Britten
Hanna Weibye
Testament to the work of Richard Alston Dance Company (RADC) over the 20 years since its foundation was not just the première-filled celebratory programme performed at Sadler's Wells last night, but the enthusiastic audience there to see it. Alston's own choreography never excites me particularly, but there's no denying his company has done sterling work for the British contemporary dance scene over the years, both through its association with the Place and London Contemporary Dance School, and through its extensive regional touring schedule.The first London première of the night, Rejoice in Read more ...
David Nice
When everything works – conducting, singing, production, costumes, sets, lighting, choreography where relevant – then there’s nothing like the art of opera. But how often does that happen? In my experience, very seldom, but not this year. It's been of such a vintage that I couldn’t possibly choose the best out of six fully-staged productions – three of them from our only native director of genius, Richard Jones, who as one of his favourite singers, Susan Bullock, put it to me, deserves every gong going – and one concert performance.Fortunately I didn’t need to lean too hard on my Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
English National Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet have staged programmes of war pieces already this year; now here's the Royal Ballet bringing up the rear in its own inimitable (and rather oblique) fashion with a triple bill that picks up on and subtly plays with the anxiety felt by those great British artists, Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden, in the 1930s and 1940s. Brandstrup's Ceremony of Innocence, first performed at last year's Aldeburgh Festival and set to Britten's 1937 Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, promised much, but for my money didn't deliver. With a Britten score, a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Another week, another war commemorative; it’s the story of all the arts in 2014. But – because you can always rely on David Bintley and Birmingham Royal Ballet to be different – last night’s programme at Sadler’s was overshadowed by the Second World War, not the First. Nor were there any soldiers or war widows to be seen: instead this remarkable mixed programme danced from the doomed brightness of the inter-war generation, to religious experience in war-torn Clydeside, to a kilt-girt, abstract, bittersweet lament.Kenneth MacMillan’s 1979 La Fin du Jour is an odd bird. Deliberately evoking the Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Nothing has resonated through the unfolding First World War commemorations more than the poetry of Wilfred Owen; and in terms of its grim immediacy and enduring heartbreak nothing ever could. Benjamin Britten knew that when he set down his War Requiem for posterity, counterpointing religious posturing with Owen’s indisputable truths. One fought, the other chose not to, but both proffered conscientious objections, and both came at the reality - "the pity of war, the pity war distilled" - from essentially the same place. The truly astonishing thing about War Requiem - and this has been true Read more ...
David Nice
“Ah now, I can’t promise you sun,” says a Scots lady-in-waiting of her native weather to a novice Englishwoman near the start of Rona Munro’s masterly James Plays. It’s the first of many references to make the audience laugh knowingly. Well, after four days of the worst weather Edinburgh Festivalgoers can remember, the sun came out yesterday morning. There’s no better place to be than the airy Queen’s Hall if you want an 11am recital of light and shade – and to say that of yesterday’s duo programme is an understatement. Come late afternoon, and the light was still dappling the green lawns and Read more ...
David Nice
Saleem (born 1976), having dropped the "Abboud" from his name, is one of the world’s most individual top pianists: his recent disc of Mendelssohn concertos with Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester is bound to make my “best of year” list. Nabeel, his brother and junior by two years, has served for some years as a violinist in the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, first-rate peacemaking brainchild of Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. Yet the siblings would surely agree that the bigger picture established by Nabeel, which Saleem has been part of for the past year or so, means more Read more ...
David Nice
Schubert played and sung through a long summer day by the water: what could be more enchanting? The prospect did not take into account the pain in that all too short-lived genius’s late work: when interpreted by a world-class trio, quartet and pianists at the 10th East Neuk Festival, it could be exhausting. So the hours in between were much needed balm on an afternoon and evening in the picture-postcard fishing village of Crail in the East Neuk (cf "nook") of Fife below St Andrews.Grey skies lifted by early afternoon, leaving the sun to bring out the honey colour of much of the local stone Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Is this sheltered place the wicked world where things unspoken of have been?” The Governess’s question echoes through the careful suggestions and delicate temporal interweavings of Annilese Miskimmon’s The Turn of the Screw, twisting smiles into sordid suggestions, schoolrooms into places not of care but corruption.It takes a bold director to look at the evocative façade of Holland House – all crenellations and architectural ghosts – and then cover it up. Henry James’s Bly couldn’t find a more natural backdrop in any theatre in London, but Miskimmon turns resolutely away from this obvious Read more ...
David Nice
What a red letter day it is when a work you’ve always thought of as problematic seems at last, if only temporarily, to have no kind of fault or flaw. That was the case for me on Sunday afternoon with Britten’s penultimate opera, Owen Wingrave, launching this year’s Aldeburgh Festival with an ideal cast fused as one with the young Britten-Pears Orchestra thanks to the self-evidently intensive collaboration of director Neil Bartlett and conductor Mark Wigglesworth.Britten always demanded the highest standards of artists he could trust (and, as movingly described in a programme article by Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It takes a brave opera company indeed to stage Peter Grimes this summer. Benjamin Britten’s 2013 centenary celebrations took us to “peak Britten”, with performances of all his major works as well as the unprecedented, outstanding Grimes on the Beach. Then, this January, David Alden’s production of the opera returned to the Coliseum: direct, theatrical and if anything more potent than five years before. How then, could Grange Park – a David to the Goliaths of the Aldeburgh Festival and ENO – possibly compete?The answer, in Jeremy Sams’ quietly inventive production, is very well. Sams takes us Read more ...
David Nice
“Assez vu” (“seen enough”) is the first line of Benjamin Britten’s last Rimbaud setting in his electric song cycle Les Illuminations. Victor Hugo and Paul Verlaine had been the objects of his 14-year old attention in the Quatre Chansons françaises; later he made typically quirky arrangements of French folksongs. Les Illuminations has certainly been seen and heard enough in concert halls around Europe, even if you can never have too much of music as fresh as this. Britten loved the continent and the idea of the European Union. But have the French returned the compliment with stagings of the Read more ...