Manchester
aleks.sierz
Another week, another postwar classic. Hot on the heels of last week’s revival of Oh What a Lovely War comes another legendary play from the Joan Littlewood museum of great one-offs. This time it’s a restaging of Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play about poor parenting and teen pregnancy in Salford. Although this play is lauded in most history books as a great radical breakthrough, it has attracted fewer revivals in recent years than plays such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Is there a good reason for this comparative neglect?The original play was penned Read more ...
philip radcliffe
“How tired we are of travelling,” the soprano sings, underscored by a solo horn. The end is near: “Is this perhaps death?” No fuss, no drama, but weariness and a calm acceptance. Since Strauss and his wife Pauline were in their eighties and living quietly in Switzerland when he wrote Four Last Songs, it is clear that they had come to terms with their inevitable demise. In the end musically, Strauss pays touching tribute to his wife, the soprano, and to his father, Franz, the horn player. Throughout, we have the soaring vocal line supported by the brass. Here, that combination reaches its Read more ...
philip radcliffe
There’s no place like home – and home for writer Simon Stephens is Stockport. He doesn’t live there any more, but he was born there in 1971 and still finds the place, particularly its seedier side, a rich source of emotionally charged material. So, having started life less than 10 miles from the Royal Exchange, he keeps coming back. This is the fourth play he has written for the theatre, starting with Port in 2002.That play dealt with Rachael, a girl growing up there in potentially crushing circumstances, but somehow finding within herself the spirit to escape, at least for a while. His Read more ...
philip radcliffe
There are occasions when just one band isn’t enough. Hence the rare experience of the Hallé and the BBC Philharmonic joining forces for a performance, in the Strauss’s Voice series celebrating the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, of An Alpine Symphony under Juanjo Mena. With around 130 players at his command, on stage and off, along with wind and thunder machines, xylophone, castanets, cowbells and other paraphernalia, Mena had the palette for vividly bringing out all the richness of the orchestral colour.Since this was Strauss’s last tone-poem, 15 years in the making since a day Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s all about the voice – Strauss’s Voice, which is the title of the series of concerts being given by the musical forces of Manchester to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. It is becoming a happy custom these days for the Hallé, the BBC Philharmonic, the Manchester Camerata, the Royal Northern College of Music and Bridgewater Hall to collaborate on the big occasions. Over the next couple of months, they will between them present all the orchestral songs as well as great orchestral works in a dozen concerts and other events, devoted to Richard Strauss.As honorary patron of the series, Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It was ironic, yet seasonal, that the BBC Philharmonic’s conductor-composer H K Gruber, who is said to be a descendant of the man who wrote “Silent Night” (Franz Xaver Gruber), should take centre stage with a rip-roaring, roof-raising percussion work that guaranteed exactly the opposite effect. At the same time Chief Conductor Juanjo Mena went back to his roots to bring us a riot of dance music – flamenco, waltz, Latin American, Malambo, Charleston and even a cowboy ballet.Mena started with the Spanish influence in the form of Joaquĭn Turina’s Ritmos, a fantasia coreográfica originally Read more ...
philip radcliffe
How do you mark the Verdi bicentenary? As music director of the Hallé Orchestra and a Verdi specialist, Sir Mark Elder gave it a lot of thought. He decided to tell a story rather than direct a concert performance of one opera – say, La traviata. The story is that of the unlikely creative relationship between the composer and Arrigo Boito, who was 30 years Verdi’s junior and became an inspirational librettist for the later operas Otello and Falstaff, as well as reviving Simon Boccanegra.Elder kicked off with an hour-long informal chat with author Jonathan Keates before proceeding to concert Read more ...
philip radcliffe
How many times can a director re-work the same show and still come up with something fresh, gripping and memorable? This is James Brining’s third version of Sondheim’s killer thriller musical Sweeney Todd. He produced an award-winning version in 2010 at Dundee Rep. He turned to it again last month for his first production since becoming artistic director at West Yorkshire Playhouse. Now, he has re-worked it for the in-the-round confines of the Royal Exchange, initiating a trans-Pennine collaboration between the two theatres. And he is scheduled to deliver a fourth version in 2015 in a co- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mancunian Jason Manford is the kind of chap it would be difficult to dislike. Laidback, casually dressed, smiley and interacting with his audience in a totally unthreatening manner - it's no wonder that that demeanour, coupled with his everyman observational comedy, has made him a star.He comes on stage to tell us there's no support act. “I'm not paying someone 60 quid to be slightly shitter than me,” he says. And then he deadpans: “I can do that.” He's joking, of course, as he's not shit at all, but rather an accomplished entertainer.When he talks about something he's genuinely moved by, we Read more ...
philip radcliffe
A “world premiere” of music written by Benjamin Britten just over 70 years ago? Whence this treasure trove of long-lost musical gold? Well, under the title of An American in England, in 1942 Britten wrote the score for a BBC/CBS co-produced series of six radio drama documentaries for transatlantic transmission to make Americans appreciate this country’s war effort. It was jointly commissioned by the War Office and performed by a 62-piece RAF band in full dress uniform.To kick off their new season, the Hallé burrowed into the archive and focused on three of these broadcasts: London by Clipper Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The guilt of knowingly sending our sons to war with defective equipment and fatal results certainly resonates today. Who takes the blame? Do we get ministerial resignations or arms-dealers going to prison? Going back to post-World War II, this is the shocking dilemma that Arthur Miller deals with so harrowingly in All My Sons, bringing it home to each one of us by focusing on just one family.Here we have what he conceived as an “ordinary” American middle-class family in Midwest in August 1947 living with the knowledge that dad’s greed and deception has contributed to the death of 21 young Read more ...
philip radcliffe
They did it, and continue to do it, their way. Under the self-confident title of The Mancunian Way, the BBC Philharmonic’s new season aims to celebrate the story of music-making in the city through works, composers and performers with special links to Manchester. There is much to celebrate, not least nowadays the spirit of collaboration between the musical strongholds in the city, where it is entirely possible to carve out a total career from childhood to professional fulfilment. One such is pianist Stephen Hough, soloist-in-residence for the season, a product of Chetham’s School of Music and Read more ...