thu 08/06/2023

medieval

CD: Tansy Davies - Troubairitz

'Troubairitz': There’s a satisfying darkness to Tansy Davies’s imagination

Tansy Davies’s neon and inside out 2 can’t help but recall Stravinsky’s 1940s commission for Woody Herrmann’s orchestra, the Ebony Concerto. There’s an idiomatic use of rich, low-pitched sounds (plenty of bassoon and bass clarinet), and insidious...

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Winter Wassail, Gabrieli Consort & Players, Shakespeare's Globe

The great Globe itself is not enough: McCreesh and company in a convivial setting

Vienna has its New Year's Day concert, conducted this year with some style but not quite enough sensuousness by Franz Welser-Möst. London could do worse for a more modest equivalent than let the Wooden O play host to a well-spiced small package of...

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The Pillars of the Earth, Channel 4

It’s taken 20 years for Ken Follett’s doorstopping saga to storm the little screen in the corner of the room. According to Rufus Sewell, playing a stonemason who knows about these things, it takes only 15 to knock up a spanking new Gothic cathedral...

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Francesca da Rimini, Opera Holland Park

They're having a laugh at Holland Park, surely: offering 700 pay-what-you-like tickets to hook newcomers on the wonderful world of opera, and then serving up a Pythonesque staging of an immoveable Italian dinosaur. Three fine singers wasted, a...

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Tim Marlow Meets Terry Jones, Sky Arts

Terry Jones and Tim Marlow engage in a polite conversation about art

He may be a writer, a director, an actor, a historian, and, of course, a former member of Monty Python, yet rather than being a Renaissance man, Terry Jones is clearly a mediaevalist at heart. We know this not only because he has written well-...

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Black Death

When were you last horrified by a horror movie? Really horrified, that is, as opposed to merely creeped out, or disgusted, or amused. Black Death is a proper horror movie, for grown-ups rather than ADD-afflicted teens, and I'll wager grown-ups will...

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BABEL (words), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Antony Gormley, Sadler's Wells

Collaborations for dance, theatre and other things are coming thick and fast at Sadler’s Wells nowadays - these are not halcyon days for pure choreography. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has become a regular at Rosebery Avenue with his mixed-theatre works FOI...

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Art Gallery: Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, V&A

Detail of the War of Troy tapestry, woven in wool and silk, Tournai, France (1475-1490)

After the opening earlier this autumn of the reconfigured Ceramic Galleries, the Victoria & Albert Museum's renovation continues. Here is a selection of exhibits on permanent display in the newly reopened Medieval and Renaissance Galleries -...

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