20th century
Florence Hallett
Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results, but crashing and burning just as often. Everyone else, like me, or in Kiefer’s case his long-suffering assistant Tony, not to mention poor old Alan Yentob, has to trot along behind, barely able to keep up with the barrage of ideas, questions and orders, let alone judge whether any of it is any good.Early on, Yentob was struggling to keep abreast of Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Walking into this exhibition is a bit like walking into a great forest. The dark green walls are hung all around with paintings of trees; we look up through branches that spiral dizzyingly skyward, while the upwards sweep of vast trunks seem relentlessly, tangibly full of life. Some of these paintings verge on abstraction, the forms of tree trunks simplified and reduced to an arrangement of planes, with spatial recession represented entirely through colour. In others, a flurry of brushstrokes captures the energy of the forest, the wind in the leaves, the light breaking through to the velvety Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
This morning, those who follow ballet on both sides of the Atlantic might be feeling a bit like the male soloists at the beginning of Ashton’s Scènes de Ballet: turning their heads sharply, almost pantomimically, from side to side. Over there, in New York, Wendy Whelan, the prima ballerina retiring after a 30-year career with City Ballet, made her farewell in a programme heavy on modern masters Wheeldon and Ratmansky, including a world première. Over here, in London, the Royal Ballet performed a quadruple bill of works by Frederick Ashton, its revered and adored founder choreographer, the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
New Adventures, the name of Matthew Bourne's company, has a ruddy-cheeked, Boys’ Own ring to it that has – until now – been rather belied by his oeuvre, which includes a dance version of Edward Scissorhands, as well as dark retellings of all the traditional story ballets. But the New Adventure which rolled into Sadler’s Wells last night really is an adventure – an adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the desert island schoolboy story heavy with allegory about the propensity of human beings to descend into barbarism.Civilization and barbarism are complex terms, and political Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
As a political act, the first performance of Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel in 1916 is exceptionally important. It was staged in Washington DC by the drama committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and was the first play by an African-American woman ever to be professionally produced (as well as one of the first to feature an all-black cast).As drama, though, it does not quite measure up. The themes it features - segregation, racism, insidious intolerance - are undoubtedly powerful and too-little discussed on the stage. Yet the play’s dialogue Read more ...
David Nice
Comparisons, even on paper, between two season openers from London orchestras could hardly have been more instructive. I didn’t attend Valery Gergiev’s London Symphony Orchestra concert last week, for reasons several times outlined on theartsdesk. But quite apart from the fact that Gergiev and his court pianist Denis Matsuev are active supporters of Putin's “Might is Right” campaign in the Ukraine – a situation which tens of thousands of Muscovites are beginning to challenge – Matsuev is also the worst of barnstormers. Last night, on the other hand, we had mercurial pianist Jean-Efflam Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The problem with programming Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony - and only the very bold and resourceful and/or the BBC are ever likely to do so - is that it eclipses everything, and I mean everything, in its proximity. And if it was my 90th birthday - as indeed it was on this day for the BBC Singers - I’m not sure I’d want to bask in its aura, especially since the world premiere commissioned for this big birthday - Kevan Volans's The Mountain That Left - had to be postponed due to the indisposition of its soprano soloist, Pumeza Matshikiza. This being the BBC Singers, however - a group for whom Read more ...
fisun.guner
Eight seconds in and my toes were already curling. Perhaps it was the authority with which the voiceover delivered some juicy clunkers. “If you wanted to be an artist in 1908, Vienna is where you’d come to make your name,” it intoned. Wow, who’d bother with Paris, eh? Picasso, you idiot, messing about with Cubism in a Montmartre hovel when you could have been sticking gold leaf on your decorative canvases, à la Klimt. Or perhaps it was James Fox’s predilection for banal generalities – cut-and-paste pronouncements that could be applied anywhere, any time. The “insights” never really got Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We call it the First World War, but in Western Europe at least, most of the scrutiny is confined to what happened to Britain, France and Germany (with a side order of Russia) from 1914-18. The writer and presenter of this two-part series, David Olusoga, seized the opportunity to emphasise the full global scope of the conflict by throwing fascinating light on the contributions made by troops from the French and British colonies, uncomprehendingly transported from India and Africa to the mud, blood and horror of the Western Front.Beginning with the revelation that the first shot fired by the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The symphony – that structural pillar of classical music – found itself under siege last night at the Proms. Both Berio’s Sinfonia and Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony assault and subvert, reshape and reimagine the genre, puncturing the Victorian smugness of the Royal Albert Hall with doubt. It was particularly poignant on this, the day after the anniversary commemorations of World War I, that the orchestra of the European Union should perform two works born, however differently, from the conflicts of this tumultuous century – one unable to see beyond the darkness of oppressive rule, the other Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Comedy, and a bit with a dog.” That’s what audiences really want according to the hapless would-be impresario Mr Henslowe, and that’s certainly what they get in Lee Hall’s new stage adaptation of John Madden’s 1998 film Shakespeare in Love – several bits with a dog, in fact.There was a time when film-makers had it all their own way, pilfering freely from literature in a process which was entirely one-way. But trends have turned, and now you’re more likely to see the show-of-the-film than the film-of-the-book. Currently in the West End you can watch Dirty Dancing, The Commitments and The Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In 2005, San Francisco Ballet were the first company to visit Paris as part of a new summer dance festival, Les Étés de la Danse. Helped not only by this auspicious start, but by the obvious demand for live dance in a month traditionally barren for the Parisian performing arts, the festival prospered, and in this its 10th year, has brought the Americans back with a stonking programme. Every night of the 17-date run at the Théâtre du Châtelet features a different triple bill, covering in total 18 pieces by twelve choreographers – and that’s not counting the opening gala. A treat indeed for Read more ...