20th century
Gary Naylor
Like families, nations have secrets: dirty linen that they prefer not to expose to the light of day. Patriotic myths need to be protected, heroic narratives shaped, good guy reputations upheld. In 1942, the USA rounded up Japanese-Americans and locked them away in the badlands of the Midwest and promptly forgot about them – and then worked hard to keep it that way in the decades that followed. It’s likely you didn’t know that and it’s no accident if so.One such intern was George Takei – Star Trek’s Mr Sulu and, in his extraordinary second life, liberal activist supreme on social Read more ...
Robert Beale
Nicola Benedetti and Sir Mark Elder are both in the enviable position of being able to take audiences with them into music territory that might scare some away. So it was a gratifyingly near-capacity house that heard Szymanowski’s Second Violin Concerto last night as – on the first occasion they have worked together – they presented it to the Hallé audience.It’s long been a favourite of gifted solo violinists, because of its combination of folk-style energy and lyricism (and the cadenza movement, which was written by its first soloist Pawel Kochański and divides the work roughly in two, Read more ...
India Lewis
Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres is American critic Kelefa Sanneh’s ambitious survey of musical history. As such, it risks remaining only a surface-level summary of the seven genres he describes. I was wrong to worry, though: despite its broad coverage, Sanneh’s study is informative and personal, providing overviews of but also covering smaller diversions and developments within rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance and pop.Each chapter loops back to the other genres to show their points of divergence, before travelling forward to explore the roads of sub- Read more ...
Mert Dilek
As bio-musicals continue to have their heyday, it makes sense for the Young Vic to throw its hat in the ring and champion a work about the hugely influential Nelson Mandela. But this new musical about the South African anti-apartheid activist and statesman is such a baffling hodgepodge that it actually risks being a disservice to Mandela’s legacy.Mandela covers the period in the eponymous figure’s life from his militant activities and subsequent imprisonment in the early 1960s to his release from prison in 1990. Perhaps because the piece is chiefly focused on Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester's champions of contemporary music, just stripped of support by Arts Council England, are undaunted and last night continued doing what they do best. A small ensemble of virtuoso players brought a large and appreciative audience at Hallé St Peter’s a set of four challenging pieces, with a world premiere and a UK premiere among them.Challenging, because the music was all complex and in each case spoke a language of its own – but rewarding, too, because of the sense of exploration and the sheer ingenuity of the sounds being heard. Two of these were by young composers championed Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Royal Academy’s Making Modernism is a welcome introduction to seven women painters working in Germany at the beginning of the last century. It wouldn’t surprise me if you’d never heard of Gabriele Münter, Marianne Werefkin and Paula Modersohn-Becker even though they enjoyed international reputations during their lives, since their male counterparts (Kandinsky, Klee, Jawlensky and Macke) are not well known here either.Käthe Kollwitz may be a more familiar name; her harrowing prints and drawings are so powerful they knock the spots off everything else here. One of her most famous etchings, Read more ...
David Nice
In usual circumstances, a fully staged opera and every voice-and-piano song-cycle by a single genius in one weekend would be an embarrassment of riches. The only problem about Britten hitting the heights, above all in setting toweringly great poetry by Auden, Blake, Donne and Hölderlin, at the top of a long list, meant one sitting and squirming at most of Ronald Duncan’s wretched lines for an opera which even in its very subject is problematic, The Rape of Lucretia.Oliver Mears’ production (pictured below, both production images by Camilla Greenwell), originating here at Snape Maltings with Read more ...
Mert Dilek
How can this beauty arise from such ugliness? The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s 1953 drama about the Salem witch trials of 1692, is rife with unwavering prejudices, selfish slander, and sickening motives. But under Lyndsey Turner’s aesthetically vigorous direction on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage, the play’s infected air becomes a breeding ground for visually arresting tableaux possessed of rampant emotional intensity. Painterly but unfussy, Turner’s staging fixes our gaze on those electric moments in Miller’s allegorical tale where unreason and blind faith lock horns with integrity. Read more ...
David Nice
“Variety is the spice of life! Vive la difference!,” chirrups the ensemble at the end of this giddying double bill. And there could hardly be more singular variety acts than a potential suicide at the end of a phone line, a woman who lets her breasts fly away and grows a beard, and a husband who breeds 40,049 children on his own.Favourite Glyndebourne Director Laurent Pelly has gift-wrapped Poulenc’s two one-act one-offs with intelligence, verve and visual brilliance - which in the first case means semi-darkness, in the second all the colours of the rainbow - and conductor Robin Ticciati Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Collective were back on home ground last night in the tour of a programme featuring the first performances of a new song cycle by Edmund Finnis, Out of the Dawn’s Mind. Soprano soloist was the amazing Ruby Hughes.It was home ground for her, too, in a sense: as a former student at Chetham’s School of Music she’s an old friend of the Collective’s leader and artistic director, Rakhi Singh.Ruby Hughes and the Collective created a moving and stimulating online streamed programme from the Lakeside Arts venue at the University of Nottingham in February last year – Dowland, Debussy, Mahler Read more ...
Robert Beale
An opera in the Hallé concert series, conducted by Sir Mark Elder, is rather like a blend of a religious observance and a masterclass in orchestral playing and singing technique.The season finale at the Bridgewater Hall was Madama Butterfly, the first time in all his years in charge that Sir Mark has chosen Puccini for this treatment in the concert hall. He is a wizard at conveying this composer’s music, and, with a starry cast and a full symphony orchestra on the platform, the score came to life as probably never before for most of its hearers, even those who have experienced it in the Read more ...
Robert Beale
In the first and sixth symphonies of Vaughan Williams, Sir Mark Elder had two of the most ambitious and rewarding of the whole canon to present in Saturday’s VW 150 concert, which consisted of those two works alone. A Sea Symphony in particular (the first) is a big work in every sense and worthy of his expertise in marshalling and inspiring large forces: performed second, it brought the evening to a marvellous end and received an enthusiastic standing ovation of the kind more usual at pop concerts than from classical fans.The Sixth Symphony, however, is music of remarkable freshness, in many Read more ...