20th century
Adam Sweeting
If we could keep living our life over and over again, would we get better at it? This is the premise underpinning Life After Life, the BBC’s four-part adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s novel.The story centres around Ursula Todd, as she grows up with parents Hugh and Sylvie (James McArdle and Sian Clifford) and assorted siblings in their home, Fox Corner. It’s an Edwardian rural idyll of lush gardens, the murmur of bees and teas on the lawn.But Ursula’s progress through the 20th century and through multiple versions of her life will not be plain sailing. Indeed, her first attempt at being born Read more ...
Robert Beale
The baton passed, metaphorically, to the Hallé last night in the Vaughan Williams symphony cycle shared between them and the BBC Philharmonic to mark the composer’s 150th anniversary. Literally, that baton was in the same hand as on the last date, for it was John Wilson who conducted the Ninth Symphony, as he had the second and seventh 12 days ago. This time VW was paired with Holst, as the second part of the concert consisted of The Planets.It made an interesting comparison, as the two composers were friends as young men, and though Holst died 24 years before Vaughan Williams and The Planets Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
"Disgusting", "depressing", "sheer horror from start to finish", a "filthy, rotten, immoral play". Such were the comments from viewers published across a spectrum of British newspapers following the BBC transmission, on 12 December 1954, of Nigel Kneale’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.The papers themselves were similarly critical. "A Tory guttersnipe’s view of Socialism" was the assessment of the socialist Daily Worker. The Daily Express opted for sensationalism. Its headline read: "Wife dies as she watches".Adapted by Kneale, obviously, from George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel, and now released Read more ...
Robert Beale
At first sight, Vaughan Williams’ Second and Seventh Symphonies might seem to have a lot in common. Both are quite programmatic and pictorial, the second (the London) including music that might have finished up as a tone poem, and the seventh (Sinfonia antartica) adapted from his score for the film Scott of the Antarctic (1948).But it seemed that John Wilson, conducting the first of two contributions to the Hallé/BBC Philharmonic celebration of Vaughan Williams (the second is with the Hallé on 21st April) found more real symphonic qualities in the earlier work than the later one.Rightly so, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Continuing the joint BBC Philharmonic/Hallé celebration of Vaughan Williams, Sir Andrew Davis took on the job of presenting three substantial works on Saturday.Toward the Unknown Region has given its title to the entire series, not a bad choice of phrase for the career of a composer whose intellectual curiosity and visionary capacity never left him: the phrase is that of the poet Walt Whitman, and the piece itself is a setting of a five-stanza poem for chorus, orchestra and organ.It's early Vaughan Williams, written when he was working on the music of The English Hymnal, and in many ways it Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
There is little denying that the Antarctic continent is no longer possessed of the allure that it once was. By all accounts, particularly those unspoken, Antarctica has been betrayed, usurped, eclipsed.Beyond the sober walls of research laboratories, or the heady enthusiasm of university corridors, people today have scant interest in the icy land mass, twice the size of Australia, on average the coldest, driest, windiest of continents, home to penguins, seals and tardigrades, that 2016 Animal of the Year, though it may be.What has taken its place? “No single space project... will be more Read more ...
Robert Beale
There was no overt reference to the world outside in this concert, and yet the poignancy of its content could hardly have been clearer if it had been planned: two symphonies and a song cycle each touched by the tragedy of war.It was the launch event of RVW150, a national and international celebration of the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, stretching from this year well into next, to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. In Manchester the Hallé and BBC Philharmonic are presenting all his symphonies in concerts over the next 11 weeks, a cycle entitled “Toward the Unknown Region”. And in the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It might seem odd to start with the encore, but I’ve never seen one like it. At the end of its two-night residency at the Festival Hall, having just romped through the rigours of The Rite of Spring, the players of the Budapest Festival Orchestra put their instruments down, shuffled to their feet and sang for us. Stravinsky’s humble, minute long Ave Maria made the perfect counterpoint to the violent paganism of the Rite, and the sound made by the untrained voices of these highly trained musicians added a vulnerability and sincerity to what had gone before.The two all-Stravinsky programmes that Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
A man sits at a table in an otherwise bare room. Shot in monochrome and positioned off-centre, he reads a newspaper and smokes a cigar, lazily obscured as two other figures drift into and out of shot. A brief fight ensues. A man falls to the floor and is dragged away. Suddenly, a door opens. A new man stands at the foot of a staircase. It leads to another room, where yet more men await.This is early Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the first film in the first volume of Arrow’s new collection of his works. The movie’s title is Love Is Colder Than Death (1969), and its opening is typical of a Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
This remarkable evening should really have been more remarkable still. The unfortunate pianist Cédric Tiberghien took an official pre-travel Covid test that obliged him to drop out at 5pm – even though, as he tweeted in frustration, three subsequent lateral flow tests came out negative. Such is concert life in the Covid era. Nobody could be expected to find a replacement to perform Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand at two hours’ notice, so the work was dropped. Still, what remained made up in sheer wow-factor what it lacked in duration. Entitled “Poems of Ecstasy”, the programme Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Three films, each restored to glorious 4K, make up Second Run’s Hungarian Masters set. Billed as “essential works by three of Hungarian cinema’s most renowned filmmakers”, each film earns that praise in its own way.Zoltán Fábri’s Merry-Go-Round is the first, released amid the final months of Mátyás Rákosi’s de-facto leadership, a period defined by intense industrialisation, militarisation and collectivization. Fábri and his contemporaries witnessed a severe decline in living standards, purges, and the deportation of more than half a million Hungarians to the Soviet Union, where Read more ...
Richard Bratby
As the conductor of English National Opera’s 2018 production of Porgy and Bess, there can’t be many maestros in the UK who can currently match John Wilson’s knowledge of that extraordinary score. And there are surely none who can rival Wilson’s understanding of – and passion for – the work of the great interwar Broadway and Hollywood arrangers (he built an entire orchestra around them, after all). Which is one way of saying that if you’re looking for an interpreter of Robert Russell Bennett’s 1942 “Symphonic Picture” of Gershwin’s opera, Wilson pretty much covers all the bases. So Read more ...