Bible
Marina Vaizey
The chatty, loquacious, exuberant Simon Schama, whose seminal 1987 book on Holland in the 17th century, The Embarrassment of Riches, transformed the anglophone’s understanding of the Dutch Republic, describes himself as historian, writer, art critic, cook, BBC presenter. He is also the University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia, and has written 14 substantial and even significant books. On several of his subjects, from British art, slavery in America and landscape in culture to the history of the Jews, he has presented popular television series. The energy and curiosity is Read more ...
stephen.walsh
So easily parcelled up as a master of opera buffa, Rossini is a composer who constantly surprises by the emotional and intellectual range of his best work. William Tell, which opened WNO’s current season three weeks ago, is a major progenitor of Verdi, even arguably Wagner: grand opera devoid of what Wagner himself called effects without causes. Now the company has added the much earlier Moses in Egypt, very much not buffa, but not strictly grand either, more like oratorio by a composer whose theatrical instincts were so strong that everything he wrote ended up as opera.This is of course an Read more ...
David Nice
So here’s where I join the ranks of Old Opera Bores by declaring this Salome, Nina Stemme, the best I’ve seen since Hildegard Behrens in 1978, and this Salome as in Richard Strauss’s Wilde opera from Donald Runnicles and his Deutsche Oper Berlin ensemble categorically the most near-perfect. It’s also the first time I’ve had a group of very loud, rude people behind me shouting “sit down” when I stood at the end (and John the Baptist’s God knows I don’t do that often). To which the only answers were “stand up yourselves” and “what does it take?” Most of the arena stalls eventually followed suit Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Schoenberg’s last, unfinished, opera, seldom staged, might almost have been written for the Welsh. At its heart is some of the most refined and intricate choral writing since Bach, but linked to stage directions so complicated that one wonders whether the composer had any idea of the technical difficulties he was putting in the way of a fully realized production. The fact that this new WNO production funks most of the stage business is not the fault of the company’s truly marvellous chorus, whose musical performance alone would be worth twice the ticket price.As a conception, Moses und Aron Read more ...
David Nice
If you’re tempted to see Fiona Shaw’s impressive solo performance as Mary the mother of a son she can’t bring herself to name – and see it you probably should – then bear two things in mind.First, anything you may have heard or read about this being the narrative of everywoman mourning an everyman who just happens to have been crucified is nonsense; despite the contemporary props, it’s unequivocally the New Testament story told from a perspective which Biblical literalists will dislike (and they hated it very vocally when the show opened in New York).Second, don’t expect the kind of nuanced Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Darren Aronofsky has made some of the most innovative and daring films that have ever been misunderstood. From Pi to Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler and Black Swan, his films have something to delight and upset everyone. That is as it should be – and Noah, his latest, is no exception.Noah (Russell Crowe) is an action man – a father and eco-warrior, a man of God’s word and his own, a protector of animals and a destroyer of men. Much has been written already that it revisits themes seen in The Fountain – a film that young men are more likely to love and weep while watching. But Read more ...
David Nice
"Oh, wretched old man! You are but the shadow of the king”, sings Plácido Domingo’s Nebuchadnezzar about himself in Lear-like abjection before his Goneril-Reganish daughter (the flame-throwing Liudmyla Monastyrska). It’s only true of this brief phase in the protagonist’s sketchy operatic trajectory from hubris brought low to piety raised on high. And it’s certainly not applicable to the one-time top tenor’s latest assumption of a Verdi baritone role, one which may lack the finer nuances of Rigoletto or Simon Boccanegra but which has its moments, all of which Domingo takes with aplomb.The Read more ...
David Nice
A Leipzig church is surely the place we’d most like to be for Bach on Good Friday. Never mind: the Barbican Hall is kinder to the best period instrument ensembles than it is to big symphony orchestras. Better still, having sat stunned and weepy for a good few minutes at the end of this performance, I’m happy to evangelise and proclaim that no better team could be assembled anywhere for the original 1724 version of this world-changing musical Passion.Richard Egarr (pictured below by Marco Borggreve), directing from the harpsichord, no doubt deserves the credit for the line that passed, without Read more ...
Veronica Lee
How do we know Jesus Christ was a Jew? He was still living with his mum at 33 and she thought he was God Almighty. Are you offended? I sincerely hope not and profuse apologies if you are, but that was the first religious joke I remember from my Catholic childhood, and which managed to take a swipe at two religions for the price of one.I also remember - and on my occasional forays into church still do - hearing priests crack jokes about God and the Pope from the pulpit. Maybe it's a Catholic thing, because I have never heard a left-footer make the complaint that Ann Widdecombe - former Read more ...
David Nice
“I do not believe in miracles,” scoffs Herodias in Oscar Wilde’s - and Richard Strauss’s - Salome. “I have seen too many.” I know how she feels. So it was a bit of a shock to find the highest-kicking of today’s composers, John Adams, and his inseparable genius director Peter Sellars, taking the raising of Lazarus seriously in the first part of their latest opera-oratorio (my term, not theirs, and also applicable to El Niño, Adams’s millennial take on Christ’s birth and its concomitant hazards).What that meant in practice, for me at any rate, was to sit through Act One compelled by every Read more ...
David Nice
This may have been the official, lavish fanfare for the Southbank’s The Rest is Noise Festival, which if the hard sell hasn’t hit you yet is a year-long celebration of 20th Century music in its cultural context and based around Alex Ross's bestseller of the same name. For Jurowski and the LPO, though, it was very much through-composed programme planning as usual, though with a sweeping bow towards the festival theme of how modernism evolved as it did.In this case Jurowski fashioned a very selective, very long (it could have been a three-parter) and often unusual nine-year odyssey for Richard Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Howard Barker is hardly known for light entertainment. In The Europeans, a raped woman gives birth on stage. In Scenes from an Execution, currently at the National, a Renaissance artist is at war with her patrons. In Lot and His God, based on the Genesis story set in the wicked city of Sodom, Lot's wife betrays her husband with an angel. Complex might be putting it nicely.Yet, this sensational production is as seductive as its female lead. The play is tough and knotty and brutal, but it is also compelling and intelligent and eloquent. A cast of four deliver Read more ...