20th century
Helen Hawkins
What defines a life? Money and success? Happiness? Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams employs a narrator, much as Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven did, who fields big questions like those while drawing the audience in. Bentley’s voice is an omniscient one, its owner unseen. Like Malick, Bentley is scrutinising a small group of people living in a bygone era in a remote part of North America; Malick focused on the Texas panhandle, Bentley on small-town Idaho at the turn of the century. Here a logger called Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) ekes out a tough, often isolated living, moving with the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Sir Mark Elder was back on the scene of past triumphs last night as he returned to the Hallé at the Bridgewater Hall – and he has not lost his taste for the slightly unexpected.This was a bill that featured both a knight (himself) and a dame – Imogen Cooper as concerto soloist (pictured below) – and its first outing pulled a gratifyingly large crowd for a programme that was in two respects somewhat off the beaten track. Sibelius’s Scènes historiques Suite no. 2 isn’t heard particularly frequently, and Dvořák’s Symphony no. 5 does not hold the place of his last two in popular esteem. Elder’s Read more ...
David Nice
It was guaranteed: string masterpieces by Vaughan Williams, Britten and Elgar would be played and conducted at the very highest level by John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London.Would a rarity by Arthur Bliss and a slow movement from a Delius string quartet arranged by Eric Fenby match them? The otherworldly Delius did; the muscular Bliss, despite special pleading by John Wilson in an affable spoken introduction, sounded magnificent and was worth hearing, but not quite on the genius level. No matter; this was a vintage Wilson programme, and the mastery of him and his players was Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata have had a ten-year association with composer-conductor Jack Sheen. For this short programme, one of the free Walter Carroll Lunchtime Concert series at the Martin Harris Centre in the University of Manchester, he and they created a partial re-enactment of the January 1914 inaugural concert of the Société Musicale Indépendante in Paris. To works by Stravinsky, Delage and Ravel were added two UK premieres, by Sheen himself and by Isabella Gellis. The plan back in 1914 had been to set new compositions alongside the recently created Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Rachel Helleur-Simcock’s first appearance with the Hallé after appointment as leader of its cello section was auspicious – she became the soloist in their performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto in the season’s opening concert at the Bridgewater Hall (Truls Mørk having had to withdraw).After 16 years with the Berlin Philharmonic, she’s come to the Manchester orchestra. No stranger to the concerto’s solo role, she brought a highly lyrical, sweetly sorrowful voice to it that made this performance, conducted by the Hallé’s gifted young maestro, Kahchun Wong, one of the most affecting I’ve heard. Read more ...
Robert Beale
At first sight, it seemed that Clonter Opera’s decision to tackle Tosca this year might be a leap too far. Its once-a-year complete production, dedicated to nurturing emerging talent in the security of the Cheshire countryside, must always be an essay in miniaturization, and a singing cast of six and an orchestra of 12 might seem hopelessly small for Puccini’s grand passions and shuddering shocks.In the end, it was a happy surprise that so much of beauty and musical integrity emerged from the exercise – and that the production by Steve Elias brought a convincing fresh interpretation to the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It took until the last room of her exhibition for me to gain any real understanding of the work of Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray. Given that Tate Modern’s retrospective of this highly acclaimed painter comprises some 80 paintings and batiks, the process had been slow! To relate to her imagery, it was as though I had first to slough off all expectations about art, and even my world view. Gazing at Winter Awely I 1995, (pictured right) the very last painting in the show, I was suddenly transported back to the Northern Territories, north east of Alice Springs, where Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Well, I wasn’t expecting a Dylanesque take on "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" as an opening number and I was right. But The Zim, Nobel Prize ‘n all, has always favoured The Grim American Songbook over The Great American Songbook and writer/director Conor McPherson’s hit "play with music" leans into the poet of protest’s unique canon with his international smash hit, now back where it all began eight years ago.It remains a curious and unique piece, at once overly familiar (take you pick from Williams, Steinbeck, Miller or even Chekhov as inspirations) but also continually surprising. The songs Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two concerts in the BBC Philharmonic’s series in their own studio form the climax of studies at the Royal Northern College of Music for a small number of soloists on the postgraduate International Artist Diploma there, and also for some young conductors on the master’s course run by Mark Heron and Clark Rundell.The conductors get the chance to direct the BBC Philharmonic and the soloists perform with them – it’s a chance to spot stars of tomorrow. The IAD represents, says the RNCM, the highest level of performance achievement there, welcoming a select group of exceptional artists each year Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour create sweeping vistas of rolling hills and valleys whose suggestive curves create a sexual frisson.Take Valley and River, Northumberland 1972 (pictured below right), for instance. A spring emerges from a fold in green hills that resemble limbs. The landscape doubles as a body, with an inviting recess nestling between parted thighs.These pastoral Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Older readers may recall the cobbled together, ramshackle play, a staple of the Golden Age of Light Entertainment that would close out The Morecambe and Wise Show and The Generation Game. Mercifully, we don’t have grandmothers from Slough squinting as they read lines off the back of a teapot in this show, but there are still too many callbacks to those long-forgotten set pieces of Saturday night telly.There’s a lot of effort put into creating a 1950s Cold War vibe in Emma Rice’s adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, but that jokey 1970s tone overpowers set design, costuming, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Huw Watkins’ Concerto for Orchestra, the fourth new work of his to be commissioned and premiered by the Hallé and Sir Mark Elder, is another beautifully crafted and highly appealing construction.It’s also intriguing in its game-playing with genre, in almost a mirror image of the way his First Symphony was back in 2017. That, a two-movement piece, was undoubtedly symphonic by the time it reached its somewhat surprising ending, but managed to give the impression of being a concerto for orchestra at many points along the way.This, in three movements and running for around 35 minutes in total, is Read more ...