Paris
Thomas H. Green
Take a first, passing glance at the debut album from Hailey Tuck and she could be mistaken for Katy Perry, done up in florid new image finery. The Texas-born, Paris-living 27 year old, however, on further inspection (and, more to the point, on listening), is nothing like that pop superstar. The only thing they may have in common is ambition, for Junk is weighted with Sony money, recorded at LA's Sunset Sound Studios with top jazz session men and a sense of high expectation. It’s a major label punt but, happily, a likeable one.The man at the studio controls is jazz super-producer Larry Klein. Read more ...
David Nice
"Massenet feels it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets," declared Puccini in annoucing his own operatic setting of the Abbé Prévost's 1731 novel Manon Lescaut. "I shall feel it as an Italian, with desperate passion." That's the usual Kenneth MacMillan keynote, too, and in his third full-length ballet he was liberated to a degree by a Massenet score very different from that of the opera, rendered even more meaty by the re-orchestration of last night's conductor, Martin Yates. Yet the heroine remains elusive, oddly remote both to the man she loves and the men who pay her, and Francesca Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
There are too many awestruck cultural histories of Paris to even begin to count. The Anglophone world has always been justly dazzled by its own cohorts of Paris-based writers and artists, as well as by the seemingly effortless superiority of French intellectual life. The ranks of the natives, as well as the city’s other cultural immigrants – the French have an uncanny skill at adopting those they wish to – have proved no less fascinating.In Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950 Agnès Poirier has chosen an unusual decade on which to concentrate. This is a truly Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
One question dominates any staging of Dialogues des Carmélites. How will the production team deal with the cruelty and tragedy in the 12th and last scene when all of the nuns, one by one, go through with their vow of martyrdom and calmly proceed to the guillotine, singing the Salve Regina? No spoilers here, but this new production at Guildhall School (a very different one from that staged in 2011) sticks to a tone which is calm, and humane. For that considered sense of unity, this is a production well worth seeing.Scenographer takis, director Martin Lloyd-Evans, and lighting designer Robbie Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Don’t you just love that new concert hall smell? The main hall at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire is so new that as soon as you walk in you get the scent of fresh woodwork; so new, in fact, that it won’t even be officially opened until next month (Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and the Earl of Wessex are doing the honours, apparently). And it’s a beauty: a spacious, shoebox-shaped room with a stage big enough for a Mahler symphony and acoustics that are lucid (without being flashy) in all registers. You can sort of understand why the RBC succumbed to the temptation to smash a bottle of musical Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Happily, there’s hope for Spiral junkies – as series six ends, we bring you news that series seven has just gone into production. This is just as well, because these last dozen episodes have been an object lesson in how to make TV drama for the mind and body, nimbly evading cop show genre-pitfalls to bring us carefully-shaded characters operating within a Venn diagram of overlapping grey areas. Big kudos, yet again, to showrunner Anne Landois.Looking back at publicity photos from previous series of Spiral (the first one was shown on BBC Four in 2006), it’s shocking to see how much the cast Read more ...
David Nice
Living-museum recitals on a variety of historic instruments pose logistical problems. Telling The Arts Desk about his award-nominated CD of mostly 19th-century works for horns and pianos, Alec Frank-Gemmill remarked on the near-impossibility of reproducing the experiment in the concert-hall: playing on four period horns would need several intervals, and colleague Alasdair Beatson would hardly be likely to have the four pianos in the same room. Last October came a breakthrough, for me at any rate: Roman Rabinovich playing on three pianos in the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands, Surrey. Yesterday Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We’ve seen some “interesting” series filling BBC Four’s celebrated Saturday evening slot recently, which if nothing else have prompted plenty of below-the-line discussion. Happily, we can now turn our backs on all that and hail the return of the ace Paris-based French cop show Spiral.Rather than trying to invent the most elaborately grotesque murders or equip its detectives with fashionable psychological conditions, Spiral gets all the fundamentals right. It keeps its characters real (which means far from perfect), and its criminal investigations are distinctly plausible. Its depiction of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Whatever the Waitrose and Morrisons commercials are telling you, as far as TV schedulers are concerned ‘tis the season for murder. Thus a Christmas Maigret has become an instant tradition, with Rowan Atkinson reprising his performance as Georges Simenon’s dolorous detective.He’s certainly better at it than he was when this new Maigret made his debut 18 months ago, and the production as a whole is getting the hang of finding the balance between the introspective and almost Jesuitical detective and the ugly violence and sleaze through which he moves. In the debut story, called simply Maigret, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The city of love provides a backdrop for marital discord and worse in Belleville, Amy Herzog's celebrated Off Broadway play now receiving a riveting British premiere at the Donmar. The director, Michael Longhurst, is rivaling Dominic Cooke (of Follies renown) as the British theatre's current American chronicler of choice, with the glorious Gloria and Chichester's Caroline, or Change already well-received this year. Belleville is a more elusive and slippery piece: a Hitchcockian study in physical and emotional displacement that isn't beyond occasional forays into grand guignol. But Longhurst Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Bertrand Tavernier’s trip through French cinema is shot through with the love of someone who has grown up with cinema and knows how to communicate his passion in a way that is totally engaging. The three hours-plus that he delivers make you want to plunge back into the classics, as well as start discovering many underrated or forgotten directors, actors, DoP’s or film score composers.What makes the documentary so good is his 100% personal approach – although he is touchingly modest and includes contributions from many of his professional colleagues. It is not a completist’s bible or an Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Utopias have a way of going up in flames. Rachel Hewitt’s new book, A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind, charts the revolutionary fervour and disappointment provoked over the course of the 1790s by looking at the decade through the biographies of five of its optimistic luminaries — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Beddoes, and Thomas Wedgwood.Over the course of this decade, the French Revolution broke out to great enthusiasm before souring into the Terror during which killed thousands; war with France was declared; Beddoes and Read more ...