1920s
Jasper Rees
It began with the sinking of the Titanic all those series ago. However many holes Julian Fellowes has seen fit to build in to the design, his own ocean-going liner has valiantly refused to go down with all hands on deck. But by Christmas we will have seen the last of Lord Grantham and his household, until such time as they all get resurrected for a big-screen reunion, even the Dowager Countess Maggie. For some, the bereavement will be too much and they'll rewind to the start of the first boxset. For others it'll be like the end of a long prison sentence.As for the inhabitants of the Abbey, Read more ...
David Nice
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark attended Nielsen’s 150th birthday concert earlier this year in Copenhagen’s glorious new concert hall. Her grandparents were there at the premiere of Nielsen’s blithest work, his cantata Springtime in Funen on 1921. Our own dear Queen has never shown such interest in music, but all the same last night's Prom celebrated the day on which she became our country’s longest reigning monarch with Gordon Jacob’s fanfare-laden arrangement of the National Anthem. Then it was off with a gust of fresh air into national celebrations of a far quirkier nature by the greatest of Read more ...
David Benedict
Nearly 10 years ago to the day, an almost unknown 24-year-old Venezuelan conductor came a cropper when valiantly stepping in at short notice to conduct Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony at the Proms. (His name was Gustavo Dudamel. Whatever happened to him?) To pull off successful performances of Sibelius’s seven symphonies you need not just the ability to fire up players but the intellectual grasp to grip their elusive, fluid structures.So after handing the first four symphonies in this year’s anniversary cycle to relatively young guns Thomas Dausgaard and Ilan Volkov, the BBC was taking no chances Read more ...
David Nice
Ask opera-lovers to name their favourite one-acter and chances are the choice will be L’enfant et les sortilèges. Colette’s typically off-kilter fable of a destructive kid confronted with the objects and animals he’s damaged is set by Maurice Ravel to music of a depth which must have taken even that unshockable author by surprise. Ravel’s earlier L’heure espagnole, on the other hand, is much less likely to be top of the list. The farcical ‘Spanish hour’ – 50 minutes, to be precise, and Ravel’s sense of timing otherwise is – proves only one thing: how potent a cheap plot can be when Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Dziga Vertov’s narrativeless “city symphony” Man With a Movie Camera celebrates the modernity and energy of the post-Bolshevik Revolution metropolis – a composite of Kharkov, Kiev, Moscow and Odessa filmed over three years. Propaganda for the harnessing of machinery in the building of the Soviet Union’s future, it was much more besides – a masterpiece of avant-garde experimentalism and, fleetingly, an unexpected critique of the continuing class struggle.Inspired by Constructivism’s creed of art with a social purpose and its photo-montage techniques, Vertov’s poetic documentary was partially Read more ...