Birmingham
Ismene Brown
Birmingham Royal Ballet has outlined its 2012-13 season for its home base in Birmingham, indicating a shrunken repertoire due to subsidy cuts, but with a new full-length family ballet by David Bintley, Aladdin.The season will celebrate the art of storytelling, says the company, and some performances will have early starts to pitch at families. Only one mixed bill is announced, attesting to the damage done to the broader performance repertoire by the swingeing cuts in grant.Touring dates and venues will be added. Autumn-Winter 2012 19-22 September, Swan Lake, The Lowry, Salford. Sir Read more ...
judith.flanders
It may be that there is no sunnier place than Ashton’s La fille mal gardée. Certainly there is no sunnier ballet. It speaks not of great drama, nor ecstasy, but instead of gentle happiness, of quiet content and loving kindness. Not, one might think, the stuff of great art. But one would be – one is – wrong, and Ashton is happy to set us straight.The standard tale of a girl whose mother wants her to marry a rich simpleton, and how she instead gets her way and marries a simple farmer, is not the point. Ashton takes this and embroiders it with magic – a dash of music hall, a splash of folk Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Birmingham Royal Ballet’s star Robert Parker has been a ballet dancer and a trainee pilot - and is now to become artistic director of Elmhurst Ballet School in Birmingham, one of the two most important ballet schools in Britain.Known as “nuclear” Robert as a child, the tall, blond dancer has long been the major attraction of BRB for his combination of dynamic dancing and characterful dramatic acting, in an enormous range from classical leads such as Romeo and Prince Siegfried to contemporary ballets by Twyla Tharp and Kim Brandstrup and ballet-drama heros such as King Arthur and Cyrano., two Read more ...
Russ Coffey
This site has never acknowledged a distinction between high and popular culture. Nor, it seems, does the city of Birmingham. Currently bidding for UK City of Culture 2013, it is also promoting itself as the "Home of (Heavy) Metal". This summer, at various locations across the Black Country, a four-month festival looks at the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and celebrates the people who inspired him to “bark at the moon”. Surrounded by guitars, leather and fans' metalobilia in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, theartsdesk caught up with Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi to find out what it’s all Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Imagine you are at a study day being run by Friends of the Earth. They mount a play in which a group of angels who somehow got left out of the Book of Genesis fall to a completely barren earth, look around, and start reconstructing, re-enacting its life and death. They plant, grow, overgrow, eat, overeat; they tell themselves the earth will always be fruitful, but they’re mistaken. In the end two of the angels become Adam and Eve and walk off hand in hand into a ruined landscape lit by the rising sun. Then Luke Bedford sets it all to music.Glyn Maxwell’s last opera libretto, as far as I know Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There was a macabre irony at the heart of this final concert in the CBSO’s Mahler cycle in Symphony Hall. Everything was back to front. It started with a Resurrection and ended with a death. Like the universe, it began with a bang and ended, Eliot-fashion, with a whimper. And the Resurrection wasn’t even Mahler’s (that happened last month), but Messiaen’s: his Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, a work which reduces redemption to sounding brass and crashing gongs. Mahler’s was the death, in the wild and haunting shape of his Song of the Earth, not his last work but in many ways his truest Read more ...
David Nice
Gustav Mahler died, according to his wife Alma’s memoirs, at midnight on 18 May, 1911. Anyone mystically inclined to connect noughts and "o"s – you see it crossed my mind – might find some spooky link between 00:00 (pedantically, the time of death was 23:05) and the fact that, for this centenary concert, indisposed conductor OramO (Sakari) was belatedly replaced by OnO (Kazushi). What transpired was delight – near-delirium, in fact – that a supreme master had total control of the composer’s Second (Resurrection) Symphony: a theatrical celebration of life and death rather than a transcendental Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Even if you are not of an age to have watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Fawlty Towers when they were first broadcast by the BBC, you will have heard of John Cleese. And if you are remotely a fan of comedy, you will hold Cleese in high regard as he is a writer, performer and actor of great talent, and this show, an overview of his life and career, proves it beyond argument.It’s waspishly titled The Alimony Tour and Cleese’s emotional baggage gets an enthusiastic airing for fully the first 10 minutes, during which he explains the show’s origins in his $20 million divorce from his third Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The most socially committed BBC drama producer of the Sixties and Seventies, best known for his exemplary partnership with Ken Loach, Tony Garnett has twice opted to direct. If Handgun (1984), his critique of American gun control, is largely forgotten, Prostitute (1980) is recalled for its worthy campaign to decriminalise soliciting for sex and for its single explicit scene - a massage-parlour handjob so ungainly it promotes self-gratification.Featuring professional actors and sex workers, the film follows two women flatmates in multicultural Birmingham: streetwalker Sandra (Eleanor Read more ...
david.cheal
These days it’s all meant to be about tracks, not albums; modern music listeners, it’s said, have pitifully short attention spans and skip flightily from one song to the next, like bees with ADHD in a blossoming orchard, without pausing to put each song in its proper context. But the third collection from Guillemots, the four-piece band who originated in Birmingham, is a proper, old-fashioned album: Walk the River has shape, structure, almost a narrative arc, taking the listener on an emotional journey that goes from despair to hope to joy to resolution.At times, it’s almost bipolar in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Family-favourite storyballets dominate Birmingham Royal Ballet's 2011-12 season, as the company looks forward to a stringent year. Beauty and Beast, Hobson's Choice and Far From the Madding Crowd, three of director David Bintley's full-lengthers, and the iconic Peter Wright Nutcracker for Christmas aim to be money-spinners for three mixed programmes, culminating in a Bintley creation next summer on an athletic theme to chime with the 2012 Olympics.Three mixed bills, entitled "Autumn Glory", "Spring Passions" and "Summer Celebrations", field works by classic Royal Ballet choreographers Ninette Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Family favourites and fewer dates on the spring split tours mark straitened circumstances for Britain's busiest touring company, Birmingham Royal Ballet, keeping a smiling, child-friendly face on. Coppelia, La Fille mal gardée and the London premiere of the new Cinderella are the mainstays of the repertoire in the season marking BRB's 20th year in Birmingham, whence the former Sadler's Wells Ballet moved in 1990.Viewings of Blanchine's amusing gangster ballet Slaughter on Tenth Avenue and BRB director David Bintley's ballet to Carl Orff's popular Carmina Burana are intercut with demanding Read more ...