19th century
David Nice
One queen is much like another in so-called “historical” Italian early to mid 19th-century opera. Elizabeth of England, Christina of Sweden, take your pick, they all fall for a tenor courtier who loves Another (the seconda donna, soprano or mezzo). With Donizetti, the musical drama is almost as disposable as the plot until a stonking number or two rolls up. Jacopo Foroni, more or less unknown until Wexford resurrected him a year ago, has a few more felicitous orchestral touches but nothing as memorable as Donizetti's best. Cristina, regina di Svezia served at Wexford, and last night in Read more ...
David Nice
Dvořák’s rustic operetta sits, swinging its legs rather diffidently, historically somewhere between the neverland Bohemia of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride and the lacerating reality of village life in Janáček'’s Jenůfa. The Cunning Peasant’s charms lie in its string of sophisticated songs and dances, more through-composed than Smetana’s, and in the abundance of not over-taxing roles, as well as chorus numbers, it offers to students.That the Guildhall School embraces these so cheerfully has much to do with the way that fine, underrated conductor Dominic Wheeler effortlessly drives the tractor, Read more ...
David Nice
ENO may not always have matched the Royal Opera in the Great Puccini Voices stakes. But it's served up many of the classiest Mimìs, with Valerie Masterson, Mary Plazas and Elizabeth Llewellyn as top seamstresses. Californian former beauty queen Angel Blue, an acclaimed Musetta in the previous revival, now joins them. Unlike Llewellyn, still awaiting the international recognition she deserves, Blue is also among the favoured roster of young sopranos who, after an interregnum where we wondered where all the best black opera singers had gone - whether the spell of Leontyne Price and Jessye Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Can you sense a person's life through a sequence of objects? Not to mention influence and legacy? Biographical exhibitions are fascinating, not least because they also tell us something about looking back through the filter of the present. And William Morris (1834-1896) has certainly been, in many ways, a man for all seasons. Here the gifted design historian and biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, is the compiler in charge, providing an affecting look at a man whose sheer intelligence, combined with heartbreaking energy, determination and idealism, not only affected his world but went further Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Andrew Graham-Dixon’s villainous alter ego got a second airing tonight in his exploration of 19th-century Britain’s love of all things Gothic. Last week we saw him hanging about in decaying graveyards, or appearing, wraithlike in a dank corner of a Gothic ruin, while ravens circled portentously overhead (main picture). We saw him relating tales of horror and mystery in flickering candlelight, or peering through the flames of an infernal bonfire, and in tonight’s episode, always one for going the extra mile, he was touring Victorian sewers, with only a rat for company.The great thing about Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Wicked women have always sold well, but more than that, they have fired the artistic imagination in a quite exceptional way. Exploring the depiction of the witch from the 15th to the 19th century, this exhibition is packed with images that must number amongst the most dramatic, atmospheric and gripping ever made, proof if it were needed of the energising effects of a truly inspiring subject. From wizened hags to beautiful seductresses, witches could embody every sin and vice associated with women, and long after the fear of witchcraft itself had subsided, witches served as repositories for Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Bigger is better in the Tricycle’s latest piece of reclaimed black history. African-American writer Marcus Gardley’s stimulating play, which transports Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba to 1836 New Orleans and a significant shift in the evolving racial hierarchy, begins slowly and timidly, reliant on exposition and sitcom laughs. Yet once he and Indhu Rubasingham embrace its operatic qualities, this memorably evocative work takes flight.Beartrice (Martina Laird), a free woman of colour, is set to inherit the fortune of her recently deceased lover Lazare (Paul Shelley) under the former French Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Ghosts are walking at the Young Vic. Katie Mitchell’s stark, startling production of Chekhov’s final lament is not just an evocation of a lost era, but a summoning of the spirits haunting Vicki Mortimer’s chilling sepulchral mansion. This is a Cherry Orchard cast into shadow – literal and figurative – but pulsing with furious energy. The past will not go gentle into that good night; it calls out in a keening cry.At just one hour 50, Simon Stephens’ taut adaptation combines elegy with economy. The stripped-back text suits Mitchell’s absolute clarity of purpose, although the excised repetition Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Stratford-upon-Avon calling. The City of London Sinfonia has embarked on a series of three Bard-based October concerts in London to commemorate the 450th anniversary year of Shakespeare's death. The first of the three stopping-off points last night was Southwark Cathedral, in some ways a logical starting-place, since the building proudly asserts its credentials as the parish church nearest to the Globe Theatre. The main work of the evening was Mendelssohn's charming and graceful incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, presented semi-staged, which occupied the whole of a delightful Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
From one great operatic storm to another. 2014 opened at English National Opera with David Alden’s Peter Grimes, gale-tossed and wet with sea-spray, and now the director turns his attention to Verdi’s Otello. Restlessly urgent, Edward Gardner’s opening assaulted us with timpani thunderclaps, stabbing into the silent auditorium as Otello himself would do just a few hours later. Tragedy is written into the musical fabric of Verdi’s opera, and in Alden’s new production we have a pervasive emotional horror that matches it blow for blow.2014 marks Alden’s 30th year working with ENO. Anyone feeling Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The silliness of the Last Night is really just a postscript to the penultimate night of the Proms, traditionally given over to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was a tradition restored yesterday evening when Alan Gilbert and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra returned for their second concert of the season. For anyone whose stomach is liable to turn at extrovert jingoism and excess, this was the perfect antidote.Febrile and urgent under Chailly, the orchestra found rather different colours in Beethoven’s final symphony for Gilbert – cooler, quieter, more understated. I’ve never Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Imagine The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel crossed with Chocolat. That’s The Hundred-Foot Journey in one, meshing a previous success of director Lasse Hallström with the previously neglected but growing genre of 'the mature person's movie'. After all, old folks like food, don’t they? Well, so do young people. Who doesn’t?The Hundred-Foot Journey is based on the novel by Richard C. Morais and screenplay written by Steven Knight (who wrote and directed the very good Locke with Tom Hardy), this is a filmic cuisine culture clash that benefits from a terrific cast and an alluring story. Shot as a Read more ...