Time flies so much more beguilingly in Daniel Jamieson and Emma Rice's 90-minute musical fantasia than it ever has, for me, in Bock and Harnick's Fiddler on the Roof – and the songs aren't bad, either. The inspiration here – and inspiration's the word – is not Marc Chagall's trademark violinist on the tiles but the artist himself and his clever, talented Vitebsk other half Bella Rosenfeld as they wing their way through the fraught first half of the 20th century. Rice and Jamieson, young and in love, played the couple 25 years ago, which makes this superb small-scale piece of total theatre a Read more ...

The Prince Regent’s Band was formed in 2013 and, like very many chamber ensembles, was created when a group of us found that we shared a number of interests in common. The musicians that make up the ensemble are all specialist historic brass players and can be regularly heard performing in principal chairs with a number of leading period instrument orchestras. We all shared an enthusiasm for and a curiosity in brass chamber music from the long 19th century.This period, roughly from the French Revolution in 1789 through to the end of the First World War in 1918, encompasses an incredibly Read more ...

Herbert Howells: Music for Clavichord Julian Perkins (Prima Facie)Herbert Howells was at a low ebb in the 1920s. His energies were sapped by ongoing health issues and resultant medical treatment. A severe creative crisis followed the disastrous first performance of his Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1925. Help arrived in the form of Howells’ friendship with the photographer Herbert Lambert, who sidelined as a maker of clavichords. This quirksome instrument delighted him. Inspired by collections of Tudor keyboard music, he began to assemble Lambert’s Clavichord: 12 short pieces, each one dedicated to Read more ...

“There is something odd, I suppose, about anyone who betrays their country.” It’s an excellent opening line, particularly when delivered in director George Carey’s nicely querulous narrative voice, for Toffs, Queers and Traitors (BBC Four). He certainly knows what he’s talking about: Carey’s last two documentaries for Storyville have been about Kim Philby and George Blake, two other prominent entries in the roll-call of British Cold War intelligence infamy.But spies, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, are surely odd in their own unique ways. They turn traitor for all sorts of reasons, even if Read more ...

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s Tate Modern exhibition features an installation made in 1985 of a Moscow bedsit, its walls lined with political posters. There’s a gaping hole in the ceiling made when the occupant apparently catapulted himself through the roof to escape the incessant clamour of propaganda bombarding Soviet citizens on a daily basis.Focusing on these same images, Red Star Over Russia: a Revolution in Visual Culture 1905-55 reveals the incredible range and versatility of the posters, pamphlets, postcards, magazines, books and banners designed to spread the word about the 1917 Read more ...

Forget the ersatz experience of Sergey Eisenstein's mighty silent films accompanied by slabs of Shostakovich symphonies composed years later. This collaboration between the London Symphony Orchestra and Kino Klassika is as close as we can ever come to hearing the massive score composed by Austrian-born Edmund Meisel for the greatest of the master's 1920s films. It was intended for large-scale screenings of October in Berlin and Moscow, which never took place in the expected format. Bernd Thewes' reconstruction plays its essential part in a giddying, baroque experience of Eisenstein's Read more ...

Like Steptoe and Son with ideological denouncements, Stalin’s Politburo have known each other too long. They’re not only trapped but terrified, a situation whose dark comedy is brought to a head by Uncle Joe’s sudden, soon fatal stroke in 1953. The prospects of replacing him and of his survival alike cause behaviour which would disgrace rats in a sack. Armando Iannucci’s portfolio of political satire has found its perfect subject.He’s helped by a cast of fascinating contrasts. Steve Buscemi’s Nikki Khrushchev is all sardonic Brooklyn cynicism, mixing acerbic putdowns with disbelieving dismay Read more ...

The Kabakovs' exhibition made me thank my lucky stars I was not born in the Soviet Union. A recurring theme of their work is the desire to escape – from the hunger and poverty caused by incompetence and poor planning, and the doublethink required to survive under a regime that became ever more repressive the greater and more obvious its failings.I first came across the Kabakovs' work in 1992 at Documenta art fair in Germany. A concrete bunker with two entrances labelled “Male” and “Female” contained two rooms lined with latrines. Someone had filled these dismal spaces with furniture that Read more ...

It’s getting to that time of the century. A hundred years ago to the month, if not quite the day, the Winter Palace was stormed, and the Russian Revolution came to pass. To commemorate the communists’ accession, Russia 1917: Countdown to Revolution (BBC Two) pieced together the narrative for those who haven’t read all or indeed any of the books on the Bolsheviks.A battalion of historians answered the summons to give their version of events, the types whose titles are prominently displayed in airports and beyond. Indeed, if you lobbed a Molotov cocktail into the documentary's green room you’d Read more ...

Over his long career – 23 novels, memoirs, his painfully believable narratives adapted into extraordinary films (10 for the big screen) and for television – John le Carré has created a world that has gripped readers and viewers alike. He has literally changed the landscape of thrillers and spy fiction, criticising bureaucracies, governments and corporations and other even broader sweeps of society along the way, turning genre into trenchant and critical observations about the post-war world. Along the way he has created fictional characters so well observed they live in the mind long after Read more ...

Revolution - New Art for a New World film starts well: the opening shot (main picture) is of young women painting white letters onto a red banner. “We all knew what to paint,” says the voice-over. “Bread, Work, Vote, but the message was ‘Women of the World Unite!’” These were the words of Liubov Popova, one of Russia’s many brilliant women artists; her enthusiasm came from the conviction that after the revolution women would have greater opportunities. “Everyone was going to have equal rights, and that included artists,” she predicted, since they were “building a new life and a Read more ...

 Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Op.110 and Op.111, with music by András Szöllösy and Gyula Csapó Gábor Csalog (piano) (BMC)Two Beethoven sonatas coupled with shorter pieces by a pair of contemporary Hungarian composers makes for an engaging mixture. Gabór Csalog’s disc feels very much like a single live performance, though the individual items were taped at separate recitals. Beethoven’s momumental late sonatas draw on many influences, from naïve folksong to baroque counterpoint. András Szöllösy’s Paesaggio con morti also fuses multiple elements, a sober chorale theme restated between music of Read more ...