17th century
Marina Vaizey
What is it about Vermeer? Just mention the name and there will be queues around the block. It’s true that there are a handful of other artists with that charisma, but none so rare as Vermeer. The Girl with a Pearl Earring is not only the subject of a recent novel and a film, but also a kind of poster for Holland as a whole, and the star of the recently reopened Mauritshaus in the Hague. At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam you can hardly see the handful of Vermeers for the crowds.Such power to attract is shared by a few others, including several Dutch masters – think Rembrandt and Van Gogh – Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Anyone lamenting the current trend for “wellness” and other associated holistic, pseudo-medical fads might want to take themselves for a medicinal trip down to Wilton’s Music Hall for L’Ospedale. There you will discover (best keep the homeopathic drops handy) that 17th-century satirists were there long before fancy Surrey clinics got in on the action.Anonymous, one-act opera L’Ospedale is a sharply observed piece of social commentary – an operatic Private Eye, with its gaze turned mercilessly on the healthcare system. If that sounds bracing rather than delightful, it’s worth pointing out that Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The curse of Tamerlano strikes again. The last time London saw Handel’s darkest and most sober opera was in 2010. Graham Vick’s production for the Royal Opera House lost its unlikely star Placido Domingo before it even opened in London, ran interminably long and lost any emotional impetus somewhere in the course of its three-and-a-half hours. To say, then, that last night’s concert performance from Maxim Emelyanychev and Il Pomo d’Oro made an even poorer job of the piece is not to dismiss it lightly.The Barbican have fine form where baroque opera is concerned. We’ve become used to concert 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 ...
alexandra.coghlan
And so the Academy of Ancient Music’s triptych of Monteverdi operas at the Barbican comes to an end, three years after it began with Orfeo. If 2014’s Poppea was the cycle’s sexually-charged climax, then this Ulisse is the dark, contemplative coda – a sobering moment of morality after the victorious excesses of opera’s most venal couple.Il ritorno d’Ulisse is always a harder sell than Poppea. Virtue, chastity and constancy don’t make for quite such an obvious drama, and the opera’s structural oddities – a complicatedly large cast, an awkward final act – make it tricky to pull off. Benedict Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Comedy, love and a bit with a dog,” counselled Henslowe in Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love, and his populist advice is taken to heart in this broad, bawdy, big-hearted farce untroubled by nuanced characterisation or context. Jessica Swale’s modern-language Restoration romp ensures a lively end to the Globe’s season, but playing to the galleries does a disservice to her trailblazing heroine.Cinderella-like Nell Gwynn (a luminous Gugu Mbatha-Raw) made the astonishing journey from illiterate Cheapside commoner to Charles II’s bedchamber, via a celebrated stint as one of England's first Read more ...
Jessica Swale
I never thought I’d be a writer. Writers are people with something to say, big ideas, agendas. I was a director, through and through. I love working with actors, playing with music and text, thinking in three dimensions. The solitary confinement of a writer’s life filled me with dread. And so I spent a very happy eight years directing before I wrote my first play, Blue Stockings (pictured below by Manuel Harlan), and needless to say, the writing of it took me completely by surprise.I’d been working as Max Stafford-Clark’s Associate Director at Out of Joint. We were rehearsing Sebastian Barry’ Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Someone more unlike Louis XIV than David Bintley is hard to imagine. The latter comes across on TV as the most pleasant, unthreatening, mild-mannered of Everymen; unthinkable that he would order the massacre of Protestants or proclaim, “l’État, c’est moi.” Yet the quiet poise with which he glides down the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles at the beginning of The King Who Invented Ballet reveals what Bintley has in common with the legendary absolute monarch: he’s a classically trained ballet dancer.As Director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, Bintley has created a new short piece inspired by the Sun Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Helen Edmundson’s The Heresy of Love may be set in 17th century Mexico and follow the conflict between strict religion and personal development, but its theme of a woman denied her voice by a surrounding male hierarchy retains real contemporary relevance. First staged at the RSC three years ago, the dramatic strengths of the work shine through in this new Globe production, which reminds us most of all of Edmundson’s confident craft and limberness of language.Her subject is the life of Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz (Naomi Frederick, excellent), one of the first major writers of the Spanish- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s an intimacy, an interiority, to music for viol consort that even the string quartet can’t match. The physical placement of the three members of Phantasm who opened this concert of music by Gibbons, Purcell, Locke and Lawes was telling. Occupying three sides of a square, facing one another directly, theirs was a private musical conversation the audience was permitted to overhear. Fortunately it was one full of eccentric, charming episodes, as well as some moments of glorious darkness.This was the first of two concerts built around Purcell’s viol consorts – anachronistic works that had Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The Forest of Arden takes many forms, but in Blanche McIntyre’s meticulously purist production, it’s strictly a state of mind – no leafy bowers in sight. Here, the unspoken can be voiced, the bounds of gender and class broken, and courtly conventions stripped away to reveal folksy values. McIntyre’s is a typically astute interpretation, but – other than a couple of well-deployed props – lacks the playfulness and invention that might help a languidly earthbound three hours take flight.Shakespeare’s comic take on pastoral romance begins with a flurry of banishments. Usurpring Duke Frederick Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It’s far too easy to think about the history of art as a series of class acts, with one superlative achievement following another. Exhibitions tend to encourage this view, and the notion of a superstar artist is key to persuading us that the latest blockbuster is unmissable. We know that the artists with the biggest reputations were not always celebrated in their own lifetimes, but just as the characterisation of the great artist as a lone genius is misleading and fanciful, this one-room exhibition shows that casting art history’s lesser-known figures as sorry failures is equally misguided. Read more ...