1920s
David Nice
Colette’s sharply fantastical libretto for Ravel’s second one-act opera imagines wrongs exercised upon objects and animals by a naughty child revisited by the victims upon the perpetrator. In a giddying venture which may be the most imaginative use yet of circumscribed lockdown days, director and founder of the new Virtual Opera Project Rachael Hewer turns Colette into Carroll, and instead parades a sequence of illogical tableaux set in this time of Coronavirus. That they work so brilliantly is due to artist Pearl Bates's visual sorcery and the further design work of Leanne Vandenbussche as Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“This year was supposed to be so very different” said Stephen Maddock, Chief Executive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra when he spoke to theartsdesk earlier this year. Talk about an understatement. The CBSO has hardly been alone in having cherished plans wrecked. But in the orchestra’s centenary year, the sudden cancellation of a programme of celebrations that had taken the best part of a decade to plan felt like a particularly cruel blow. And having finally pieced together a skeletal replacement season (the CBSO’s main venue, Symphony Hall, was able to re-open its doors only Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
We don’t often see sultry come-to-bed moves in the Wigmore Hall, that chaste Parthenon of refined musical taste. But when Jess Dandy stretched out languidly on stage while offering to show Nicky Spence “how the gypsies sleep”, the temperature shot up even in an empty auditorium. In Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared, wildness and passion war with inhibition and conformity. The piece channels the mingled fascination for, and fear of, an untamed Roma culture that runs through so much Central European art, its music not least. What kind of work is this vocal narrative, premiered a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Prohibition-era setting of The Great Gatsby brings an appropriately illicit feel to this bold decision to stage an immersive theatre event in the age of Covid. Where, in 1922, champagne was the essential liquid to get any evening going, here it’s hand sanitiser fluid, before you’re led – hopefully wearing a suitably decadent facemask – to a socially-distanced place in the speakeasy where the action will unfold. In a bold opening, the script swoops straight from the novel’s beginning to its end, so that the narrator, Nick Carraway, flags up Gatsby’s death before we meet him Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Those Wainwrights, they never cease to surprise. Get out your soft shoes and prepare to shuffle, for the “six-string diarist” has set his guitar aside and put on his metaphorical tux to croon with a band on more than a dozen timeless classics. Songs (to coin a phrase) that your mother would know.It appears the genesis for I’d Rather Lead a Band was the participants’ shared work on the music for Boardwalk Empire, set in 1920s Atlantic City. The songs – which, says Wainwright, “reflect on my whole life, really” – were chosen by Nighthawks bandleader Vince Giordano, with producers and music Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Viennese operetta is like that other great Central European treat, goulash. It comes in many forms. In Vienna it’s coffeehouse comfort food; in Slovenia they add bacon for a smoky tang. And in the marketplaces of Transylvania it comes in bubbling iron cauldrons, practically fluorescent with paprika. But it’s all goulash. You know it when you taste it, and all that matters is that it tastes good. And when it’s really good, it tastes even better when warmed through and dished up second time around.Which is by way of saying that I can’t honestly get too worried about the authenticity or Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Tut in colour, and he is! The new painstaking technique of colourising vintage black and white photographs and film was touchingly exploited in this documentary for BBC Four to narrate the most thrilling and best-known archaeological discovery ever made, that of the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings in 1922.The news went worldwide, a 5,000-year-old burial bringing some sunshine to a world traumatised by World War One and the Spanish flu. The newly-coloured images made the narrative of this awesome discovery feel stunningly immediate. The charming Oxford Read more ...
Charlie Stone
A century on, the années folles of Paris between the wars do not cease to excite readers and writers of all varieties. Alex George’s latest novel, The Paris Hours, draws on the myriad charms the interwar period has to offer, condensing them into a single day in 1927. We follow his four protagonists on their separate ways through the crisscrossing city streets until they come together in the most dramatic of dénouements. If these four leads are fictional, though, the author reminds us that this is still the Paris of Hemingway, Proust, Ravel, Stein and so many others by littering his narrative Read more ...
David Nice
There are bad times just around the corner for the characters of Babylon Berlin, though 1929 is grim enough. Focusing on the moment to take away the easy option of hindsight for the viewer and making its vast line-up, played by actors of supreme skill and nuance, deeply sympathetic or obnoxious according to the role, this extravaganza is much more about the gritty reality than the glamour of all those dances on the volcano. Not that there aren't glittering, decadent club sequences, but the harsh facts behind them never escape the directors' eyes."Directors", because there are three of them, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Coming in at around four hours, in two parts, this 2015 documentary is ostensibly about Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, but really, via the prism of his existence, it’s as much about America’s journey through the first two thirds of the 20th century. What other life intersects so neatly with such a scattershot selection of key names – Franklin D Roosevelt, Elvis Presley, Lucky Luciano, Mia Farrow, Louis B Mayer, Edgar J Hoover, Louis Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King, Eli Wallach, and on and on. It’s a compulsive biography that, like the man it covers, never slows, and never grows Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Escapism sometimes feels not just useful but necessary. To be carried back, for an evening, to the world of the 1920s/1930s dance band, with foxtrots, pasodobles, crisp starched collars and secco endings, of slick hair and even slicker arrangements, does have a lot to recommend it. And a virtually packed house in Cadogan Hall last night were palpably more than happy to be taken there.We were in assured hands. Although this is the very first UK tour by the 12-piece, Berlin-based Palast Orchester, the band led by Max Raabe has existed since the singer started it in1986, and it has kept hold the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Burhan Qurbani isn’t the first director to bring Alfred Döblin’s seminal 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, to the screen. First, there was the Weimar Republic era adaptation that Döblin himself worked on. Fifty years later, Rainer Werner Fassbinder brought us his 15-hour television opus. Both kept to the story’s original setting, focusing on a recently released convict caught in the swirl of the criminal underground and the groundswell of Nazism and Hitler’s ascent to power. Director Burhan Qurbani, who is of Afghan heritage and born in Germany, eschews the historical setting Read more ...