20th century
alexandra.coghlan
What rare luxury. A three-concert series from the London Symphony Orchestra and their Principal Guest Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is lure enough, but add three collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma as soloist and you have to rope off a special area in the Barbican for the returns queue. Rarer still – it would be worth every moment of the wait.The concert-triptych has been a meditation on musical friendships and relationships, with long-time colleagues Ma and Tilson Thomas paying homage to the complex network of emotions and influences that existed between Britten, Copland and Shostakovich, three Read more ...
edward.seckerson
In Bergen’s Grieg Hall (one is tempted to say the Hall of the Mountain King) the 2013 Bergen Festival concludes with the mournful tolling of bells. A consonant “Amen”, like a healing benediction, is the last word and with it comes perhaps a glimmer of hope. But the mood is sombre not celebratory. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, for all its theatricality, would be an unlikely choice to close a festival in any year but this - Britten's hundredth anniversary. Its effect on an audience has been tried and tested the world over and those who have vilified it (they still do) for being overly emotive Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Although originally commissioned by the Royal Opera House, Benjamin Britten’s opera Owen Wingrave was always intended to be an opera-for-television. Perhaps it’s this unusual pedigree that has scared off potential performances of this little-seen work, perhaps it’s the piece’s awkward drama and barely digested polemic. Either way it’s a shame. This late score is full of Brittenish melodic fragments and orchestral colours, and if the opera house wouldn’t exactly be the poorer for its absence the concert hall certainly would.Why the inherently naturalistic medium of television should have Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Githa Sowerby's play, written in 1912 and a huge hit at the Royal Court and then in America, has been described as having qualities of Ibsen or Chekhov, and its themes certainly echo those writers' examinations of emotional claustrophobia and thwarted ambition.How much of this is in the original, edited and translated by Blake Morrison and directed by neuropsychologist Jonathan Miller I confess I don't know, but if this is wholly her work then she was remarkably prescient; obsession with class and worker-owner strife, as well as a horribly dysfunctional family, are here. It could almost be Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Three hundred years ago we danced and ate to art music. Before that we worshipped to it. In the 19th century we began to sit and stare at it. The immersive music movement of the past decade has moved things along again. Today we are encouraged to swim through performances, sniffing the music out, hunting it down. The latest ensemble to free themselves from the sit-and-stare model are the enterprising outfit, the London Contemporary Orchestra (LCO). For their concert on Friday we had to go down 200-odd steps into the labyrinths of the disused station at Aldwych. It was well worth the effort. Read more ...
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 ...