Paris
Boyd Tonkin
Like almost everything that it touches these days, English National Opera’s autumn season of shows rooted in the Orpheus myth has enjoyed a fairly mixed reception. The company’s programme of visits to the Underworld concludes with another high-risk journey: Philip Glass’s 1993 opera Orphée, inspired by the 1950 film that Jean Cocteau spun from his own earlier drama on this theme. From the off, as director Netia Jones (in her ENO debut) tells us, Glass and Cocteau have drawn us into a hall of endlessly reflecting mirrors, a game of shadows and doubles in which each story and treatment of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And welcome back to our favourite French cop show – perhaps our favourite cop show from anywhere, in fact – which has raced into its seventh series (on BBC Four) with some typically grimy storylines about death and lowlife in a very de-romanticised Paris. If you catch a glimpse of landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, it’s only in the far distance across drab expanses of rain-soaked rooftops. The action in Spiral is frequently shot with pavement-level actualité, as if it’s been hastily assembled from home-made documentary footage found in a discarded fast-food container.Last week’s opening episode Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It isn’t provable whether adultery is more accepted in French bourgeois life than in that of other countries, but French films often suggest it’s nothing to get in a lather about. Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction, in which three of the four main fortysomething characters are having affairs, presents infidelity as rote behavior more calmly than would most British or American films, puritanism being not fully extinguished. Assayas doesn’t avoid raising the moral standard – he just doesn’t let it flap excessively.The film isn’t focused on adultery, however, but on the issue of digitisation's Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Royal Ballet’s choice of season opener could be dismissed as safe and predictable. But as the glorious naturalistic detail of 1830s Paris unfolds in Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 retelling, you see the reasoning. It’s only a year since the Royal Opera House remodelled its ground floor spaces to be more welcoming, and Manon is the ideal first-time ballet. It has everything – glamour, history, a fast-moving love story crackling with illicit sex, crime and social injustice. And it has MacMillan’s choreography, the like of which – in terms of examining the human heart in all its waywardness – Read more ...
graham.rickson
Albert Roussel Edition (Erato)Be grateful that Albert Roussel became a composer at all. Born in 1869 and orphaned at a young age, he was a talented pianist who joined the French navy as a teenager. Music was an enjoyable distraction during his naval service, Roussel accompanying Sunday services and playing chamber music with fellow officers. He retired in 1894 and promptly moved to Paris to study music, initially studying harmony and counterpoint privately before enrolling at the Schola Cantorum under Vincent d’Indy. Prodigiously talented, Roussel was quickly roped into teaching Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A tale of teenage depression and its family resonances, Florian Zeller’s The Son has a devastating simplicity. It’s the final part of a loose trilogy, following on from the playwright’s The Father and The Mother, but the new play eschews the obliquely experimental structure of its predecessors for something much more direct. Where the earlier works explored the nature of dramatic perception itself – through the prisms of dementia and psychosis respectively – The Son concentrates its stark energy on the experience of mental illness in a story that’s partly about the consequences of divorce but Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Parisian outfit Caravan Palace have now had a career that’s lasted over a decade. They’ve not busted the British charts open (although they have had hit albums in France), but they’ve long been festival favourites with multi-millions of YouTube plays, and their UK profile has never been higher. Their new album dials back the manic dancefloor energy they sometimes emanate, yet succeeds as a wittily constructed, summery, electronic dance-pop concoction.Caravan Palace have long been associated with the dance music sub-genre electro-swing (a mash-up of swing jazz and club beats), an easily Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gounod: Symphonies 1 and 2 Iceland Symphony Orchestra/Yan Pascal Tortelier (Chandos)Roger Nichols’ lucid sleeve note underlines the point that Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique singularly failed to kick off a 19th century French symphonic tradition. Édouard Lalo complained that critics assumed that you only wrote symphonies if you weren't up to the challenge of composing operas. Saint-Saëns’ 3rd is the only French romantic symphony we get to hear nowadays, Franck’s sublime example having slipped through the cracks. Exactly when Gounod's two symphonies were written isn't clear, though it's Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Félix Vallotton is best known for his satirical woodcuts, printed in the radical newspapers and journals of turn-of-the-century Paris. He earned a steady income, for instance, as chief illustrator for La Revue blanche, which carried articles and reviews by leading lights such as Marcel Proust, Alfred Jarry and Erik Satie. You can see the influence of Japanese prints in the flattened spaces, simplified shapes and unusual viewpoints that give a comic slant to scenes of Parisian life. A sudden downpour sends people scurrying for cover, hats are blown off by gusts of wind and a street is filled Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Film buffs who are also tennis fans (there must be quite a few of us who fit in that particular Venn diagram) will love this quirky and experimental documentary by Julien Faraut, which uses archive footage and narration to examine the idea of a shared passion for cinema and sport, and how they may unite on film.Faraut, as actor Mathieu Amalric explains in the voiceover, was working in the archives of the National Sport Institute in Paris when he discovered a huge pile of film reels by fellow Frenchman and documentarian Gil de Kermadec. They were part of a series of instructional 16mm films Read more ...
Saskia Baron
For admirers of Henri-Georges Clouzot or Brigitte Bardot, this Criterion restoration of their rarely seen 1960 collaboration is a must have. La Vérité may not be Clouzot’s greatest film, the pace is a little slow and for British viewers uninterested in the French legal system, the courtroom scenes may occasionally drag, but it’s a powerful film nonetheless.Bardot plays coquette Dominique Marceau, bored of life in her provincial home town and her working class family. She persuades her parents to let her live in Paris with her prim older sister Annie (Marie-José Nat) a violin student at Read more ...
David Nice
Asked to choose five or ten minutes of favourite Berlioz on the 150th anniversary of his death (yesterday), surely few would select anything from his giant Requiem (Grande Messe des Morts). This is a work to shock and awe, not to be loved - music for a state funeral given a metaphysical dimension by the composer's hallmark extremes in original scoring. It cries out for an ecclesiastical edifice to resonate with the masses and provide the voids, but St Paul's Cathedral has always been one step too far: glorious to be in, not the place for a true musical experience. All things considered, John Read more ...