1920s
Florence Hallett
Painted during his first trip to Paris in 1900, Picasso’s Le Moulin de la Galette is an outsider’s view of an exotic and intimidating new world. Men and women are seen as if through some strange distorting lens, their blurred, mask-like faces indistinct but for red-slit mouths and coal-black eyes. We seem to be in the room with them, and yet we are isolated. Even a woman looking out from the edge of the canvas gazes straight past us: if not invisible, we are certainly inconsequential.The painting is a heavily symbolic start to this exhibition, which tells the well-worn but, to all but the Read more ...
David Nice
"Unjustly neglected masterpiece" is a cliché of musical criticism, and usually an exaggeration. Romanian master Enescu's vast journey through aspects of the Oedipus myth seemed like an unacknowledged great among 20th century operas through the medium of the starrily-cast EMI recording with José van Dam as the noblest Greek of all; after Martinu's Julietta and Szymanowski's King Roger, here was the last titan to be properly served by a top UK production. Following two acts of La Fura dels Baus's monumental if sometimes skewed take last night, doubts had set in, but by the end, it did indeed Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Choleric humour, pathos and kindliness are mingled in conflict," wrote Robert Simpson of Nielsen’s 1928 Clarinet Concerto. The work was written for a player with a complex character, full of contradictions. Last night’s soloist, Mark van de Wiel, the Philharmonia's principal clarinettist, gave a fluent performance of the work convincing on its own terms, portraying the protagonist as an introvert and anti-hero. He mostly looked down, sometimes appeared anguished, occasionally tapped his feet in rhythm, and only sought out the conductor with his gaze in order to ensure that the more complex Read more ...
David Nice
From Hollywood in 1928 back to Petrograd in 1917 and forward again, the fortunes of Emil Jannings' General Sergius Alexander encapsulate the ambivalence of Austrian-American Josef von Sternberg's silent masterpiece. Our protagonist seems heartless and complacent at the beginning of the central flashback, but loves his country; a smouldering-eyed revolutionary girl (Evelyn Brent), persuaded of his patriotism, seems ultimately happy to become his sex-slave; and her boyfriend (William Powell), head of the Kiev Imperial Theatre entertaining the troops as an actor, is later free as movie mogul to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sometimes compared to Boardwalk Empire or The Wire, and raved over by the likes of Brad Pitt, Snoop Dogg and even Jose Mourinho, Peaky Blinders opened its third series by becoming positively Godfather-esque. Writer Steven Knight whisked us away from the satanic mills of Birmingham to Tommy Shelby's sprawling Warwickshire mansion, where the Peakies supremo was trying to celebrate his unexpected wedding to Grace.It was a fraught gathering of clans, set in a tenebrous anti-Downton. The extended Shelby brood, which teems with brothers and cousins and aunts like dynastic knotweed, is never more Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You may never have heard of Florence Foster Jenkins, although she has definitely earned a certain renown among music-lovers. For all the wrong reasons: the American soprano, who performed at private recitals in the early decades of the last century, before a climactic Carnegie Hall appearance a month before her death in 1944, was famous for the sheer awfulness of her voice.More a phenomenon than an artist, she was certainly a paradox: her dedication to classical music was all-consuming, as total as her inability to perceive that she had none of the technical accomplishment required to perform Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Twenty-five-year-old Anthony Asquith didn’t call the shots on the silent movie that launched his distinguished directorial career, but the screenplay he co-wrote with JOC Orton included elaborate scenarist notes that told his designated co-director, AV Bramble, exactly what he intended. It was a gamble that paid off – 1927’s Shooting Stars proved a dazzling combination of tragicomedy and early docudrama, its subject being life in a film studio (Cricklewood in North London).The essays that accompany the British Film Institute’s dual-format release of the restored film emphasise that it Read more ...
David Nice
2015, Sibelius anniversary year, yielded no London performances of the composer's last masterpiece, the Prospero's farewell of his incidental music to The Tempest. With Shakespeare400, 2016 has already made amends: even if the Bardic input came solely from Simon Callow doing all the voices, and summing up the plot – "elsewhere on the island", "meanwhile..." – Osmo Vänskä served up more of the original numbers for the 1926 Copenhagen production than I've encountered live before.Previous "editions" from Neeme Järvi and John Storgårds gave us more of the play, the last with an abridged version Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"One... Two... You know what to do": that coolly delivered rehearsal intro from a trombonist called Cutler (Clint Dyer) could serve as a synoptic appraisal of the simply overwhelming National Theatre revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. The play in 1984 launched the late August Wilson on to Broadway, where I first saw it, and here announces itself as a bellwether achievement in artistic director Rufus Norris's still-young National Theatre regime and as, very possibly, the finest Ma Rainey yet.For that, credit the surpassing empathy of a director in Dominic Cooke, who brings much the same easy Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Tweaked and polished to within an inch of its life, The Danish Girl is the latest shamelessly awards-seeking effort from British director Tom Hooper, whose last two period films The King’s Speech and Les Misérables were certainly showstopping pieces of cinema. Yet, despite the latter’s ostensible grit, both specialised in human anguish prettily presented for your viewing pleasure; Hooper’s unapologetically indulgent, highly embellished approach isn’t to everyone’s taste but you’ve got to admire his bravado.The Danish Girl is based on David Ebershoff’s fictionalised account of the life story Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On Monday ITV showed BAFTA Celebrates Downton Abbey, in which a massed gathering of cast and crew plus a few celebrity guests toasted Downton's five-year stampede to global acclaim. Its creator Julian Fellowes waddled onstage and told an anecdote about how he'd been accosted by a Downton fan while browsing in a Barnes & Noble bookshop in New York. "Just let Edith be happy!" she wailed at him.As it turned out in this double-length finale, he did, exercising the God-like authority the Emmy, Golden Globe and BAFTA-scooping show has bestowed on him. In fact it all went a bit Richard Curtis as Read more ...
David Nice
Great Estonian Neeme Järvi’s two conducting sons have had varying success in London this week. Kristjan did what he could with a dog’s dinner of a Britten Sinfonia programme on Wednesday night, while older brother Paavo presumably chose the three surefire masterpieces in his Philharmonia concert yesterday evening. The climax was Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony, one of the greatest of the 20th century; certainly there’s none to cap its sheer physicality. But the same tension and uncertainties had a different kind of impact in the Flute Concerto, one of Nielsen’s later enigmas, and while Haydn’s “ Read more ...