Reviews
David Nice
A glittering, gaudy surface and an epic, sometimes disturbing underbelly are what many of Klimt’s canvases and Richard Strauss’s autobiographical bourgeois comedy of marital misunderstanding have in common. It was the main idea of Wolfgang Quetes’s Scottish Opera extravaganza to bring those mythic resonances in harmony with the realist conversation-piece aspect of the opera. But you don’t do Intermezzo without a capricious heroine of huge charisma like Glyndebourne charmers Elisabeth Söderström and Felicity Lott. Any British opera-goers heard of Anita Bader? You will now.Bader makes very much Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso has yielded more than its fair share of operatic spin-offs. Inspiring three operas apiece from both Handel and Vivaldi, as well as works from Lully, Haydn, Caccini and Rameau, its vivid stories of love, magic and revenge were plundered freely by composers for the better part of two centuries. It’s a rich seam of works, and one the Barbican is celebrating with a triptych of concerts. We’ve already had an exceptional Alcina from Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre, and Il Complesso Barocco will present Ariodante in May, but last night it was the turn of Read more ...
David Nice
White-knuckle crescendos loom large in that greater-than-ever conductor Neeme Järvi's spruce Indian summer. Short-term bursts were the chief payoff in tackling Dvořák's deceptively simple-seeming Serenade for Strings with a huge department on all too little rehearsal time, but they also helped to pave the way for the two big events in Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony: not just the infamous "invasion" sequence based on Ravel's Boléro, but above all the final slow burn. It was ultimately here that Järvi's mastery of the long, inward line showed us what creative conducting is all about. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The history of the census is a fascinating one. The Babylonians and the Chinese held censuses mainly for military and taxation purposes, and Egyptians in order to organise the huge number of people required to build the pyramids and to redistribute land following the annual flooding of the Nile. Christians, meanwhile, give thanks for the census that recorded the birth of Jesus of Nazareth; during the five-yearly census ordered by Caesar Augustus, which required every man in the Roman Empire to return to his place of origin, Joseph and the heavily pregnant Mary had travelled to Bethlehem, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Les Grands Ballets Classiques de Stoke Poges are a company waiting to happen for most of us, but for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo a bitter rivalry must be endured - one of their ballerinas didn’t show up last night in High Wycombe, due to winging on a last-minute errand of mercy to the Stoke Poges mob. Fortunately Ida Nevaseyneva was available to totter in with her eternally moulting Dying Swan - and all suddenly became right with the world. The Trocks are an errand of mercy, to anyone who loves old ballet, anyone who loves smart comedy.This all-male US ballet company started Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Wars have no end. Soldiers may come home, battlefields may be vacated, peace treaties signed, but scars remain. The violence of combat has a way of revisiting itself on the victors and vanquished and ravaging soul and state. This was the message of Benedict Andrews's new production of Monteverdi's The Return of Ulysses for the English National Opera at the Young Vic, which sees Ithaca as a mutilated world, inhabited by a suicidal wife, a brutalised soldier and a society grotesquely drunk on its own supremacy.The curtain lifts on a grieving widow. Penelope circles her cage, a shiny modern Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As preparation for this new account of Women in Love, I conscientiously picked up a copy of the novel for the first time since studying it at university. Big mistake. By half an hour into the drama I was in a state of some discombobulation. His adaptation may be called Women in Love but William Ivory has dipped back into The Rainbow, the novel’s preceding companion volume. At some point he seems to have lobbed both books into a cement mixer.The question is - why can’t he? After all, once upon a time they were both meant to be part of the same volume called The Sisters. You can’t muck about Read more ...
David Nice
Without the definite article, what kind of a Flute is Peter Brook's - beyond, that is, the literal manifestation of a stick on a string that makes no soothing noises? Best describe it as a crescent moon of a version, loosely based on Schikaneder's text with less than half of Mozart's music and matching slivers of voices, attached to mostly fledgling stage presences. The diminishing returns of Brook's operatic deconstructions, from the bold Tragedy of Carmen through the more seriously compromised Impressions of Pelléas, here reach a dead end in a kind of bleached purgatory.Which could hardly Read more ...
neil.smith
Hollywood stars are well known for bragging they do all their own stunts, often at the expense of the genuine daredevils who risk their lives on their behalf. With the advent of CGI and motion-capture technology, though, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make such an idle boast. What’s an icon to do to prove their mettle? The answer, it would seem, is to do all their own singing, even when they are patently ill-equipped to do so.Gone are the days when Audrey Hepburn’s lips would part and Marni Nixon’s voice would waft out, as was notoriously heard to happen in My Fair Lady. Instead we Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The first thing that must be said is the paintings, captured by Herzog and his crew, are breathtaking beyond description. Among the animals depicted with remarkable clarity are mammoths, horses, bison, rhinoceros, ibex, lions and the only known instance of a panther in paleolithic art. There is even a giant creepy crawly clambering up one wall. And the cave itself is a mini-miracle of preserved evidence. Skulls of a vanished species of bear litter the floor, while their claws left the first scratch marks high on the walls some 40,000 years ago.Herzog has never been a film-maker to swim Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If you just knew him from the pop and world-music part of his career you might struggle to believe that Peter Gabriel was once considered to be synonymous with everything that was white and stiff in music. His Genesis work, all public-school poetry and am-dram costumes, not only practically invented prog rock, but also spawned its most infamous practitioner, Marillion. By “Sledgehammer” and “Steam”, however, Gabriel had fully switched sides of his brain. That was, however, until last year when he revisited prog by replacing his touring band with an orchestra. Not everyone was impressed.The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It'll be interesting to see what the recent race row - or more accurately, lack-of-race row - does for the ratings of Midsomer Murders. Possibly nothing, if the research that says that people from ethnic groups all hate the show and never watch it is to be believed. It certainly defies logic that producer Brian True-May has been made to walk the plank for saying that the programme has an all-white cast when... it does. Somehow, everybody has contrived not to mention this ever since Midsomer began in 1997.That aside, it was nonsense as usual for last night's opening episode of series 14 Read more ...