Tchaikovsky
judith.flanders
The Royal Ballet’s autumn season began on Monday, but this was the eagerly awaited Swan Lake. Natalia Osipova, ex-Bolshoi, now principal with American Ballet Theater and the Mikhailovsky in St Petersburg, was making her debut as a guest with the Royal Ballet, partnered by Carlos Acosta.Osipova had, dramatically, left the Bolshoi for the smaller and less prestigious Mikhailovsky, to the puzzlement of many. But the Bolshoi streams its dancers: a certain type is classical, another is romantic, another – Osipova’s type – play soubrettes. Her Kitri in Don Quixote (first seen in London in 2007) Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach, Beethoven, Schubert Reiko Fujisawa (piano) (Quartz)Each of these three composers makes very specific, particular demands on a pianist’s technique. Playing Bach as sharply and as delicately as this doesn’t suggest that Reiko Fujisawa will be up to the mark when tackling the spongier, more amorphous world of Schubert’s Impromptus, but she’s able to inhabit both sound worlds with ease. Having a mixed programme on CD is such a rare pleasure; this is like listening to a carefully prepared live recital. The Schubert comes at the end of the disc. The major-minor shifts in the first Read more ...
David Benedict
There are no two ways about this: Eugene Onegin is a masterpiece. The plotting is so thrillingly concise, the cunningly built-up musical passion so astonishingly detailed that there simply is no excuse for an underpowered or melodramatic production. But for the last 20 years, the Royal Opera and English National Opera have offered up one flawed – I’m being kind - production after another. Enter director Daniel Slater. His thrillingly intelligent Opera Holland Park production trounces them all.From the moment the overture begins it’s clear there’s a controlling intelligence at work. To Read more ...
theartsdesk
Matthew Bourne, creator of the famous male swans of his modern reinvention of Swan Lake, is to launch the nationwide screening of a spectacular new 3D film of his creation, along with a live Q&A - and we have free tickets to be won for this exclusive event. UPDATE: Competition now expired.Swan Lake will be given its premiere 3D screening on Monday 14 May, followed by the Q&A session with Bourne, the film's director Ross McGibbon and the producer Fiona Morris. The session, held at the Curzon Soho, 99 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 5DY, will be chaired by theartsdesk's Ismene Brown.The Read more ...
judith.flanders
An apocryphal story tells of an awful theatrical adaptation of the story of Anne Frank. When the Nazis arrive to search the house where the family are in hiding, an enraged theatre-goer shouts, “She’s in the attic!” Well, I didn’t quite point Anna Karenina to the train station, but the thought crossed my mind.Boris Eifman has always divided the critics. Western audiences tend to respond the way they do to car crashes: they are appalled, but find it hard to look away. Russians, meanwhile, virtually stand on their seats and scream for more. Eifman, who since 1977 has run his own company in the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Louis Andriessen: Anaïs Nin, De Staat London Sinfonietta and soloists/Atherton (Signum)A friend of mine studied with the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen in the 1980s. He sent me a cassette (remember those?) of De Staat, and I can remember being bowled over by the music’s stark majesty and rhythmic punchiness, Andriessen’s repetitive vocal lines soaring over minimalist riffs, more redolent of Stravinsky than Glass. Written in the mid-1970s, Andriessen wrote of one early performance that he “had to sing every note for them (the musicians), because they articulated the piece like Bruckner Read more ...
David Nice
Two precisely imagined dream-visions bookend a cornucopia on the musical front. I’ll start with the deadly but save the apparently frivolous for the top slot. Christopher Alden’s pitiless exiling of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Elizabethan wood to 1960s school block was to opera what Lars von Trier’s Melancholia was to film: audience-sundering, often alienating, sometimes enticing, but very much its own consistent world. Its splendid cast and conductor Leo Hussain worked as one to enhance the paradoxes of its terrible beauty.ENO’s newcomer on the schoolboy front, Nico Muhly’s Two Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It would always be a risk putting such a gossamer Christmas charmer as The Nutcracker into a gargantuan Mammonite cavern like the O2 Arena, where magic only counts if it rings loudly in the coffers - car park £25! programmes £10! As with the Royal Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet last June, Birmingham Royal Ballet have put up a cinema screen to enable thousands of viewers far away to catch what looks dolls-house-sized in real view. But where that other ballet is all about action and plot, this is a ballet about atmospheres and dreams, needing most delicate weaving into its setting.If you sit in a £ Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Here’s a mindboggling statistic. By my calculation, some 330,000 seats are going to be offered for sale in London and Birmingham for just one ballet this Christmas - that’s live seats, not counting the three (yes, three) cinema screenings of foreign Nutcrackers being beamed into the UK on a lot of holiday dates. So the dance industry reckon to sell up to half a million Nutcracker seats mostly in London in a bit over a month?I’m tallying up Royal Ballet (20 performances), Birmingham Royal Ballet (28), English National Ballet (35) and Matthew Bourne (47) live, not to mention New York City Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I don't want to get the blues at The Nutcracker of all ballets. It should be all snow and Christmas, flowers and presents, firelight, moonlight, candlelight and unearthly brilliance. What with the lush magic of the Birmingham Royal Ballet Nutcracker and the solemn rapture of the Royal Ballet one, English National Ballet have always had a daunting task to be both different enough and distinguished enough to compete, but their current one kills itself none too softly with its lighting.Every few years their Christmas bankroller switches flavour and tone, and last year their joshing modern Read more ...
David Nice
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra's Glasgow concert tonight has had to be cancelled because of what my Scots godson, in far less extreme conditions down in the Borders, once described as "horrifying wind and rain". The programme? The Suite from Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden, about a northern people in the grip of extended bad winter weather until the icy heroine should be melted by the rays of love, and the second act of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, where admittedly it's in the first that ballerina snowflakes eventually get tossed around in a storm and the heroine heads off with her Read more ...