20th century
alexandra.coghlan
For most people a 25th anniversary is cause for celebration – a party, a dinner, maybe a few speeches. If you are musical theatre phenomenon Les Misérables however, festivities operate on an entirely different scale. London struggles to support two opera houses, yet this anniversary year will be playing host to three separate (and briefly simultaneous) productions of Boublil and Schönberg’s classic show, including an all-star, cast-of-thousands spectacular at the O2.Skipping over what such excess says about the tastes of London’s theatre-goers, it also says much about the show itself. An all- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Every year there are a couple of Proms that have a haphazard look about them, as if a fire had suddenly broken out in the BBC archives, and the programming committee grabbed whatever came to hand – a piano quartet, a couple of choral odes and a concerto for mandolin – and made for freedom. Though there had evidently once been a clear architecture to Sunday’s concert by the BBC Symphony Chorus and friends, in practice things were somewhat confused; endless personnel shiftings and a stuffed-to-bursting programme blunted the impact of music which demanded altogether simpler treatment.Bookending Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Ever since I can remember, the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg has played a walk-on part in histories of Soviet music. If you find him in an index at all (probably under Vainberg or Vajnberg, and usually with the first name given him by a box-ticking Soviet border guard in 1939: Moisey, or even Moshe), you’ll usually end up reading one of those melancholy and unhelpful lists: “Shostakovich’s followers include...”Grove’s Dictionary concedes a short and somewhat misleading entry: “His works are often based on a programme, largely autobiographical in nature.” Boris Schwarz, in the standard, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the second part of this historic career overview interview with the unique British impresarios, Victor and Lilian Hochhauser talk about their razor-edged relations with Soviet apparatchiks and the pressures they came under to prevent artist defections. Victor (who is a very engaging raconteur) reveals the lengths the Russians tried to go to stop Pierre Boulez conducting Berg in the USSR - liver-busting ceremonial vodka sessions, and a solution of Lewis Carrollian ludicrousness. "I hated them," he says, "but we needed each other."Following on from last week's revelations about their Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The stage of the Royal Albert Hall has a rather unfortunate habit of making orchestras seem incidental. Stretching endlessly across, one of the world’s largest organs by way of backdrop, even the most generous conventional ensembles take on Lilliputian proportions. Youth orchestras, with their Romantic scale and do-or-die attack, often emerge best from this encounter, as the Simón Bolívar and Gustav Mahler ensembles have recently proved. Framed by eight double basses and five horns, the Royal Albert Hall finally starts to make sense as a performance space. In the hands (and lips) of the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
With summer now fully upon us, and tourists flocking to the West End, it seems a good time to lift the bonnet on the tireless engine of London’s long-running hit shows. Over the next six weeks theartsdesk will be giving six of London’s hardest-working and longest-running classics – Les Miserables, The Lion King, Chicago, Billy Elliot, The Woman in Black, and of course The Phantom of the Opera – the once-over, checking to see whether all really is still running as smoothly and efficiently as it once was.There’s a country and western song (whether spoof or real it’s hard to tell) that goes by Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
"Stockhausen's festive overture from 1977 opens the programme," declared the Proms website cheerily. Come again? Festive? Stockhausen? From my limited but largely enthusiastic knowledge of the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen - much of which is about as festive as Auschwitz - I assumed that this must either be a big misunderstanding or a lively, perhaps German, joke. It was both. There can have been few composers more ballistically, brilliantly obnoxious than loopy old Karlheinz Stockhausen. Most famously, he declared the attack on the Twin Towers "the greatest work of art Read more ...
peter.quinn
“A E Housman said he could recognise poetry because it made his throat tighten and his eyes water. I can recognise jazz because it makes me tap my foot, grunt affirmative exhortations, or even get up and caper round the room.” For those curious to discover the kind of music that made poet Philip Larkin leap around shouting “Yeah, man”, help is at hand. As part of this year's Larkin25 celebrations to mark the 25th anniversary of his death, Proper Records is releasing Larkin’s Jazz, a four-disc conspectus that collects together many of his favourite jazz recordings.Larkin became a jazz addict Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
How do you construct a compelling play about the greatest of fictional detectives without either mystery or reveal? The cryptic answer, in the form of Jeremy Paul’s 1988 theatrical two-hander The Secret of Sherlock Holmes, is far from elementary.Arthur Conan Doyle’s Laudanum-quaffing, woman-hating logician Sherlock Holmes is surely the original for every heroic-cop-with-troubled-home-life that has since washed up in our fiction with whisky on his breath and murder on his mind. Clad in a paisley dressing gown, violin in hand, Holmes might colour proceedings with an inscrutable elegance, yet Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
"Oh! My Daddy, my Daddy!" It’s a cry that has echoed through the childhood of generations of English children, reducing all but the very staunchest to tears. Whether encountered through Edith Nesbit’s book or the classic 1970 film, The Railway Children is a national touchstone, sitting alongside Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland at the core of a proper English upbringing. With the film celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, what better time to don your knitted tam o’ shanter and climb aboard the latest theatrical adaptation, currently hissing and chugging its way into the disused Read more ...
howard.male
As an 11-year-old boy, I was awestruck from the first moment I saw Concorde on our three-channel black-and-white television, seemingly rearing up from its runway like a cyborg swan. At that age - and during that era - fact and fiction became vertiginously blurred when it concerned the fast-forward march of science and technology. While Factual-man was taking one slow-motion giant leap for mankind, Fictional-man was going where no man had gone before. And even if the US Enterprise did have warp-drive, our very own Concorde didn’t seem that far behind, as it hurtled through the blue at the Read more ...
David Nice
It's been quite a week for youth and the vernacular in the world of so-called “classical” music. Multiply by four the seven fledgling stage animals currently firing up John Adams’s “earthquake-romance” in London's East End, add an orchestra of 13-to-24-year-olds from four continents, student dancers, amateur choirs young and old and just a handful of professionals, and that's only the starting-point for this hair-raising, goosebump-inducing, 500-strong performance of what many of us believe to be Bernstein's most cohesive masterpiece.The real starting point, in fact, was nine months ago, this Read more ...