19th century
Veronica Lee
Shared Experience is certainly living up to its name; in a radical departure from normal theatre conventions, the company is currently sharing part of its rehearsal process with audiences as it develops Helen Edmundson’s latest work, Mary Shelley, which tells the astonishing story of how Shelley came to write Frankenstein at the age of only 18.The play is co-produced by Shared Experience with West Yorkshire Playhouse (where the open rehearsal first had a run-out as part of the theatre’s Transform season last month), Nottingham Playhouse and Oxford Playhouse, where SE is now the resident Read more ...
graham.rickson
An unreleased live recording from a much missed conductor provides heartwarming food for the soul, while another podium giant brings musicality to uncompromising Modernism, aided by a phenomenal pianist. Meanwhile, a Hungarian exile in Hollywood takes a break from composing film scores and thinks of home.Dvořák: Symphonic Variations, Symphony No 8 London Philharmonic Orchestra/Mackerras (LPO)
One of those rare conductors universally liked by orchestral musicians, Sir Charles Mackerras’s untimely death last year hasn’t stopped the steady stream of reissues and live recordings. The Philharmonia Read more ...
fisun.guner
As one of the stars of the Moulin Rouge, she was variously known by the nicknames "La Mélinite", "Jane la Folle", and "L’Etrange". The first was after a brand of explosive, the other two attesting to a little craziness. Jane Avril’s eccentric dance movements evoked the involuntary spasms of female hysteria patients. But while photographs exaggerate her childlike demeanour (she wears her hair in ringlets and poses in a range of shepherdess bonnets, a look popular in 19th-century music hall), as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s muse, she was transformed into a somewhat haunted figure far older than Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week we’ve a brilliant, budget-priced box of Beethoven symphonies played on authentic instruments. It’ll remind you of how much fun there is to be had with this most iconic of composers. A historical recording of a famous cellist reappears, but the best reason to listen to the disc is to hear a famous Czech conductor achieving miracles. And there’s an entertaining, educative DVD featuring a conductor who’s in his element when addressing an audience.Beethoven: Complete Symphonies La Chambre Philharmonique/Krivine (Naïve)
Beethoven symphonies played on modern instruments feel more and more Read more ...
David Nice
Travelling by Eurostar, or plane, to the continent and buying a ticket, all for less than the cost of a Covent Garden stalls seat, might entice if you wanted to see a certain opera, singer or conductor. But to go so far for the look of a staging? Well, the Catalan company La Fura dels Baus’s phantasmagorical ENO production of Ligeti's Le grand macabre has left some of us hungry for more, which so far means going abroad to find it. Ultimately their latest Wagner doesn't always rise to the expected visionary heights, but it does boast world-class music-making and, wonder of wonders, real Read more ...
graham.rickson
A 20th-century Austrian symphony receives a memorable first recording, coupled with a witty, rarely played slice of Schubert. Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is heard in a powerful reading recorded in the Royal Festival Hall. And we’ve an intelligent, logical coupling of two ballets commissioned by Diaghilev.Mahler: Symphony No 2 Resurrection LPO and Choir/ Jurowski, with Adriana Kučerova (soprano) and Christianne Stotijn (mezzo soprano) (LPO)
The LPO’s own label have already released a staggering performance of this work under the late Klaus Tennstedt, so you do wonder nervously how this Read more ...
David Nice
It's not often in classic comedy that you cry with laughter at the opening gags, and even rarer that the final scene of perfectly orchestrated ensemble acting actually crowns the work. More than two decades on from his groundbreaking Old Vic production of Ostrovsky's Too Clever By Half, director of genius Richard Jones is still finding the right mugs and pushing the boundaries of edgy satire. And this time he brings the wackiest Russian comedy of them all, Government Inspector by the great Gogol, shorn of its English definite article in - at last, slava! - a tumbling, pungent new translation Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Dickens wasn’t wrong – hard times they were. Around 1300 men, women and children worked at the Murrays’ Mills complex in the Ancoats area of Manchester in its mid-19th-century heyday (if you can call it that). Arrive a minute later than 7am and you were locked out, without pay. Now that actors are treading those same worn and oil-stained boards with an imaginative new version of Hard Times, you won’t get in after 7pm (and you’re the one paying, of course).In wide bays, where the machines (Dickens’s “mad elephants”) used to clatter and spew out cotton like confetti, on a mill floor 100 Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Nothing says summer opera quite like the skittish melodies and Neapolitan oom-pah-pah of a Donizetti overture. It doesn’t get much cheekier or more playful than this, the kind of music that makes you long for a pea shooter to pelt opera-goers with a stealthy fire of peanuts, or daub the bald head of the concert-goer in front of you during his Act II siesta. When set against the greenery and obbligato peacocks of Holland Park, a work like Don Pasquale makes sense in a way it scarcely can in the corseted confines of a traditional opera house. Add a witty staging by Stephen Barlow, and Richard Read more ...
David Nice
The staging smacks of Covent Garden's familiar Verdi-by-numbers - surprising since it's the often inventive Phyllida Lloyd's concept, revived by Harry Fehr, but it might as well be the inert pageantry of Elijah Moshinsky - while the necessary singing-acting, no doubt as a result, is mostly one-dimensional and overcooked. Verdi's first confident shot at music-theatre, revised for Paris in 1864 but already vivid in outline four years before Rigoletto broke the mould, deserves better. At least it enjoys firm-of-purpose conducting by Antonio Pappano and one vocal performance of unflagging Read more ...
David Nice
So the world didn't end yesterday as predicted, and Wagner's divine comedy about the meaning of art has weathered the ironic apocalypse following Hitler’s misappropriation. Bayreuth reels, but we Brits are lucky to have two stagings in under a year which take the humanism at face value. Scaling it down for Glyndebourne's intimate summer paradise, given director David McVicar’s knack of finding a plausible historical setting, should have offered a viable alternative to Richard Jones's hallucinogenically wonderful Welsh National Opera production. Often it did. The problem was that several Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
"There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature,” preaches the Gospel according to Richard Brinsley Sheridan. What the playwright omits to mention, however, is that it is possible to be ill-natured without in fact being terribly witty, a flaw that proves almost fatal for Warner’s acerbic, alienated new production of The School for Scandal. Overstyling Sheridan’s most stylised of comedies, Warner turns what Hazlitt described as the most “finished and faultless” play into a mass of tensions, exaggerations and contradictions. The result can be exhilarating in the moment, but Read more ...