Christmas
Dylan Moore
While Christmas is the season when traditional theatres trot out the tired clichés of panto, the ever-innovative National Theatre Wales have decided, in their wisdom, to stage a surreal, psychedelic theatre-gig at the Sophia Gardens cricket ground in Cardiff. Based on an idea originally conceived by Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys, artist Pete Fowler and graphic designer Mark James that has already spawned Rhys’s 2007 solo album Candylion, the "insatiable, inflatable" and very much larger-than-life version sees the musical polymath reteam with writer Tim Price and director Wils Wilson Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Dickens’s public readings from his novels were almost as famous and popular as the novels themselves. He would write special scripts that gave prominence to particular characters and that dramatized the salient events of each story; and of all these performances, A Christmas Carol was one of the favourites, his and his audiences’. So what better idea than to turn this unforgettable tale into an opera: an opera for a single singer, dramatizing the story, impersonating all the main characters, being, as it were, Dickens himself with added music?Iain Bell’s opera, new last year but performed Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Christmas legends are not born; they are made. In the case of the Nutcracker, its Christmas indispensability in Britain and America stems not from the original 1892 St Petersburg production, but from 1950s reinterpretations by emigré Russians (Balanchine and Karinska in the US, Lichine and Benois in the UK). Like most other story ballets, there is no stable text - apart from the Tchaikovsy score, of course, but Balanchine was happy to cut and rearrange that too. The rest is a palimpsest of story treatments, costume designs, and questionable psychoanalytic interpretations, presenting many Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
I habitually skipped over Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Girl in my childhood fairy tale compendium because I couldn't bear the sadness (see also: The Happy Prince *sob*). Parents of sensitive children will therefore be relieved to know that in Arthur Pita's 2014 dance version, which is back at the Lilian Baylis Theatre at Sadler's Wells this Christmas season, any tears at the titular waif's lonely demise will be vastly outnumbered by smiles at the fun and fantastical world Pita and his imaginative collaborators have conjured up for her to inhabit before and after death.Pita sets the Read more ...
David Nice
It’s boasting, but surely true, to claim that London offers the biggest number of classy Christmas concerts in the world. How could it be otherwise with established seasonal festivals based around Spitalfields, St John’s Smith Square and the over-restored but still amazing Temple Church whose founder Knights Templar bring Dan Brown fans in droves and an inevitable daily admission fee of a fiver? To these three shrines come most of the best choirs from Britain and further afield, and on the evidence of A Wondrous Mystery on the second evening of the Temple Winter Festival, there’s none more Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any Christmas album worth its salt draws from the classics. Versions of, say, “We Three Kings”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “Silent Night”, “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” and “The Little Drummer boy” are compulsory. What is not so inevitable is how these musical and seasonal chestnuts are tackled. All five songs are covered on Lit Up: Music for Christmas, and all five sound like they never have before.Astrocolor are from Canada. The five-piece from Victoria, British Columbia formed specifically to make a Christmas album like no other. Want a Massive Attack-style “We Three Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hindemith: The Long Christmas Dinner American Symphony Orchestra/Leon Botstein (Bridge)Hindemith's delectable pantomime Tuttifäntchen remains one of my favourite seasonal discs, and now we have the first English-language recording of one of the composer's last works. The Long Christmas Dinner is a single act opera written in 1960 in collaboration with Thornton Wilder, an adaptation of his 1931 play. This is a highly affecting, gently moving piece, compressing 90 years into 50 minutes; Wilder and Hindemith show us the rise and fall of a middle class family through a sequence of seasonal Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Searching for artistic merit in most Christmas albums is a bit like looking for allegory in a Cliff Richard calendar. Under the sheen of one-size-fits-all production that’s necessary to compete in as wide a market as possible come the annual bunfight for plastic tat, pretty much everything is reduced to sounding like a nicely wrapped fancy box of nothing.That said, expectations are there to be confounded, so lets open Kylie Christmas and see what we’ve got…We’re covering disappointment straight from the off. As we smile sweetly and say “Thanks”, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Is Jim Broadbent Britain’s best-loved actor? The slate of screen roles he’s accumulated over the years – this Christmas Carol is his return to theatre after a decade away – has surely given him a very special quality in the nation's consciousness, a combination of general benignity with more than a hint of absent-mindedness, an almost madcap bafflement at the world.So I can’t have been the only one to wonder what he was going to make of Ebenezer Scrooge, and the top-hatted image of him that grins at us from the poster has the kind smile that we certainly associate with the character post- Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
With its hybrid Romantic-kitschy plot, chocolate-advert Tchaikovksy tunes, and baggage of obligatory Christmas cheer, the Nutcracker is harder to get right than you might think if you've only ever seen Sir Peter Wright's Royal Ballet version, now over 30 years old and still practically perfect in every way.The production is the result of research into the St Petersburg original, as well as revisions added 15 years ago to incorporate ideas from the Nutcracker Wright did for Birmingham Royal Ballet, but it feels as effortless, inevitable and magical as a fairytale's "once upon a time". Part of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It would take a brave soul to mention Peter Mullan and “national treasure” in the same breath. To start with, he’d be more than clear which nation has his allegiance, and then suggest, in the gentlest possible way, that maybe he was, well, a wee bit young for any such honorifics...So we’ll leave that for another couple of decades, and just salute an actor whose presence on screen is so distinctive, compelling and most of all real. (And hope that we’ll see him back soon in the other capacity in which he has distinguished himself, as a director, with three films, Orphans, The Magdelene Sisters Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Kate’s no stranger to the Christmas collection – Sweet Bells from 2008, and While Mortals Sleep from 2011 both focused on South Yorkshire-inspired carols and seasonal songs, and the Kate Rusby at Christmas DVD from 2014, filmed at Harrogate Hall, put listeners firmly in the picture, with the Barnsley Nightingale supported by her excellent band, featuring partner and guitarist-singer Damien O’Kane, and a five-piece brass section.That soft northern brass sound features again on “Bradfield”, the mellifluous opener for The Frost Is All Over, a plump, pillowy arrangement that fits her voice very Read more ...