Reviews
David Nice
Like Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges and Puccini’s Turandot, Wagner’s first opera – The Fairies in English – has its roots in a “theatrical fable” by the 18th century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi. There the resemblances end. Only Prokofiev follows Gozzi’s playful mix of commedia dell’arte and fairy-tale characters. The 20-year-old Wagner has one moment of fun – cut in this performance – but a mere handful of musical gestures and plot devices prophesying greatness to come rises to the surface in this gloopy mess. You’ve got to admire the ambitious scope of it, but inspiration is Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Staged in 1931, The Man Who Pays the Piper appealed to women who had gone to work (and become the master of the house) while men were fighting in the First World War, but were subjugated once they returned. The protagonist, Daryll, starts work during this time and gets hooked on the money, the independence and the buzz of her job at a fashion house. She enjoys being able to keep her siblings and kindly but inept mother in luxury. But when her father is killed, she realises she could be funding her family indefinitely. This is not what she wants.The strength of GB Stern's rarely seen play lies Read more ...
David Nice
“I do not believe in miracles,” scoffs Herodias in Oscar Wilde’s - and Richard Strauss’s - Salome. “I have seen too many.” I know how she feels. So it was a bit of a shock to find the highest-kicking of today’s composers, John Adams, and his inseparable genius director Peter Sellars, taking the raising of Lazarus seriously in the first part of their latest opera-oratorio (my term, not theirs, and also applicable to El Niño, Adams’s millennial take on Christ’s birth and its concomitant hazards).What that meant in practice, for me at any rate, was to sit through Act One compelled by every Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bernard Herrmann: Vertigo and Music From the Films of Alfred HitchcockGreat film soundtrack music can have a tough time being accepted as thus. There’s the test of time: does the music continue resonating? Is the music a sympathetic foil for the visuals? Can it live away from the screen and still create its atmosphere? The questions are endless, but the music of Bernard Herrmann will always pass any test. With Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo declared the greatest film ever in last year’s Sight and Sound poll, Herrmann’s music for it was, by association, also cast as an all-time great. Previously, Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
Art is a fickle subject – hence why many preeminent philosophers offer different theories as to how we can begin to understand the opposing effect the same object or creation can have on different people. Many can be mildly affected by a given entity, but occasionally something bigger can happen – some might say a revelation of sorts. And such a thing took place for me at the Royal Opera House yesterday evening.The Royal Ballet opened their third run of Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to a packed and receptive audience, including me – somewhat to my surprise Read more ...
mark.kidel
The thing about puppets, as those who have handled them know all too well, is that they take over. They have a life of their own. This is all fine and good as long as the puppet-masters don’t get swamped by the magical power of supposedly inanimate objects.Much of the fun and originality of Tom Morris’s restlessly inventive take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, made in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company - his co-directors for War Horse - derives from the playfulness that toys encourage in us all. But the astounding array of mechanical inventions, from the simple miniature Read more ...
fisun.guner
Glam. Were you there? If so, what was it all about? You might come up with a list: Roxy Music, Ziggy Stardust, shiny flares, Sweet, shaggy hair, the ubiquitous platform boot, T-Rex, glittery eye-shadow, lip-gloss pouts (on men). It was the era of dressing up and gender-bending as fashion statement, though it’s also true that the glamour in Glam Rock was more glitter paste than gold. Some of it remains pretty cool, but unlike the Sixties you probably wouldn’t want to go back there, or at least for no longer than it takes to get round this exhibition, though Glam! The Performance of Style is Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
For finding new popes as much as for hunting down new music, looking to the ends of the earth seems a fruitful route to take. Last night saw the start of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Barbican residency with their principal conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. And with them, they brought the latest music from the Pacific rim, all of it quite surprising.Surprising, that is, for not being very surprising. For the new music from West Coast Americans John Adams and Joseph Pereira, and Korean Unsuk Chin, didn't sound like you might expect. It wasn't bracingly fresh or pioneeringly brave. Nor did any of it Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Anyone who has ever sat through a Las Vegas show – whether in the Nevada desert city or on tour – will instantly recognise the cheesy, overblown nonsense being lampooned throughout this movie. Whether they'll find it as funny is another matter. For while The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has its moments, two thoughts interrupted my viewing enjoyment: one, the big-blown magic shows on the Strip are surely beyond parody; and two, if they are going to send them up, the makers of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone could have done it so much better.But hey, it's funny enough to be getting on with. We Read more ...
Helen K Parker
You have just walked into a large white room. The only thing in the room is a sign on the ceiling. You look up. The sign says, "Don’t look down." You immediately look down. Before you have time to run, the floor has melted away beneath your feet and you are tumbling into an abyss as punishment for obeying your reflexes.A motivational chalkboard sign, one of many you will encounter, awaits you at the bottom. It says, "Too much curiosity can get the best of us." And as you stare at its coyly mocking diagram of a cat about to paw a broken electrical wire, you begin to suspect that if you ever Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Ken Loach’s first solo documentary since The Flickering Flame, The Spirit of ‘45 is an indispensable agitprop movie that might have been subtitled Days of Hope, after Loach and Jim Allen’s 1975 drama serial about the political struggle of a socialist family between the Great War and the General Strike. Hope in 1945 resided not in the kind of militancy that emerged in Britain following the Russian Revolution, however, but in the idea that the people who had won World War II together could build the peace together.Constructed from archival footage and on-camera oral reminiscences of socialist Read more ...
philip radcliffe
What Manchester has today, Vienna will have tomorrow. The BBC Phil’s composer/conductor HK “Nali” Gruber is taking his musicians and singers back home to the Wiener Konzerthaus to reprise this concert next week. You can’t fault it for variety – Stravinsky, Britten and MacMillan, Gruber’s predecessor as composer/conductor here. But the main thrust is celebrating Stravinsky. It is the centenary of The Rite of Spring. In the BBC Phil’s series of celebratory concerts, we here came to his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, also premiered in Paris, in 1927. It hasn’t been heard in Manchester for nearly 20 Read more ...