19th century
Adam Sweeting
In 2010, Maxine Peake starred in The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, but this new dramatisation of Lister’s life has been gestating in Sally Wainwright’s brain for 20 years, and finally arrives under the auspices of the BBC and HBO. Hugely entertaining it is too, not least its rollicking folkabilly theme tune, and its story of a buccaneering polymath, adventurer, businesswoman and pioneer of lesbian liberation now finds itself fortuitously timely.Suranne Jones steps boldly to the plate in the title role (“Gentleman Jack” was a mocking nickname), blowing through the staid social world of Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien follows the same formula of many literary biopics, with a tick-box plot of loves, friendships and hardships that forged the writing career of one the 20th Century’s greatest fantasy writers.We open at the Western Front, as a feverish Tolkien doggedly makes his way through the trenches with trusty companion, Sam (Craig Roberts) – a proto-Samwise Gamgee, complete with West Country accent - looking for his schoolfriend, Geoffrey Smith (Anthony Boyle). Blasts of German flame-throwers transform into dragons, and caped cavalry officers shape-shift into Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera North created something approaching a new art form when they performed Wagner’s Ring in "concert stagings", putting their large orchestra in full view, with singers symbolically dressed and given limited front-of-stage space, and a continuous projected screen backdrop. That approach was also used for their Turandot two years ago, and now method and team are reunited as Sir Richard Armstrong conducts Aida with Annabel Arden as director and design by Joanna Parker.The positives are considerable. Gone are conventional stage effects; instead, the performance is aurally stunning, with a Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Munch’s The Scream is as piercing as it has ever been, and its silence does nothing to lessen its viscerally devastating effect. It was painted in 1893, but it was a lithograph produced two years later – now the star of the biggest UK exhibition of Munch’s prints for a generation – that would make it famous. Munch's now rare black and white lithograph includes an inscription, which translated from the German reads: “I felt a large scream pass through nature”. Perhaps by spelling out the true subject of The Scream it gilds the lily, but in conveying the agony of empathy it offers an Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Soon after his death, Van Gogh’s reputation as a tragic genius was secured. Little has changed in the meantime, and he has continued to be understood as fatally unbalanced, ruled by instinct not intellect. Van Gogh’s characterisation of himself as a blue-collar artist-worker has only compounded this, so that the real revelation of Tate Britain’s new show is not Van Gogh’s affection for this country, or the influence he would himself have on British art, but the sophistication of his inner life, which acquired breadth and depth through his lifelong interest in British art and literature.Van Read more ...
David Nice
When "Maestro" Riccardo Muti left the Royal Opera's previous production of Verdi's fate-laden epic, disgusted by minor changes to fit the scenery on the Covent Garden stage, no-one was sorry when Antonio Pappano, the true master of the house then only two years into his glorious reign, took over. He's now unsurpassable in the pace and colouring of the great Verdi and Puccini scores. Signs from his previous collaborations with once radical director Christof Loy and the glorious cast assembled were that this time round Forza would be a total triumph. In the end, several mountains gave birth to Read more ...
David Nice
Vibrant rustic dancing to conclude the first half, a heavenly barcarolle to cast a spell of silence at the end of the second: Bernard Haitink's 90th birthday celebrations of middle-European mastery wrought yet more magic in Dvořák and Mahler after his first concert of Mozart and Bruckner. He seemed perhaps a little more frail, less spiritually concentrated this time; but that wasn't going to get in the way of the phenomenal stick technique nor of the London Symphony Orchestra sounding, once again, more like its counterparts in Amsterdam, Berlin and Vienna than ever before.It's possible that Read more ...
David Nice
Asked to choose five or ten minutes of favourite Berlioz on the 150th anniversary of his death (yesterday), surely few would select anything from his giant Requiem (Grande Messe des Morts). This is a work to shock and awe, not to be loved - music for a state funeral given a metaphysical dimension by the composer's hallmark extremes in original scoring. It cries out for an ecclesiastical edifice to resonate with the masses and provide the voids, but St Paul's Cathedral has always been one step too far: glorious to be in, not the place for a true musical experience. All things considered, John Read more ...
David Nice
Would Verdi and Puccini have composed more non-operatic music, had they thrived in a musical culture different to Italy's? Hard to say. What we do know is that they both became absolute masters of orchestration – Puccini rather quicker than Verdi, living as he did in an entirely post-Wagnerian era. Verdi left us one great mass, the Requiem, Puccini a youthful and honest expression of the liturgy as well as other early pieces he mined for Manon Lescaut and La bohème. It made a pretty, occasionally stirring climax to an evening which could have done with an absolute masterpiece.One such, even Read more ...
Robert Beale
The BBC Philharmonic and its chief guest conductor John Storgårds introduced their Manchester audience to two new things – possibly three – in this concert. One was a world premiere, and you can’t get much newer than that. The other big item was a symphony that’s already nearly 40 years old, yet having only its third performance in Britain.The first piece was Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale, which is hardly new, but still rarely heard. It dates from soon after the "Spring" Symphony, though the finale was re-written some time later, and is in reality a symphony without a slow movement Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time is an intoxicating cinematic collage-compilation that embraces social history – in microcosm, via its story of the titular Canadian mining town – as well as the history of film itself. But it goes further, too, to achieve something that's close to a meditation on history itself, on time, on the organic process of development and decay. In the 21-minute interview that is the main extra on this Second Run release, Morrison calls it a “window into a time that’s gone”, his phrase capturing nicely the film’s treatment of the four decades or so of North Read more ...
David Nice
It seems an almost indecent luxury to have heard two top mezzos in just over a week with so much to express, backed up by the perfect technique and instrument with which to do so. Georgian Anita Rachvelishvili with Pappano and the Royal Opera Orchestra the Friday before last only had to hold the spell through a Rachmaninov sequence in the middle of an all-Russian concert. For her long sold-out Wigmore Hall recital, Latvian Elīna Garanča chose a daunting sequence of song series by Schumann, Wagner and Mahler, ending the official programme with other-worldly poise in what sounded exactly as it Read more ...