21st century
A Dish of Tea With Dr Johnson, Arts TheatreSaturday, 10 September 2011
It’s not every evening one is invited to take A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson, and the 90 minutes spent in the company of England’s greatest wit and original lexicographer pass in a whirl of aphorisms and expostulations, with a fair smattering of... Read more... |
Horizon: Are You Good or Evil?, BBC TwoWednesday, 07 September 2011
Scientists, eh? You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them: they cure life-threatening diseases and they threaten life with ever more powerful weapons. And in the instance of this documentary, they state the bloody obvious and then go... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Tetzlaff, BBCSO, RobertsonWednesday, 07 September 2011
I’ve noted before the lingering John Wilson effect on the BBC Symphony Orchestra, whereby that pioneer of Hollywood-style authenticity always leaves the strings especially who play for him in good, vibrato-drenched shape for late-Romantic music.... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Clein, Britten Sinfonia, BBC Singers, HillSaturday, 03 September 2011
Dominated by a focus on contemporary music, this year’s Proms’ Saturday Matinees have also developed something of a heavenward glance as the series has progressed. Last weekend it was the Christian mysticism of Hildegard of Bingen at the fore, with... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Ma, BBCSO, RobertsonWednesday, 31 August 2011
Over the past six weeks of the Proms the BBC’s hard-working Symphony Orchestra has performed everything from Britten to Brahms, Verdi to Volans. Their Mahler with Ed Gardner was an operatic epic, their programme of English music for Mark... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Reykjavík: Fanfare for the Harpa Concert HallSunday, 28 August 2011
After three days' motoring and clambering around the most awesome natural landscapes I've ever seen, how could a mere concert hall in a city the size of Cambridge begin to compare? Well, it helped that the façades in which that great visionary... Read more... |
BBC Proms: BBC Singers, Sinfonye, Hollingworth, Wishart, Cadogan HallSaturday, 27 August 2011
Twelfth-century abbess, healer and mystic Hildegard of Bingen had no formal musical training. Perhaps because of this her music – exquisite arabesques of chant melody, animated by the conviction of her religious beliefs – creates a language all its... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Martinů, Muhly, ELFFriday, 19 August 2011
A young American composer's work is showcased by a major label and doesn't disappoint. A classy British horn player enjoys teaming up with a pianist and a flautist. And an impressive cycle of 20th-century symphonies gets a welcome airing, thanks to... Read more... |
Wynton Marsalis Quintet, Ronnie Scott'sTuesday, 16 August 2011
“Wynton Marsalis has had an enormous impact on jazz over the last 40 years,” say the programme notes, “being one of the first artists to perform and compose across the full jazz spectrum from its New Orleans roots to bebop to modern jazz.” Although... Read more... |
BBC Proms: National Youth Orchestra, Jurowski/ Nigel KennedySunday, 07 August 2011
Youth was everywhere to be seen at the Proms last night. Whether in the massed ranks of Britain’s National Youth Orchestra, soloist Ben Grosvenor (even younger than the precocious Benjamin Britten when he debuted his own Piano Concerto in 1938),... Read more... |
DVD: Anna NicoleThursday, 04 August 2011
“I wanna blow you all… a kiss” are our hapless heroine’s first and last words in this opera dealing with Anna Nicole Smith's real-life rise and fall in strip-cartoon, morality-ballad style. But it’s not by any means the shallow, voyeuristic tack-... Read more... |
Home Death, Finborough TheatreMonday, 11 July 2011
What is a "good" death? How do most of us want to die? These are not questions that we often stop to ask, particularly in the theatre, where deaths tend to be either heroic or sordid. Two years ago, however, the playwright Nell Dunn’s partner of... Read more... |
