Paris
Charlie Stone
Edgar Degas is famous for his depictions of ballet dancers. His drawings, paintings and sculptures of young girls clad in the uniform of the dance are signs of an artistic obsession that spanned a remarkable artistic career. One work in particular – a sculpture of a young ballet dancer in a rest position – cemented his reputation as a pioneering spirit, unafraid of provoking controversy in the pursuit of perfection. It is this sculpture and the story behind it that Camille Laurens explores in Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, whose immersive translation by Willard Wood conveys a deeply Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jehnny Beth was the formidable and mysterious leader of Savages’ flinty monochrome attack, remoulding stark post-punk into gender-fluid shapes. Retiring the band after two Mercury-nominated albums, and returning to France after more than a decade of self-discovery in London, this solo debut is the product of an intense period of self-reflection, softening the carapace of her English persona to ponder innocence and rustic roots.Beth’s friend PJ Harvey laughingly dismissed her poetry as “terrible”, and even Cillian Murphy’s spoken-word turn can’t redeem some po-faced portentousness, or a chilly Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Andrew Marr’s art show is a lot of fun, although engulfed in almost overwhelming banality and cliché. Our enthusiastic presenter is a self-confessed addict of art. As a pillar of television presentation, he is a natural for this series looking at individual paintings, 10 in all starting with Leonardo's Mona Lisa.The “greatest” in the title is misleading, as this handful of the world’s best-known paintings are not necessarily the best. Aesthetically, the jury has long been out as to the quality of this early 16th century portrait. Her enigmatic smile fascinates, but she only leapt into mega- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Great idea to use a symphony orchestra as the basis for a TV drama, because all of human life is there. Not to mention death, since this entertaining, though melodramatic, new French import (Channel 4) began with the dramatic collapse on the podium of veteran conductor George Delvaux just as he was launching into the finale of the New World symphony. He was pronounced dead at the scene.After Delvaux’s demise, the plot orbits around the return to Paris of ace French conductor Hélène Barizet, played with flair and tremendous dress sense by Marie-Sophie Ferdane. Though strangely, she carries a Read more ...
Charlie Stone
A century on, the années folles of Paris between the wars do not cease to excite readers and writers of all varieties. Alex George’s latest novel, The Paris Hours, draws on the myriad charms the interwar period has to offer, condensing them into a single day in 1927. We follow his four protagonists on their separate ways through the crisscrossing city streets until they come together in the most dramatic of dénouements. If these four leads are fictional, though, the author reminds us that this is still the Paris of Hemingway, Proust, Ravel, Stein and so many others by littering his narrative Read more ...
Florence Hallett
One year on the world is drastically altered, but footage of Notre Dame’s stricken spire collapsing in flames is no less shocking. That this event, endlessly replayed, has not paled against the new reality of daily death tolls is testament to the scale of the loss. As the rector of Notre Dame, Patrick Chauvet put it: “Notre Dame is not just Paris, it’s France and beyond France, it’s the world.”By the time a fire was discovered at 6.43pm, more than 30 minutes had elapsed since a sensor had detected smoke in the attic, and Notre Dame, one of the great monuments of Gothic architecture, was Read more ...
Matt Wolf
18 months or so after it opened in Chichester, Flowers for Mrs Harris launches a sequence of streamed productions from the West Sussex venue just in time to allow a new British musical to join the ever-swelling ranks of theatrical offerings online. This stage adaptation of the 1958 novel by Paul Gallico, directed by Daniel Evans, who brought the title along from his previous tenure running the Crucible, Sheffield, may be a show that really benefits from what advantages there are to experiencing theatre in this way.For starters, one can really zoom in on (you’ll forgive the choice of verb) Read more ...
David Nice
There is no mention of Marc-Antoine Charpentier in David Cairns's comprehensive Berlioz biography. It seems extraordinary that the master of the most intimate and moving of musical Christmas stories, L'enfance du Christ, knew nothing of the next best, Charpentier's Pastorale sur la naissance de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ composed 175 years earlier, with its similar move from darkness to light, its music of tender intimacy and childlike joy as well as sorrow, an elaborate metaphysical final chorus common to both. Charpentier's moments of seemingly small but potentially momentous drama were Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
What price a pair of seats at the ballet? If you’re talking the latest starry Russian import then, with a few perks thrown in, you might not see much change from £800. And yet the size of the first-night crowd queuing for Modanse, a double bill starring the Bolshoi prima Svetlana Zakharova and a bunch of her pals, apparently required the erection of crush barriers along St Martin’s Lane.The evening is dominated by Gabrielle Chanel, an hour-long biog-ballet in the course of which Zakharova gets to look chic in no fewer than seven of the couturière’s iconic outfits and slouch moodily Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Like almost everything that it touches these days, English National Opera’s autumn season of shows rooted in the Orpheus myth has enjoyed a fairly mixed reception. The company’s programme of visits to the Underworld concludes with another high-risk journey: Philip Glass’s 1993 opera Orphée, inspired by the 1950 film that Jean Cocteau spun from his own earlier drama on this theme. From the off, as director Netia Jones (in her ENO debut) tells us, Glass and Cocteau have drawn us into a hall of endlessly reflecting mirrors, a game of shadows and doubles in which each story and treatment of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And welcome back to our favourite French cop show – perhaps our favourite cop show from anywhere, in fact – which has raced into its seventh series (on BBC Four) with some typically grimy storylines about death and lowlife in a very de-romanticised Paris. If you catch a glimpse of landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, it’s only in the far distance across drab expanses of rain-soaked rooftops. The action in Spiral is frequently shot with pavement-level actualité, as if it’s been hastily assembled from home-made documentary footage found in a discarded fast-food container.Last week’s opening episode Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It isn’t provable whether adultery is more accepted in French bourgeois life than in that of other countries, but French films often suggest it’s nothing to get in a lather about. Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction, in which three of the four main fortysomething characters are having affairs, presents infidelity as rote behavior more calmly than would most British or American films, puritanism being not fully extinguished. Assayas doesn’t avoid raising the moral standard – he just doesn’t let it flap excessively.The film isn’t focused on adultery, however, but on the issue of digitisation's Read more ...