1940s
David Nice
"Sadler's Wells! Any more for Peter Grimes, the sadistic fisherman?," a cheery bus conductor is alleged to have called out around the time of this towering masterpiece's premiere in 1945. The side of a "Grimes bus" today would probably proclaim over Britten and the work itself the "brand" of two stalwart perfomers - conductor Edward Gardner and leading protagonist Stuart Skelton, dominant forces of the opera over the last ten years.With English National Opera and more recently presenting his Bergen Philharmonic as one of the finest orchestras in the world - last night's concert performance Read more ...
Robert Beale
Everyone’s doing Weinberg now, or so it seems. The Polish-born composer who became a close friend of Shostakovich was born 100 years ago, and there’s plenty of his music to go round. Raphael Wallfisch gave the UK premiere of his Cello Concertino (Opus 43B), with the Northern Chamber Orchestra in Manchester last night. The “B” is not insignificant – it’s a reworked and shortened version of his Cello Concerto of 1948, scored for string orchestra accompaniment only, and wasn’t published until two years ago.At 16 minutes in length but still with four movements, the piece is certainly an Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Much has been made of Martin Scorsese’s recent dismissal of Marvel films. Putting that debate aside, there’s no escaping the fact that in an era of rapid-fire sequels, with the same ensembles trotted out year after year, there’s far more frisson to be felt when the reunion is after not one or two, but 25 years – and what the filmmakers are seeking to recreate really is movie magic. That’s the case with this reteaming of Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, who made a trio of classic films together – Raging Bull, Goodfellas and the last, Casino, in 1995. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There used to be this myth that we knew nothing about the concentration camps until the victors opened their gates in 1945, and that the survivors were then nursed back to health. The Russians put out newsreels filmed weeks later of nurses tending to the children of Auschwitz, but the reality was that many had already been marched by the Nazis in the final stages of the war to camps like Gross-Rosen in south western Poland. And often when they were liberated, those children became just more human flotsam in the displaced persons camps that scarred Poland and Germany for years after the war Read more ...
Richard Bratby
There’s nothing like practising what you preach. “I say straight out that I regard all so-called 12-tone music, so-called serial music, so-called electronic music and so-called avant-garde music as utter rubbish, and indeed a deliberate conning of the public” said the composer Ruth Gipps to her biographer Jill Halstead. And sure enough, her Second Symphony – premiered by the then City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1946, and the opening item in this fascinatingly left-field programme from Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla – is unmistakably the work of what Arnold Bax would have called a “brazen Romantic”.It’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Renée Zellweger already has strong musical cinema form, Her role as Roxie Hart in Chicago garnered her second Oscar nomination. However, playing and singing Judy Garland is a whole different ball game. The film Judy takes a late-Sixties run of London dates as the prism through which to view the Hollywood star at the end of her life, focusing on both the triumphs and the damage wrought by her celebrity rollercoaster career. The soundtrack, on the other hand, doesn't often intimate those highs and lows so much as capture her hyper-jolly, go-get-‘em film persona.Zellweger inhabits the vocal role Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Following a triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ Superstar, now playing at the Barbican, the Park works its magic on another of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Seventies rock operas. Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-down, super-sleek, contemporary take excavates the biting satire of a work sometimes bogged down in period trappings and melodrama, and locates the furious spirit of Eva Perón – portrayed, with unusually convincing youth and fire, by the electrifying American actress Samantha Pauly.Pauly, who starred in the Chicago production of Six, makes a memorable UK debut as the wife of the Read more ...
David Nice
On the UK's biggest day of shame, it was some relief to tap in to the fury of the Russian people at a much greater national degradation (Napoleon's invasion in 1812, Hitler's in 1941). Though it works even better at the end of the first, "Natasha Rostova" part of Prokofiev's selective homage to Tolstoy, his choral epigraph gave us a good blasting at the start in the firm profiling of WNO forces under their music director Tomáš Hanus. The operatic War and Peace, though, is no more just about big gestures than the novel, and Prokofiev's astuteness in characterisation, which can be as assured as Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Better than the 2001 film but likely to disappoint devotees of the book, Captain Corelli's Mandolin onstage works best as a reminder of the identifiable stagecraft of its director, Melly Still. Playful, non-literal, and often endearingly physical (the human goat all but steals the show), Still's approach to this tale of love during wartime overrides a reductive and sometimes comically cliché script from Rona Munro full of lusty Italians singing Verdi and the like. As summer filler at a playhouse devoted for most of the last year to Harold Pinter, one could do a lot worse, and the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories is a collection of oral testimonies conducted between 1978-2004 with Soviet and post-Soviet citizens who were children during the second world war. They recount strange and terrible experiences which — even as adults — retain the force and candour of childhood memory.Unsurprisingly, many coalesce around abstract, sensory features which, along with spare brutal episodes, attest to deep sadness and thinned living. “What has stayed in my memory is colour,” says Lenya Khosenvich — a common admission. Faina Lyutsko remembers how “The death Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Terence Rattigan completists, and count myself among them, will leap at the chance to see a rare production courtesy the Orange Tree Theatre of While the Sun Shines, a 1943 monster hit for this great English writer that has languished in semi-obscurity ever since. (Theatre Royal, Bath, did an acclaimed version in 2016 but London hasn't seen it in an age.) Returning to a playwright whose previous French Without Tears enjoyed two sellout runs at this address, the director Paul Miller confirms a gift for mining the canon afresh.If one's actual experience of the play amounts to a rather more Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Stalingrad is the companion piece to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which on its (re)publication in English a decade ago was acclaimed as one of the greatest Russian (and not only Russian) novels of the 20th century. For its sense of the sheer sweep of history, of a society passing through a period of momentous conflict, comparison was often made with Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Stalingrad is the prequel to Life and Fate, and its appearance now allows readers to assess Grossman’s magnum opus – he considered the two novels to be effectively a single work – in its entirety. Tolstoy Read more ...