20th century
Moses und Aron, Komische Oper Berlin, OperaVision review – complex and powerful memorialThursday, 06 August 2020
Barrie Kosky’s production of Moses und Aron was staged at the Komische Oper Berlin in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Schoenberg’s opera is philosophical and open to a variety of interpretations. Kosky emphasises... Read more... |
A House Through Time, Series Finale, BBC Two review - timely series reaches uneven conclusionWednesday, 17 June 2020
Setting his third series of A House Through Time in Bristol (BBC One) was a stroke of inspired prescience for historian and presenter David Olusoga. His chosen house, Number 10 Guinea Street, had been built in 1718 by the slave-trafficking Captain... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Apu TrilogySunday, 24 May 2020
Over the years, the legend of The Apu Trilogy has been much-repeated. Now widely considered India’s greatest filmmaker, Satyajit Ray was little more than a small-time commercial artist when, failing to find a sponsor for his script, he assembled... Read more... |
Women Make Film: Part Two review - two steps forward, one step backFriday, 22 May 2020
The second half of Mark Cousins’ documentary on films by women filmmakers starts with religion; it ends with song and dance. This is a second seven-hour journey through cinema. It reconfirms Women Make Film as a remarkable feat of excavation and... Read more... |
Elektra/Der Rosenkavalier, Nightly Met Opera Streams review - searing hits and indulgent missesWednesday, 22 April 2020
A brutal Greek tragedy and a rococo Viennese comedy, both filtered through the eyes and ears of 20th century genius: what a feast on consecutive nights from the Metropolitan Opera's recent archive. There's been real thought behind the wealth of... Read more... |
Director Marjane Satrapi: ‘The real question is do you like everyone? No? So, why should everyone like you?’Friday, 20 March 2020
Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-born French filmmaker, has a reputation that precedes her. Her upbringing was the subject of the acclaimed films Persepolis (2007) and Chicken With Plums (2011). Persepolis won the Cannes Jury Prize, two César awards and... Read more... |
Anderszewski, CBSO, Wellber, Symphony Hall Birmingham review - grandeur in restraintWednesday, 11 March 2020
No orchestra wants its conductor to cancel in the week of a concert. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s illness was announced only on Monday, but even in ideal conditions, if you needed to find a last minute replacement maestro for a programme of Bartók and... Read more... |
Frang, CBSO, Yamada, Symphony Hall Birmingham review - the tingle factorThursday, 20 February 2020
There’s a particular moment of a particular recording – I suppose every slightly over-obsessive record collector has one – that I just keep listening to over and over again. It’s in Fritz Reiner’s 1960 Chicago Symphony recording of Respighi’s The... Read more... |
Francesca Wade: Square Haunting - Bloomsbury retoldThursday, 06 February 2020
These days, Bloomsbury rests in a state of elegant somnolence. The ghosts of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell linger on in the shabby gentility of Russell Square and its environs, the bookish institutions that are the bones of the place conferring... Read more... |
Rags: The Musical, Park Theatre review - a timely, if predictable, immigrant taleMonday, 20 January 2020
“Take our country back!” is the rallying cry of the self-identified “real” Americans gathered to protest the arrival of immigrants. It could be a contemporary Trump rally – or, indeed, the nastier side of current British political discourse – but in... Read more... |
Mahler's Eighth, CBSO, Gražinytė-Tyla, Symphony Hall Birmingham review - a symphony of 600Monday, 20 January 2020
“Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound” wrote Gustav Mahler of his Eighth Symphony. “There are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving.” It’s an image that captures the impossible scale and mind-boggling... Read more... |
1917 review – immersive, exemplary war filmThursday, 09 January 2020
The greatest war films are those which capture the terrifying physical and psychological ordeal that soldiers face, along with the sheer folly and waste of it all – Paths of Glory, Come and See, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, most... Read more... |
