Joe Muggs praises Shygirl’s album SWALLOW! for drawing on the lush electronic textures, breakbeats, trip hop and pop of the late 1990s without becoming pastiche. The review traces connections to artists and works including Kylie Minogue, Madonna, The Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack and Björk, while arguing that Shygirl transforms these influences into a personal account of growing up in the 21st century. Its themes of darkness and struggle are balanced by hope and possibility, making the album feel forward-looking and a confident statement of artistic self-discovery.

Sarah Kent finds Tate Modern’s exhibition of early art photography visually rewarding but conceptually muddled. The show highlights the beauty and variety of Pictorialist photographs, including works by Robert Demachy, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Peter Henry Emerson, and reveals the movement’s global reach through Asian photographers. Kent criticizes the unexplained omission of Julia Margaret Cameron and questions the inclusion of Madame Yevonde and modernist Alexander Rodchenko as evidence of Pictorialism’s continuing legacy. She concludes that the exhibition’s inconsistent selection makes the term Pictorialism seem almost meaningless.

At Union Chapel in London, 85-year-old Tom Rush delivered a solo set on a rare UK visit, combining strong vocals and fingerpicking with dry humor and storytelling. The performance ranged across songs associated with Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and Murray McLauchlan, as well as Rush’s own widely recorded “No Regrets.” The review emphasizes Rush’s enduring musical skill and the breadth of his repertoire, while noting his support for emerging songwriters through Rockport Sundays and his role in keeping Club 47’s folk history alive.

A recital at Wigmore Hall featured mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, tenor Mauro Peter and pianist Joseph Middleton in a programme of Mahler, Schubert, Britten and George Crumb. Reviewer David Nice found Barron’s performances of Mahler’s “Um Mitternacht” and “Das Abschied” seriously flawed, citing pitch and vocal control issues and questioning the piano reduction, while praising Peter’s sensitive, richly coloured singing in Schubert and Mahler. The review also commends Middleton’s programming and highlights successful performances of works by Britten and Crumb, but concludes that the recital’s Mahlerian finale did not work.

Robert Icke’s stage adaptation of the 2006 film follows Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler as he monitors East Berlin artist Georg Dreyman and his partner, actress Christa-Maria. The production’s rotating glass-box set, projections and camera-shutter effects are praised for their ingenuity, and Stephen Dillane and Keira Knightley receive favorable notice. But the staging’s choice to place Wiesler among the people he surveils weakens the intimacy and emotional perspective of their private lives. The play’s many ideas and debate-like dialogue also compromise clarity, leaving an inventive but overburdened adaptation.

The London Festival of Baroque Music concluded with La Nuova Musica and David Bates giving a jubilant, acclaimed performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Earlier concerts demonstrated how contemporary performers’ interpretive choices can renew Baroque and early music: Concerto Copenhagen offered intimate, energetic versions of Bach’s orchestral suites, Laurence Kilsby and Yuli Bayeul brought expressive depth to Dowland songs, and The Curious Bards blended Purcell’s music with folk and tavern-inspired flair. The review praises the festival’s vitality and interpretive variety, while noting that the reduced forces in Concerto Copenhagen’s suites sometimes lacked grandeur.

Graham Rickson reviews Eureka’s three-disc collection of five East German DEFA fairy-tale films released between 1955 and 1977. He highlights The Singing Ringing Tree as a particularly memorable, beautifully designed classic, while also praising the wit of Rumpelstiltskin and the visual inventiveness of other entries; The Devil from Mill Mountain is slower, and The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs is noisy but entertaining. The films reflect aspects of East German socialist ideology while retaining the character of their source tales. The collection’s restorations, booklet essays, animated shorts and featurette make it an absorbing, if uneven, release.

Bernard Hughes gives Jonathan Coe’s historical novel about the friendship between Ralph Vaughan Williams and Maurice Ravel a largely negative review. He argues that the novel’s broad comic episodes clash with its more serious material, while its dialogue and characterisation fail to make the composers feel convincing. The story’s historical basis also leaves the central relationship underdeveloped after the First World War, as the narrative shifts toward Vaughan Williams’s troubled first marriage. Hughes praises the framing account of Ravel’s copyrights and finds the novel’s final marital episode moving, but concludes that these elements do not overcome its uneven tone and failure to illuminate the composers’ friendship.

Paul Herzberg’s two-hander follows John, a Black British journalist raised amid his anti-apartheid father’s exile, and Marius, an Afrikaner haunted by an abusive Nazi father and his own wartime violence. Their fraught conversations expose how apartheid’s trauma persists beyond Truth and Reconciliation and resists simple divisions of guilt and innocence. The review praises the actors’ emotionally restrained performances and the production’s visuals, while criticizing the play’s length, repeated direct-address monologues, and occasionally strained coincidences. It argues that symbolic reconciliation—such as the celebrated 1995 Rugby World Cup moment—was a beginning rather than a resolution to the long work of recovery.

The Mary Wallopers’ Birmingham show moved between stripped-back Irish folk and raucous rock, building to a frenzied finale of “Eileen Óg.” The review praises the six-piece’s ability to combine partying and high-energy crowd interaction with sensitive performances and political broadsides, including a Palestinian flag onstage and a pointed remark about wealthy people. It concludes that the band’s hard-won balance of Irish cultural pride, political intensity and good humour avoids cliché and appeals to a varied audience.