Features
David Nice
"Massenet feels it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets," declared Puccini in annoucing his own operatic setting of the Abbé Prévost's 1731 novel Manon Lescaut. "I shall feel it as an Italian, with desperate passion." That's the usual Kenneth MacMillan keynote, too, and in his third full-length ballet he was liberated to a degree by a Massenet score very different from that of the opera, rendered even more meaty by the re-orchestration of last night's conductor, Martin Yates. Yet the heroine remains elusive, oddly remote both to the man she loves and the men who pay her, and Francesca Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone passionate about great conducting would jump at the chance to hear 89-year-old Bernard Haitink giving three days of masterclasses with eight young practitioners of the art, his eighth and possibly last series in Lucerne (though he's not ruling anything out). That was the hook to visit this year's Easter Festival. Concerts and a site-specific event may have looked like optional extras, but turned out to be also of the essence, including a profoundly well planned and executed programme masterminded by András Schiff and a rare staging of Schumann's Scenes from Faust as the Festival's very Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
I was on a panel of six critics convened to choose the winner of a special "media award" at the Glyndebourne Opera Cup on Saturday evening. What follows is therefore not a review, but rather a chance to chew over the concept and its highs (and occasional lows). And you may be intrigued to hear that our panel and the main jury picked the exact same top three winners.From its first season in 1934, Glyndebourne has been inextricably associated with the music of Mozart. As every edition of its new contest is supposed to be devoted to just one composer, Wolfgang Amadeus was the natural choice for Read more ...
Michael Arditti
From the myths of the Old Testament to the miracles of the New, the Bible has been as much a source of inspiration to writers, artists and composers as it has to theologians and priests. One of the most infamous yet influential of all Old Testament myths is that of the Destruction of Sodom, which has inspired writers from the Earl of Rochester to Proust, painters from Dürer to Turner, and film-makers from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Robert Aldrich.It has also been a source of untold misery as the justification for homophobia in Judaism and Christianity and, through its retelling in the Qur’an, Read more ...
Matthew Bourne
Nobody deserves the title of New Adventures “legend” more than Scott Ambler; nobody is remembered more affectionately – the generosity of spirit, the many kindnesses, the fierce loyalty, the tears of pride in company notes sessions, the endearing eccentricities and, of course, the highly embellished and hilarious stories are all legendary to those that knew and worked with him. A much-loved friend and colleague since the early days of Adventures In Motion Pictures (AMP), he was also instrumental in creating the unique style that is synonymous with New Adventures today.In 1990, having lost all Read more ...
Alexandra Baraitser
It was always my dream to be an artist but I never expected to be a curator. Graduates considering vocations in critical and curatorial practice went to the Royal College of Art or studied art history at university. Not me: I trained at Chelsea College of Art and then went to the British School at Rome where I was the Abbey Scholar in Painting.In general I like to work with painters – there's a poetry in painting that gives endless possibilities and painting is often about looking inward – searching the "space within". Silent Painting is the sixth show I have curated, featuring three women Read more ...
Antony Sher
In 1982 Antony Sher played the Fool to Michael Gambon’s King in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear. Shortly after, he came back to Stratford to play Richard III, for which he won the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Actor.Sher kept a record of his performance in Year of the King. Other Shakespearean memoirs have followed, including Year of the Fat Knight about playing Falstaff and, with Gregory Doran, Woza Shakespeare!, about staging Titus Andronicus in South Africa.In 2016 Sher returned to Lear, this time in the title role, for the RSC production, directed by Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
My heroine would not have appeared in a Jane Austen novel. Brilliant, arch and incisive though Austen was – as deft in dissecting the economics of romance as in laying bare the lies told by the human heart – for better or worse, she still sent all her heroines down the aisle. Ann Jemima Provis, the ingenious, wicked-humoured 17-year-old who found herself at the heart of the scandal that dominates my novel The Optickal Illusion, was a genuine historic figure who might even have crossed paths with Austen in London in the 1790s. Yet she wanted more than marriage, and in her fight to win a Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Fear not. The Arts Desk has not suddenly sprouted a Sports Desk. Heaven forfend. Korea in late February had more to offer than luge, bobsleigh, skeleton and all the other bemedalled and potentially life-threatening variants of hurling bodies down icy slopes. The host region of every Olympic Games throws open a window to the world on its culture, and PyeongChang 2018 was no different.This mountainous province on the country’s eastern seaboard has staged a summer music festival for the last 13 years. When it was awarded the Games in 2016, the PyeongChang Winter Music Festival was born. This Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Is #MeSnooze a hashtag? It could well be for those who sat through the 90th annual Academy Awards, an Oscar night so reined in by the current climate in Hollywood that it was as if all the fun and frolics had been leached out of a ceremony always at its best when it lets in a teensy bit of the lowbrow, or at least allows for the unexpected.The unpredictable was certainly the case last year. The Best Picture cock-up (the so-called Envelopegate) wasn’t going to happen twice in a row, even if Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were invited back to do the honours: “Presenting is lovelier the second Read more ...
David Nice
Punching well above their weights, population-wise, on the international music scene, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are celebrating, and being celebrated, in style over the year of their 100th birthdays. Berlin has just finished a 10-day "Festival Baltikum" at the fabulously recreated, Schinkel-designed Konzerthaus in the old city centre, in which championship of a massive Estonian oratorio finally reached Germany's current capital of musical culture. Leipzig, its second in terms of size, if not ambition - where the composer Rudolf Tobias first conducted the disastrous 1909 premiere of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Budzma! (Cheers!) At a long, food-laden table in a noisy room of Minsk, the capital of Belarus, a toast is proposed. We clink glasses and drain moonshine. This happens once, twice, five, 10 times. Between the toasts comes a wave of passionate speeches from some of our fellow diners. Loosely linked, they call up a period of history, controversial and still rarely discussed, when the German invaders were welcomed here as liberators who would deliver Belarus from the Soviet yoke. The verbatim stories, told by actors dressed as villagers from the 1940s, brim with passion. Next to me, a young Read more ...