20th century
edward.seckerson
The Major-Domo promises fireworks during the Prologue of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Katharina Thoma, the director of Glyndebourne’s new staging, drops a bombshell - actually several bombshells. Glyndebourne’s wartime history (as a refuge for evacuees) would seem to have chimed with the darker implications of the opera within - namely, the Composer’s opera seria of the title. So here we are, in these darkest of days, occupying the house of a wealthy nobleman for sure but not in Vienna or even Germany but in deepest Sussex. So why, one wonders, is everyone speaking German Read more ...
fisun.guner
Every time you turn a corner, he’s there, on yet another monitor. Either the exhibition curators have a sense of humour, or Alastair Campbell really is the last word on propaganda, a subject about which the British Library has mounted an excellent and occasionally provocative exhibition.On one screen Blair’s former spin doctor can be seen talking with some regret. The P-word, he is saying, is so sullied that it’s now no more than a byword for lying. Personally, I feel more comfortable with the Jeremy Paxman line: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” Perhaps Campbell could mount a campaign Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
North London has a splendid new theatre, The Park, whose £2.5 million existence – without a penny of government subsidy – is something of a miracle given our cash-strapped times. The building itself is also a bit of a marvel, tucked into a Tardis-like space (originally a blacksmith’s) in the heart of Finsbury Park. With two stages – a 200-seat main theatre and a 90-seat studio – and a strong community ethos, The Park has heaps of promise. Hats off to artistic director Jez Bond and his team.The opening play, however, doesn’t quite offer the dramatic fireworks one might have Read more ...
edward.seckerson
If you should take your seats prematurely in the London Coliseum you’ll find yourself confronted with a group of serving British soldiers. You’ll shift a little uneasily under their gaze. There they are, staring, smoking, loitering; there we are, on a visit to the opera. There’s a disconnect. Among those soldiers is Wozzeck (Leigh Melrose), the eponymous anti-hero of Alban Berg's operatic masterpiece. And since it's not too often that stagings of the opera actually address the issue of his profession there is an added immediacy. This is the here and now of a Britain effectively still caught Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The Barbican Hall’s house lights faded to black, with just the soft glow of music stand lamps on stage as the Britten Sinfonia filed on and eased into the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Directed from leader’s desk by Jacqueline Shave, the orchestra gave an exquisite account of the piece, the chamber aesthetic and necessary communication between players somehow helping to draw the audience in. It was certainly a rewarding alternative to the lusher – and slushier – version one would hear from a full symphony orchestra’s worth of strings.It was a nice theatrical touch to begin the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Early on in Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene, John le Carré remembers Greene telling him that childhood provides “the bank balance of the writer”. Greene remained in credit on that inspiration front throughout his life, even while he struggled financially in his early writing days with a young family; later in life, too, he lost everything to a swindling financial adviser – the move to France was to avoid the Revenue.Greene went to Berkhamstead School, where his father was headmaster, and was bullied, not least for the assumption that he was a spy for paternal authority (the spy Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Down by the seaside, an array of rather lumpen large naked women are marching, posing, reclining, and even rolling over along the walls of the new Jerwood Gallery, delineated by William Scott (1913-1989). Scott’s centenary is being commemorated with an array of exhibitions and publications in Britain and America, and the market too is revving up with the publication of a four-volume catalogue of his oil paintings.He was born in Scotland, brought up in Northern Ireland, trained at the Belfast College of Art and the Royal Academy in London, and was part of those several generations of British Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Vladimir Jurowski deemed this the most challenging of any programme in the Southbank’s year-long The Rest is Noise festival and proceeded to tell us precisely why. That his little preamble lasted almost twice as long as the first piece - Webern’s Variations for Orchestra Op.30 - was an indicator of just how scientific the thinking behind his programme was. Jurowski instinctively understands how and why works impact on each other in the way they do. Intellectually and emotionally speaking this was a classic of its kind - and with one possible exception the accomplishment of its execution was Read more ...
David Nice
Highly sexed cockerels and cats, a lovesick lion and a ballet of frogs might not seem like a recipe, or rather a menagerie, for profundity. Yet in two ravishing French man (or child)-meets-beast fables for the stage, Poulenc and Ravel are quite capable of tearing at our heartstrings. That they did so unremittingly last night was very largely due to the supernaturally beautiful sounds master conjuror Stéphane Denève drew from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Yet more than just the icing on the cake was the collective and individual presence of students from the Royal Academy of Music for Ravel's L' Read more ...
David Nice
Backed up by reasonably adventurous orchestral programming, lucky conductors can forge a strong Stravinsky evening by picking and mixing from his five ancient Greek rituals. Sir John Eliot Gardiner, unintentionally homaging the late Sir Colin Davis who at least in earlier days would have jumped to such a pairing, chose to celebrate his 70th birthday with the extremes of white balletic lyric poem Apollon musagète and hard-hitting blackest tragedy Oedipus Rex.Apollo’s celestial strings and the acerbic mix of brass with woodwind in Oedipus, all superbly aligned, guaranteed further contrasts. But Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Although overwhelmingly remembered now as a novelist, Somerset Maugham was best known during his lifetime as a playwright. “England’s Dramatist”, as the newspapers christened him, produced more than 20 plays spanning the length of his career, outdoing contemporaries Shaw and Rattigan for popular and critical success. But his was not an enduring fame, and with his work now strikingly absent from the theatrical repertoire, any revival must inevitably face the suspicious question: why?Romping its way through questions of “love, beauty and the economic situation” (with a few theatrical detours to Read more ...
David Nice
"You know that I am as sincere in my faith, without any messianic screamings, as I am in my Parisian sexuality," declared Francis Poulenc, who died 50 years ago this January at one with his God and his cheerful, not exclusively but mainly gay, promiscuity. Alas, the Revd Richard Coles and Anne Atkins, nearly scuppering all the joy of the CLS's mini-festival finale in a “discussion” before the concert proper had even begun, didn't seem to know at all .Having proposed some sort of imaginary tussle between God and sex for the soul of our lovable Frenchman, the two went off at a waffly, self- Read more ...