreigner’s "I Want to Know What Love Is" plays out against slo-mo slaughter at a funeral (complete with flying canapés and corpses); grating heavy metal enhances torture by a tattooed henchman; Ram Jam’s version of "Black Betty" provides the earworm for a chain-choking scene in a hardware store. Unfortunately, in the wake of Baby Driver with its niftily executed marriage of music to action, The Hitman’s Bodyguard fails to hit any new beats.
The action scenes mimic Bond movies – aerial vistas of London and Amsterdam highlight tourist landmarks and there's much vaulting from buildings and ingenious vehicle swaps. It's a high-cost production but with odd moments of sloppiness in the CGI: among the many matted-in fireballs there's a dubious windmill just in case you missed out that our heroes are in Holland. There’s no shortage of hardware, explosions and eviscerated baddies but it’s all a bit baggy. An Amsterdam-set chase sequence goes on for so long (involving trams, motorbikes, 4WD and boats) that you almost feel sorry for Dukhovich who just can't seem to hire assassins who can aim. Who knew it was so difficult to shoot a man driving an open-topped powerboat on a straight strip of canal? 
When not involved in chasing and shooting, the two leads settle down to lengthy exposition on their lives (cue a dirge-like flashback to formative childhood traumas designed to engender sympathy for Kincaid's career choice as paid killer). Our heroes debate their relative moral superiority: ‘Who is more wicked? He who kills the evil motherfuckers or he who protects them?’; but even more turgid is the endless banter about romance and Bryce's regrests about losing his Interpol sweetheart (Elodie Yung). After the umpteenth splurge of motherfuckery I had a craving for Jackson's character to meet up with Peter Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It for a serious swear-off.
Salma Hayek is entertaining as Kincaid's sassy wife, locked up conveniently close to the Hague court so he can divert from the main action and impersonate the Milk Tray man delivering lovegifts. There’s some unintended amusement to be had in the odd casting of the two Interpol bosses – played by actors who could double as look-alikes for Katie Hopkins and Ilie Nastase – but a comedy scene hitchhiking with a van full of nuns is just painfully stupid. Both Jackson and Reynolds have given far better performances in similar roles; revisiting The Long Kiss Goodnight or Deadpool would make more rewarding viewing than shelling out for The Hitman’s Bodyguard.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Hitman's Bodyguard