20th century
Matt Wolf
Alfred Hitchcock famously loved his blondes, and they didn't come much more lovable than Barbara Harris. A Broadway star during the 1960s who later shifted her attentions towards film, Harris was at the peak of her talent in Family Plot, a delightful if minor Hitchcock entry distinguished by a fine quartet of American leads (Karen Black, William Devane and Bruce Dern are the others) among whom Harris stands apart. Indeed, by the time of the conspiratorial wink from Harris that closes the film, audiences will surely find themselves already grinning right back.As it happens, Family Plot was Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Never one to underestimate the potency of a cameo (as evidenced by his own appearances in his films), Alfred Hitchcock had a particular genius with supporting roles – generating menace, intrigue or comedy with the fewest of brush strokes. Two of his earliest, and slightest, creations would also prove two of his most enduringly popular: cricket-obsessed duo Caldicott and Charters from 1938’s The Lady Vanishes.Played by Naunton Wayne (Caldicott) and Basil Radford (Charters), the two ex-Oxford men of sound character and indeterminate sexual preference all but transform a thriller into a social Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It may be the power of suggestion, but there was distinctly laid-back vibe at the packed Royal Albert Hall last night. Clapping between movements (and this was an audience never knowingly under-clapped) wasn’t greeted by the any of the usual hisses, and when a latecomer clattered down the entire length of stalls steps before the Largo of Dvořák’s Symphony No 9 she drew only the most indulgent of laughter. The Brazilians had arrived, bringing with them a warmth that extended well beyond the stage.It seems extraordinary that this should be the first visit of the São Paulo Symphony – one of Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Ravel composed only two operas, both one-acters, widely separated in time, superficially very different, but both in a way about the same thing: naughtiness. In L’Heure espagnole (1911), the clockmaker’s wife, Conceptión, entertains a succession of would-be lovers in her husband’s absence. In L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1924), the little boy who won’t do his homework, who smashes the teapot, pulls the cat’s tail and rips the wallpaper, suddenly finds his victims coming to life and scaring him to death.Naughtiness, rather than wickedness: Torquemada, the clockmaker, turns a blind eye on his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Another day at the Proms, another English choral masterpiece. Last night it came courtesy of the newly formed BBC Proms Youth Choir – a moveable feast of an ensemble that will bring together different youth choirs from across the UK over the next three years. I can’t imagine a more apt work to inaugurate the project than Tippett’s bravely painful meditation on human cruelty and capacity for endurance, A Child of Our Time. Framed intelligently within a collage of 20th-century American styles it offered a hopeful vision of the future, both musically and philosophically.Trained by Simon Halsey, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A friend of mine has an Eames lounge chair that he treats with enormous reverence and claims is the comfiest seat ever made. I simply don’t get it; with its bent plywood shell and black leather upholstery, this 1956 American design classic looks to me dark, clumsy and uninviting – especially when compared with Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair of some 50 years earlier or the delicate designs produced in the 1920s for the Bauhaus by Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe.Since the Eames phenomenon didn’t readily cross the Atlantic and we are not overly familiar with their achievements, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a lovely moment in The Opera Group’s production of Bow Down. An actor motions to a member of the audience and grins bleakly: “He thought he was here for an opera….”. It’s an aside, over before we’ve even fully registered it, but it’s one that reminds us that both Tony Harrison and Harrison Birtwistle knew exactly what they were doing when they constructed this amputated, bleeding limb of a work and christened it an “opera”, back in 1977.It would be hard to imagine two more brusque, pitilessly beautiful artists than Birtwistle and Harrison. From Lancashire and Yorkshire Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
This has to be the only music festival I've ever been to where two vacuum cleaners were on standby in case the star performer conked out. But that's what happens when your star performer is a player piano - they seem to run on Hoover tubes. With 11 concerts and one film in two days, this celebration of American maverick Conlon Nancarrow was London's alternative marathon. One that was no less eccentric, exhausting or adrenalin-generating (though much less running-based).At the core of the weekend was a nine-concert cycle of the complete studies for player piano. As far as anyone knew, it was Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Lord count was perhaps surprisingly high in the first instalment of Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture. Among the talking heads I counted there was only one who wasn’t a life peer or a “proper” hereditary one, and there was only one who was neither Lord, Lady or Dame (though she did have a CBE). That hereditary baron Ferdinand Mount was not only squeezed into the minority corner but never actually uses his title was, I suppose, a telling comment in itself about contemporary Britain and our egalitarian self-image, but more so the fact that two of the lifers, Lord Bragg and Peter Hennessy, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Recorded music has a lot to answer for. Until its arrival, most people made their own music – at home, using whatever resources were to hand. If you were lucky, you might have owned a piano. The less well-off might have had access to a ukulele. Tony Coleman and Margaret Meagher’s enchanting, lo-fi documentary stakes a bold claim for the ukulele’s pivotal role in 20th-century music history.A variant of a folk instrument introduced by Portuguese immigrants to Hawaii in the 1870s, it was championed by King David Kalakaua, who was beguiled by the ukulele’s sweet sound. The annexation of Hawaii Read more ...
howard.male
It’s a song which hangs in the air like pollen or reefer smoke, before gradually rising like a never-to-be-answered prayer. It began life as a lullaby but grew up to be a protest song, a scream of existential angst and even a purred invitation to sex. It’s a song like no other song, in that it has been covered more than any other song (its nearest competitors being “My Way” and “Yesterday”), and it was written by three Jewish immigrants before eventually being adopted by African-Americans as their own. A friend of Gershwin’s said, when reminiscing about hearing it for the first time Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Blessed are the dead”, sings Brahms in the final movement of his German Requiem. And as far as the rest of this concert was concerned it was perhaps just as well. In Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, the children are all dead; and in Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw everyone else has passed on except, of course, the survivor. The audience was not so much dead as largely absent, frightened off, I suppose, by the dreaded Arnold. Or maybe they were just at home painting pumpkins.They missed a brave programme, but a brilliant one. Schoenberg’s brusque, utterly unsentimental masterpiece is Read more ...