Reviews
geoff brown
One top student orchestra playing on its own can be exciting enough. Two playing together can produce a charge of dynamite that might not leave the building standing. That was so anyway in last night’s Prom, when players from New York City’s Juilliard School and London’s Royal Academy of Music, by now frequent collaborators, joined up to shake the earth with thunderous brass, swooning strings, diamond precision, a velvet bloom – every characteristic of a world-class orchestra except the honour of being conducted by Lorin Maazel.Instead the podium was occupied by America’s favourite composer, Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Appearing at Buxton for the first time, Northern Ireland Opera are ahead of the game in marking next year’s Britten centenary by turning their attention to The Turn of the Screw. It is only their fifth production since the company was formed in 2010, so they are nothing if not adventurous. Being a chamber opera, the Screw suits their modest forces well, as it does the venue of Buxton Opera House. First staged at La Fenice in 1954, the claustrophobic opera benefits from an intimate theatre to make the most of its spookiness.Henry James loved ghost stories and the 1898 novella on which Britten’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"What caused him to be so fast? Is he here for a purpose?" wondered Usain Bolt's father, Wellesley, in a mystical tone. Usain's mother, Jennifer, also seems to detect the workings of a higher power in her son's blindingly rapid progress around the world's running tracks. "Thank you, Lord, for what you have done," she said.It was hardly surprising that this profile of the so-called Lightning Bolt, multiple record-breaker and triple Olympic medallist, oozed with awe and dripped with reverence. Getting a film crew inside the Bolt entourage presumably depends on an understanding, possibly in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
There is a growing fashion for new public sculpture and anthologies of contemporary sculpture outdoors, inspiring various polemics for and against. Kew Gardens has been at it for nearly a decade: there was a triumphant Henry Moore show several years ago, followed by glass artist Dale Chihuly festooning their lakes and ponds. The current artist-in-residence, David Nash, creates works with wood from fallen trees.Kew has deliberately focused on artists accustomed to working out of doors, and although the results have been variable, the attempt has been serious and intelligent. Elsewhere, Caro at Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
How silly an armchair looks in the Royal Albert Hall - like a rubber duck floating in the Pacific. Yet how right it was for those behind this excellent semi- staged Proms performance of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande to try to recreate a bit of fin-de-siècle intimacy for this most intensely intimate of operas. And how appropriate also for there to be a couch on stage in a work that is, and has always been, a psychoanalyst's dream.But it wasn't just the furniture that suggested that we were being given entry to an interior world. Everything about the way this symbolist drama played Read more ...
howard.male
In the grim windowless warehouse that is the Village Underground, Eighties hip-hop-pop princess Neneh Cherry told us that her current return to all things jazzy and experiment was born just down the road in Acton. This is only interesting in the sense that her three collaborators, The Thing, actually come from Sweden where Cherry herself is also based.After several minutes of competitive screaming from both Ms Cherry and Mats Gustafsson’s baritone sax, a groove started to form from the primal free-jazz swamp and a song recognisable as Martina Topley-Bird’s “Too Tough to Die” gradually Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Following the three home-grown opera productions, in come the visitors. And so we come to the “other” Figaro, the one by the 18th-century Portuguese composer, Marcos Portugal. This being Buxton and the visiting company being Bampton Classical Opera, fellow-travellers in reviving neglected later 18th-century works, Mozart would be just too, well, common. It’s not all that long ago that we had the “other” Barber of Seville, the Paisiello version here. And we have had several helpings of Cimarosa over the years, from The Secret Marriage to The Italian Girl in London.Marking the 250th anniversary Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Before Ibsen was, well, Ibsen, he had a successful career as a failed playwright. Producing works on a spectrum between unremarkable and outright bad, he muddled his way through to his late thirties when the publication of Brand derailed what might otherwise have been a spectacularly mediocre life’s work. With the change in fortunes came a change in tone – a welcome and necessary one if the leaden comedy of Ibsen’s early pastoral satire St John’s Night is anything to go by.Inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ibsen’s play subjects the collision between man and magic to a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One intends no discredit to the keenly judged monarch-to-be that is Tom Hiddleston's Prince Hal, who will reappear on the small screen next weekend carrying the story forward in Henry V, to point out that Richard Eyre's terrific BBC adaptation of Henry IV Part 2 was stolen by dad. Playing the ailing King Henry who will not go gently into the good night, Jeremy Irons gave a performance of equal parts fury and passion that ranks with this actor's very best. Can someone not accommodate Irons once more on the classical stage, and soon?It's tempting to think of both halves of the Henry IV duo Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Let a woman in your life," roars Professor Henry Higgins, “and your serenity is through. She'll redecorate your home, from the cellar to the dome and then go on to the enthralling task of overhauling you.” It’s a scenario not unlike letting the winsome darling that is musical theatre loose among the club armchairs and smoking jackets of a classical music festival.The dome of the Royal Albert Hall may have been safe from a substantial redesign, but last night the lights glowed hot pink and the stage teemed with more action than a whole cycle of Beethoven symphonies. John Wilson and his Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The bells ring out for creativity in the Royal Ballet’s final production under its outgoing director, Monica Mason, and the ambition at least of the enterprise is hugely to be cheered, even if asking seven choreographers to work together is on a hiding to nothing.Metamorphosis: Titian 2012 is a cross-platform hybrid of too-rare provenance: it was germinated when the National Gallery asked three artists, Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross and Mark Wallinger, to make new work responding to the three great Titian paintings about Diana and Actaeon. (These centre on the myth of the huntsman Actaeon who Read more ...
fisun.guner
Jenny Saville rose to art stardom under the patronage of Charles Saatchi. Fresh out of art school, she was contracted to produce work that would then be shown in his gallery. The Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition in 1997 followed, and she became a fully paid-up member of the YBAs. Making big paintings featuring big women, in the dunnish colours of Lucian Freud – to whom, as a figurative artist, she was vaguely compared – Saville’s work has also, naturally, been seen as a feminist riposte to art history’s male gaze. Therefore, given her public profile over two decades, it might come Read more ...