1940s
Belcea Quartet, Wigmore HallSaturday, 02 November 2013
Pure, unorthodox genius: the terms apply both to the three works on the Belcea Quartet’s programme – Haydn at his most compressed, Britten unbuttoned and sunny, Shostakovich hitting the tragic heights – and, if the term “genius” can be applied to re... Read more... |
The Rape of Lucretia, Glyndebourne TourSunday, 20 October 2013
“Aren’t you sick of Britten yet?” asked a colleague three-quarters of the way through the composer’s centenary year. Absolutely not; there have been revelations and there still remains so much to discover or re-discover. Yet re-evaluation can sour... Read more... |
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Duchess TheatreThursday, 26 September 2013
Arturo Ui, king of the Chicago cabbage trade, is Brecht’s Richard III. Egad, he even speaks in iambic pentameters, with a fair few nods at Shakespeare, though a certain cowlick and moustache locate him firmly at the centre of the 20th century... Read more... |
Paul Bunyan/The Secret Marriage, British Youth Opera, Peacock TheatreThursday, 12 September 2013
It’s raining Bunyans, and since Britten’s early American operetta with its sights originally set on Broadway teems with song and invention that can’t be a bad thing. A fortnight after Welsh National Youth Opera commandeered Stephen Fry to voice-over... Read more... |
Prom 68: Skride, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, PetrenkoTuesday, 03 September 2013
The Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra made quite a splash with their Tchaikovsky symphony series under Mariss Jansons back in the 1980s. The watchwords then were freshness and articulation, a re-establishment of Tchaikovsky’s innate classicism - and so it... Read more... |
Prom 53: Antonacci, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Nézet-SéguinFriday, 23 August 2013
Prokofiev’s Fifth is a symphony for which the conductor’s setting tends to be turned to either bright and light or dark and heavy. Perhaps because of the composer’s perceived joker role as set against Shostakovich the symphonic chronicler of Soviet... Read more... |
CD: Pokey LaFarge - Pokey LaFargeSaturday, 10 August 2013
It’s one thing to sound like an oldster recording back in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, it’s quite another to look the part. In the half-century rise of gym body hegemony and homogenous Barbie’n’Ken facial aspirations, normalcy of human... Read more... |
Capriccio, Royal OperaSaturday, 20 July 2013
Richard Strauss’s lavish postscript to 50 years of music theatre is about so much more than the theme of its source, Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi le parole ("first the music and then the words", with a big invisible question mark). Its overall... Read more... |
DVD: Burnt by the Sun 2Tuesday, 09 July 2013
Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun was one of the few good news stories in Russian cinema in the Nineties. Made with his longterm scriptwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov, it picked up a main prize at Cannes in 1994 and the Best Foreign Film Oscar the... Read more... |
Company of Heroes 2Friday, 28 June 2013
Fusing the intensity of first-person shooters like the Call of Duty series with top-down strategy games doesn't immediately seem a good fit. First-person shooters work because you respond viscerally to bullets flying past your face and the fear of... Read more... |
The Winslow Boy, Old VicWednesday, 20 March 2013
Terence Rattigan's beautifully spoken characters are a passionate lot in this gripping story of a father's fight to prove his son's innocence. Lindsay Posner's production of the 1946 play succors and seduces its audience with an unstoppable... Read more... |
The Spirit of '45Thursday, 14 March 2013
Ken Loach’s first solo documentary since The Flickering Flame, The Spirit of ‘45 is an indispensable agitprop movie that might have been subtitled Days of Hope, after Loach and Jim Allen’s 1975 drama serial about the political struggle of a... Read more... |
