1920s
David Nice
Backstories, we're told, are a crucial part of stage visionary Richard Jones's rehearsal process. Janáček, or rather Russian playwright Ostrovsky on whose The Storm the composer based Katya Kabanova, gives several of his hemmed-in characters narratives to suggest what they were and why they are where they are now (not good), stuck in a deadly dull – or just plain deadly – provincial town. It's a tribute to Jones's outwardly spare production that we want to know more.Is the mental health of Katya now, married to a drinker and bullied by her stepmother, the result of persecution by this Borough Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Well, I didn’t expect that – and judging from the way the rest of the audience reacted, nor did anyone else. After Cristian Măcelaru slammed the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra full speed into the final chord of Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony, there was a stunned silence, broken by gasps. And then cheers, as a smiling, visibly drained Măcelaru gestured back at the orchestra with both thumbs up. True, this is a symphony with a fearsome reputation: a rarity even today, when the idea that Vaughan Williams is anything other than a major 20th century modernist looks as parochial as his Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Two years after the release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, we return to the Wizarding World once again for the next, somewhat convoluted, chapter in the five planned prequel instalments, with Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Eddie Redmayne reprises his role as the bashful but brilliant Magizoologist, Newt Scamander (pictured below), joined by muggle-baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), and witches Tina (Katherine Waterston) and Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol). Leaving New York, the quartet from the first film travel to a jazz-age Paris on the hunt for the troubled Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jerusalem! This fact-studded story of 20th century British music told us that the nation's unofficial national anthem, Hubert Parry’s setting of William Blake’s poem, originated in 1916 as a commission from the “Fight for Right” movement. Officials wanted a grand piece of music to boost morale (following the law of unintended consequences, Parry saw to it that Jerusalem became a rallying song for the suffragettes, too). The work of Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams was also enlisted to boost the national spirit. Even bureaucracy recognised the potential of music to uplift, encourage, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Edward Gardner was back amongst friends when he opened the Hallé’s Thursday series concerts. This was the place where he made his mark, as the Manchester orchestra’s first ever assistant conductor (and Youth Orchestra music director), and he’s been a welcome visitor ever since. There’s an air of personal authority to him now, and a physical style a little less reminiscent of Sir Mark Elder – from whom he undoubtedly learnt a lot in those early days – and both the Hallé Orchestra members and the Hallé Choir gave him of their best.Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra was characterized by Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Stoller Hall, the modest-size auditorium inside Chetham’s School of Music, is really proving itself to be the venue Manchester has long needed this season. Two concerts on successive days, each the first of a series and both making something of a statement, proved that.On Thursday Psappha opened its Manchester season there (the remaining performances are at St Michael’s Ancoats) with three guest singers and a second half that was as much music theatre as concert. "Four iconic works from the 20th century" was the subtitle, but the initial focus was on two pianos and two pianists, as Paul Read more ...
David Nice
Setting aside any reservations about a slight overall timidity in repertoire choices - no problems with that last night - this year's Proms have worked unexpectedly well, above all with their weekend strands. The trump card with the usual roster of international visitors gracing the final week was to get two of the greatest orchestras, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony, and two of, let's say, the half-dozen most interesting conductors worldwide, Kirill Petrenko and Andris Nelsons, to bookend a Sunday in which they are to appear one after the other. Last night proved a totally Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Not far into Aftermath, Tate Britain’s new exhibition looking at how the experience of World War One shaped artists working in its wake, hangs a group of photographs by Pierre Anthony-Thouret depicting the damage inflicted on Reims. Heavy censorship during the war combined with the traumatic human toll meant that lone helmets and ravaged trees came to stand easily for the dead, while wrecked landscapes and crumbling buildings questioned the senselessness of such utter destruction.In one photograph the cathedral crouches like an abject creature, low and painful behind a foreground strafed with Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The show’s subtitle – “Songs banned by the Nazis” – is a catchy one, and somewhere under the confetti, the stilettos, the extravagant nudity, the sequins and even shinier repartee that are wrapped around Effigies of Wickedness like a mink coat on the shoulders of an SS officer’s mistress is the bruised and grubby story of one of history’s foulest episodes. As the evening progresses and the glossy fur slips lower and lower we see a reveal more shocking than any burlesque club or Weimar cabaret could offer.Effigies of Wickedness (a phrase borrowed from an official description of the Nazis’ Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What is it about Brian Selznick’s ornate illustrated fictions that leads good directors to make bad films? Turning The Invention of Hugo Cabret into Hugo was a near disaster for Scorsese, and now comes Todd Haynes’s stifling adaptation of Selznick’s novel, Wonderstruck.Two different narratives intertwine, one set in the 1970s, the other in the 1920s. Both centre on children battling with hearing loss who embark on a solo quest in New York searching for an absent parent. Eventually their lives overlap, but it takes forever to get there. At one point the Julianne Moore Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Hie thee to Oxford, for it is doubtful that we will see the like of this exhibition again this side of the Atlantic. American art of the 1920s and 1930s was once disregarded in its homeland in favour of Francophile superiority, and once it fell into critical and commercial favour it became too expensive to move around at the beckoning of would-be international hosts.But the Ashmolean is – bolstered, too, by its nearly breaking the million-visitor mark last year – a master at barter: as the repository of more Michelangelo drawings than anywhere else, its loans made the Michelangelo exhibition Read more ...
David Nice
A political prisoner is brutally initiated into the life of a state penitentiary, and leaves it little over 90 minutes later. Four inmates reveal their brutal past histories with elliptical strangeness - each would need an episode of something like Orange is the New Black - and two plays staged during a holiday for the convicts take up about a quarter of the action. I won't say that director Krzysztof Warlikowski makes complete sense of Janáček's maverick take on Dostoyevsky's semi-fictionalised prison memoir - occasionally he even rather overloads it - but everything on stage has a feverish Read more ...