19th century
Nick Hasted
Iceland’s soul lies in its interior, a forbidding heartland which overwhelms 19th century Danish priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) on his ill-considered posting to this colonial backwater.Director Hlynur Pálmason showed his talent for snapping unbending male psyches in a country of physical extremes in A White, White Day, a film as visceral as Scorsese in its riven machismo, Malick-like in its vaporous, uncanny landscapes, and wholly Icelandic in its saga-resembling trials and consequences.Simmering masculine conflict sharpens the brew here too, though both films are laced with humour. The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When Berthe Morisot organised the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, along with Monet, Degas, Renoir and co, she’d already exhibited at the Paris Salon for a decade – since she was 23. That’s not bad for someone refused entry to art school because she was a woman!Luckily, Berthe and her sister Edma had parents wealthy enough to employ artists like the renowned landscape painter Camille Corot to give them private lessons. They even had their own studio and, judging by the landscape included in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s (DPG) show, Edma was rather good; but as was expected of an upper Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s no point in being upset with the writer Steven Knight for doing what he usually does; even so, many viewers will find what he has done with Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations far too Peaky for their tastes. Knight’s role is described as having “created and written for television” a script “based on" the Dickens novel (much as he did with his 2019 reworking of A Christmas Carol). And that is what you get: a lurid Victorian gothic, so noir at times that you have trouble trying to follow what’s happening, and to whom, especially at night. A handful of the novel’s peripheral Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It is, perhaps, important to note that this production was first staged in London at the Young Vic, a venue noted for shows possessed of a rather harder edge than that usually connoted by the description "West End musical".On leaving the theatre after an unnecessarily gruelling evening in just about the most uncomfortable seat in which I’ve ever sat (and competition is very fierce in that category), I heard an old boy who had not clocked that provenance remark, “It was very… modern.” Quite.And why not? The old warhorse has seen 80 years of beautiful mornings, sitting in the canon of Read more ...
David Nice
So it turns out there isn’t a problem with Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), a stroppy mock-epic I thought couldn’t ever love again, when constantly singing phrases from Antonio Pappano and the LSO turn it into an hallucinogenic opera for orchestra.It seems too good to be true that 10 days after a Philharmonia Don Juan to die for from Jakub Hrůša, who will take over from Pappano at the Royal Opera, along came another performance which felt legendary even as we listened. We have to hear way more Strauss from both great conductors.Perhaps not so much from Samuel Coleridge- Read more ...
David Nice
It’s always a disappointment when the Venusberg orgy Wagner added in 1861 to his original, 1845 Tannhäuser to suit Parisian tastes gives way to foursquare operatic conventions. Especially so in this revival of Tim Albery’s 2010 production, where Jasmin Vardimon’s choreography (pictured below) seems executed with more brilliance than ever and post-viral vocal problems loomed large last night for this hero.The static nature of the rest of the evening, though, - Wagner’s problem, accentuated by Albery, though his living tableaux are well managed - is redeemed by exceptional singing-acting from Read more ...
Robert Beale
Ben Gernon’s calm and clear way of conducting an orchestra (something he once told me he’d observed in the work of his mentor, Colin Davis) is good to watch and, I would guess, welcomed by those he directs. Since his time with the BBC Philharmonic as principal guest conductor (2017-2020) he’s been a welcome visitor to them in Manchester and Salford, and this programme pulled a good crowd and was indeed very rewarding.That doesn’t mean that everything they did together was perfect, but when it worked, it worked beautifully. Beginning a programme with something that needs instant Read more ...
Robert Beale
Nicola Benedetti and Sir Mark Elder are both in the enviable position of being able to take audiences with them into music territory that might scare some away. So it was a gratifyingly near-capacity house that heard Szymanowski’s Second Violin Concerto last night as – on the first occasion they have worked together – they presented it to the Hallé audience.It’s long been a favourite of gifted solo violinists, because of its combination of folk-style energy and lyricism (and the cadenza movement, which was written by its first soloist Pawel Kochański and divides the work roughly in two, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Edgar Allan Poe fathered the detective genre as well as a school of Gothic horror, and Scott Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s 1830-set novel acts as an origin story for the author and the whodunnit.Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is the prototype for the Rue Morgue murders’ deducer, Auguste Dupin. He’s a legendary, retired police detective, asked to solve a death at the West Point military academy in wintry upstate New York. The suicide verdict of Dr Marquis (Toby Jones) is swiftly altered to ritual murder then followed by a second, with hearts carved out of hanged bodies. Landor Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
What do you mean you haven’t heard of the newsboys’ strike of 1899? It’s a classic David and Goliath story: a group of New York kids selling newspapers for Joseph Pulitzer (him of the prize), who take a stand when their boss tries to charge them 20% extra to buy their “papes”.The 1992 Disney film, Newsies, became a cult classic, and was turned into a Tony-winning Broadway show in 2011 that ran over 1000 performances. The newsies have now burst onto the stage of the shiny Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre, backflipping, wise-cracking, and making the most of some mediocre songs.Director/ Read more ...
Robert Beale
If there was a certain doom-laden dimension to Clemens Schuldt’s Bridgewater Hall programme with the Hallé ( … Requiem … Mozart in D minor … Strauss describing Death and …), it was easily lightened by the conductor’s own approach and personality.Schuldt has a very clear beat and makes his gestures economically, but every one of them works, and he gets precise and telling results. He’s appeared in this hall before, with the BBC Philharmonic in 2018, and with the same Strauss work, Tod und Verklärung, and we realised then that his command of an orchestra in a complicated score and the richness Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese won delirious acclaim for their previous Netflix series Dark, a labyrinthine and fantastical account of children vanishing from a small German town. Anyone familiar with its baffling events and leaps across different timelines will probably feel at home with 1899, the duo’s similarly mind-bending follow-up.The story this time pivots around the disappearance of an ocean liner, the Prometheus, which has been missing at sea for four months. When a strange, constantly-repeating telegraph message is received, apparently coming from the vanished vessel, it prompts Read more ...