20th century
Kieron Tyler
Is there a place for the travelling fun fair any more? Static attractions like Alton Towers and Thorpe Park have rides that are bigger, grander, more varied and scarier than anything a traditional, transient fair could ever transport. All the Fun of the Fair’s answer was that the fair has survived by winding the clock back, rekindling the past with original Victorian and Edwardian rides. There’s still room for something less bombastic.All the Fun of the Fair traced the history of the travelling fair in its familiar form. What we now recognise as the fair, with rides, sideshows and snacks Read more ...
fisun.guner
The only voice recording Sigmund Freud ever made was for the BBC. It was made in December 1938, at Freud’s West Hampstead home just a few months before the father of psychoanalysis succumbed to throat cancer. He was 82 and wouldn’t see out another year, yet here he was on fighting form: “People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavoury,” he declaims, his voice clipped, precise and resoundingly emphatic. “Resistance was strong and unrelenting. The struggle is not yet over."Freud was a revolutionary, and like all revolutionaries he was, clearly, a dogmatist. Twenty Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Jealousy of people who live in Birmingham is not (I venture to hazard) so widespread a phenomenon as to merit a name all its own. After last night’s Prom from the CBSO and music director Andris Nelsons however, a term may well have to be coined for all of us Londoners whose green-eared envy seems unlikely to abate any time soon. We’ve heard the recordings and the rumours of greatness trickling down from the West Midlands, but the opportunity to see this partnership in action further south is rare. Conquering the Royal Albert Hall with an evening of generous, emotive music-making, the CBSO Read more ...
David Nice
All aboard the chrome locomotive for composer-conductor Oliver Knussen’s annual magical mystery tour. You may notice rather few fellow passengers in the Albert Hall; that’s a given with this event (though the Proms could have thrown in and advertised one of Olly’s Top 10 OTT Favourites – I’ve heard him proclaim them - to drum up more trade). You may also find rather too many stops for change of crew. But so long as you sit forward to catch the results of his famously acute hearing, second only to Boulez’s, you’ll get something out of a long, unsexy ride.Part of the pleasure of multi-work Read more ...
graham.rickson
We go out of this column's comfort zone for this week’s releases which include orchestrated versions of songs by the Fab Four, and an Italian pianist’s imaginative response to jazz god Thelonious Monk. And there’s also some Led Zeppelin played by a string quartet.The Beatles for Orchestra: Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Davis (Carl Davis Collection)New York-born composer and conductor Carl Davis has been working in the UK since 1960. He’s best known for his film and television music – notably the BBC’s 1996 Pride and Prejudice, for which he provided a near-perfect pastiche classical Read more ...
fisun.guner
Dalí may have the edge on Magritte for instant recognition and popularity, but how easily the Belgian beats the Spaniard as the more interesting Surrealist. Armed with his small repertoire of images – the nude, the shrouded head, the bowler hat, the apple and the pipe, to name a few – and painted in that precise, pictogram way of his, Magritte is an artist who holds back more than he gives away. Next to his restrained, meticulously tidy offerings, Dalí appears decidedly overcooked.In paintings such as The Treachery of Images (Cesi n’est pas une pipe), 1929, in which a representation Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week's chronologically varied selection includes instrumental music written by one of the giants of Elizabethan music and a baffling, beguiling work composed by a 20th-century maverick, inspired by a visit to a Japanese garden. There's also a splendid new recording of an Italian opera which opens with one of the world's most famous tunes.William Byrd: Complete Consort Music Phantasm (Linn Records) This is a collection of music composed by William Byrd for viol consort, probably between 1560 and 1603. The viol is the ancestor of the cello, a fretted, bowed instrument with six strings. It Read more ...
theartsdesk
Lucian Freud, who died aged 88 at his west London home on Wednesday, was often described as Britain's greatest living artist. In the six decades he was active, figurative painting went in and out of fashion - though mostly it was out - but Freud remained resolutely outside and beyond fashion. As both an art world grandee and something of a celebrity, he really had no rival, though perhaps David Hockney, still alive and 15 years his junior, came closest. Freud, however, had a very different way of looking: cooler, harder, more penetrative. Below, four writers pay their personal tributes. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Never has a French invasion of these shores been quite so welcome. The two-day siege currently being staged in the Royal Albert Hall by Myung-Whun Chung and his Orchestra Philharmonique de Radio France opened last night with patriotic fervour in an all-French programme. Even Beethoven’s Triple Concerto began rolling its “R”s when cajoled into life by the dashing Capuçon brothers. While their strongly accented interpretation may not have been to everyone’s taste, as an exhalation after the meditative intensity of Messiaen and Dusapin it was perfectly judged.Showcasing the impossibly Read more ...
David Nice
From Middle-earth, middle England and Nibelheim they came, adventurers anxious to acclaim an Unjustly Neglected British Masterpiece. Praise, or curse, their persistence in steering the BBC and the Albert Hall back to Havergal Brian's biggest work after 31 years; hail by all means conductor Martyn Brabbins's flexible command of nine choirs and two orchestras. All I can say is that before I sat through nearly two long hours of continuous music last night, I proclaimed that this was exactly the sort of thing the Proms should be trying. Now I'm hanging out the garlic and spraying the air Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week’s reviews include a generous Liszt anthology played by one of the 20th century’s most fondly remembered pianists. There’s a reissued box of Beethoven symphonies performed on modern instruments by one of the classiest European orchestras. Heading further north, we've a repackaged set of Sibelius symphonies with some essential extras.
Beethoven: The Symphonies Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus/Kletzki (Supraphon)
This lovely box set feels naughtily indulgent after the bracing, clean textures of Emanuel Krivine’s recent period-instrument Beethoven cycle. Paul Kletzki, born in Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The funny thing about updating is how old-fashioned it can seem. Perhaps that’s why opera directors “update” to the Fifties, building in their own obsolescence. Steven Berkoff didn’t deliberately do this (I suppose) in his Oedipus play Greek; yet behind the interminable shits and fucks, the inyerface monkey farts, the snot and the vomit, there does lurk a rather touching aproned and flat-capped mum-and-dad Family Favourites world that was certainly long dead by 1980, when the play was first done. And it’s one of the strong points of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s 1988 opera that it preserves all the Read more ...