Reviews
Jasper Rees
There’s a baby boom in sitcom. This week two of last year’s best comedies return for second helpings, each with a child in tow. In Detectorists (BBC Two on Thursday) Andy is out in the field panning for gold with a small sweet addition. But first Catastrophe is back – and the title holds good. For Sharon and Rob (played by series creators Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney) parenthood is just as much of a disaster zone as the unplanned pregnancy which threw them together in the first series. And the jokes still come at you like rapid machine-gun fire.In fact, it’s possibly even funnier now. In the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“No courtier or lady’s champion would dream of fighting a duel anywhere else…” The setting for duels, liaisons, champagne and love, Paris’s Pré aux Clercs gives its name to Ferdinand Herold’s almost-comic 1832 opera – a welcome mood-lightener in this season’s otherwise tragic fare at the Wexford Festival. But though the piece does end in marriages rather than deaths (at least, for those who matter), it’s not quite the uncomplicated piece of silliness we might expect, or hope, from such a staple of the Opéra Comique.The context – France’s 16th-century Wars of Religion – offers not only echoes Read more ...
David Nice
A Hawksmoor church ought to be the right setting for the psychological terror of Britten’s great chamber opera, a slanted but still chilling adaptation of Henry James's novella. True, the once-deroofed interior has been coolly revamped as a rehearsal and performance venue, but imaginative lighting and a clear acting space, with room for a 13-piece ensemble to the side, ought to do the trick.Unfortunately this setting, straight from Aldeburgh, isn’t exactly that for what its "conceivers" describe as “not a conventionally staged production… not ‘semi-staged’, nor… a concert performance”. It’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's the age of the prequel, sequel and origin story, and the ingenious Charlie Higson has decided that now is the time to give Robert Louis Stevenson's divided-self myth a superhero-style makeover. Action-packed and a little bit shocking, this supercharged Jekyll & Hyde (****) has the makings of a major hit.After a crisp precis of the kind of stuff the original Hyde got up (we got a long-distance view of him beating politician Sir Danvers Carew to death in a London street), we were whisked forwards 50 years to Ceylon, where nice doctor Robert Jekyll was inoculating the local children Read more ...
David Nice
Castanets in Wagner? The imperfect Wagnerite will identify them in one place only: the Venusberg ballet music of the Paris Tannhäuser. The perfect variety will know that they’re also to be found in the overture and carnival scene of Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love). Would that the rest of Wagner’s second opera were as wacky, but it’s still something to find the 21-year-old composer grappling with the German equivalent of an opéra comique or a dramma giocoso. We only got that overture in Wagner anniversary year, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth at the Proms, since a complete staging in Sussex Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Unswervingly confident, relaxed and assured, the élite of the 18th century are currently arrayed on the walls of the Royal Academy, gazing down at us with the utmost assurance of their unassailable place in the world, bright eyed and dressed to match. The swirls of public reputation are unpredictable: here is a revelation, the art of one of the most successful and highly prized portraitists of his day, Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-1789), now almost completely unknown except to specialists.A Huguenot, born in the independent Protestant city state of Geneva, he trained in Paris, and went on to Read more ...
Richard Bratby
It would spoil the surprise to say what exactly emerges when – after a breathless build-up and a few glimpses of a seductive silhouette – the living doll Olympia finally makes her entrance in Act One of English Touring Opera’s new production of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Let’s just say that it’s startling, beautiful, strange and ever-so-slightly spooky. In a word: uncanny. In an even better word: Hoffmannesque. The audience gasped, and James Bonas’s production found its stride.The Tales of Hoffmann(*****) is the centrepiece (with Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande and Massenet’s Werther) Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Laraaji: Ambient 3 – Day of Radiance“If you are OK with this as being an ‘ambient’ record, then I am OK with it too,” says Laraaji in the booklet accompanying this new reissue of his first album, 1980's Day of Radiance. He goes on to explain that back then he described his music as “‘beautiful’ or ‘ethereal’ or ‘celestial’.” As for being defined as New Age, he declares: “I have always accepted it. It was a term that was very alive at the time I began exploring this direction.” Minimalism is another genre which Day of Radiance could slot into quite comfortably. Pinning down exactly what Read more ...
David Nice
It’s Orfeo in the original Italian: not Monteverdi’s, nor yet another version of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, but a cornucopia of invention in the shape of the first Italian opera for the French court. When the Ensemble Correspondances presented its very much slimmed down version of a 13-hour “Ballet Royal de la nuit” for Louis XIV at the Chaise-Dieu Festival this August, it was the fragments of ravishing music from Luigi Rossi’s work which stood out among the six featured composers. Furnishing a finer line-up of soloists than the French group could muster, the Royal Opera’s second opera to be Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Final thoughts: a fitting theme for the farewell concert of this year’s Gewandhaus Barbican residency. But the connections proved tenuous: Death and Transfiguration, the gloomy opener, was written when Strauss was only 25, and the Mozart Clarinet Concerto which followed, while it was one of his last works, shows little concern for mortality or summation. But the motivation was honourable – to find homes for Strauss’ tone poems, which rarely fit comfortably in any concert programme.This will probably be the last time that Riccardo Chailly conducts the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the UK (he’s about Read more ...
Barney Harsent
As part of BBC4’s continued course of musical regression therapy, we revisited a time of wide-eyed innocence, when ideas were big and pupils even bigger. The Sixties had swung and now they were set to start spinning as people looked to the past for inspiration, and to the future with aspiration.It’s often said, mainly by ageing hippies I suspect, that if you can remember the Sixties then you weren’t really there. Ageing hippies are, of course, notorious bullshitters as the parade of contributors here proved, having both very clear memories – and opinions – about what went on in the build Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
To create this strikingly original portrait of the man some (though not Frank Sinatra) liked to call "the greatest movie actor of all time", writer/director Stevan Riley has plundered a remarkable trove of Brando's own audio recordings and used them to create a kind of self-narrating autobiography. The notion that we're hearing Brando telling his own story from some post-corporeal ether is reinforced by the device of opening the film with a computerised 3D talking head, based on a digital image of Brando's own head made in the 1980s. "Actors are not going to be real," it predicts, in Brando's Read more ...