Blackbird

Sakari Oramo’s Prom of English music with the BBC Symphony Orchestra opened with the overdue UK premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Time Flies. A co-commission by the BBC, the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, and Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie, it was written in 2019 as a celebratory piece for the Tokyo Olympics the following year, though its planned multiple premieres were all initially shelved due to Covid and subsequent travel restrictions. The first performance finally took place in Hamburg last year. Tokyo, for…

Almost four years after it premiered and promptly disappeared, a spy thriller written, directed, produced, financed by and starring the Irish-American dancer Michael Flatley will be released in Irish cinemas in September.According to its blurb on IMDb, Blackbird is about a “troubled secret agent” who retires and opens “a luxurious nightclub in the Caribbean to escape the dark shadows of his past”. Then, in a bittersweet development for the eponymous former spy, “an old flame arrives and reignites love in his life, but she…