Features
David Nice
Outnumbered by four to one: out of the classical/opera team, Alexandra Coghlan, Jessica Duchen, David Benedict and Boyd Tonkin all chose English National Opera's production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess as their best of the operatic year, while I went on another night when the spirit from usually zesty conductor John Wilson and a fine cast seems to have been shining less bright. Most disappointing, I thought, was the cliched staging and the way that director James Robinson had failed to encourage even a singer as consummate on stage as Nicole Cabell to find a convincing body language. But I Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
If you believe the bulk of the “books of the year” features that drift like stray tinsel across the media at this time of year, Britain’s literary taste-makers only enjoy the flavours of the Anglosphere. With a handful of exceptions, the sort of cultural and political notables invited to select their favourite reading overwhelmingly endorse titles from the UK or US. For our book-tipping elite, it seems, a hard literary Brexit happened decades ago. Yet publishing history tells a different story. The sales volume for translations of literary fiction released in the UK has doubled since the Read more ...
David Nice
Five of Leoš Janáček's 10 operas are staples of the worldwide repertoire. Two I'd never seen on stage, so the slice I chose of the19-day festival devoted to all of them for the second time in the history of Brno, the cultured Moravian capital where he spent most of his life, tended to the rare and local. I could also have seen productions from the Welsh National Opera (From the House of the Dead), Flanders (The Makropulos Affair and Ivo van Hove's staging of the song-cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared) and Poznan in Poland (Jenůfa) as well as the tributes of Brno's world-class Read more ...
'I’ve told everyone that it’s a comedy – but will anyone laugh?' Jonathan Dove on his new Marx opera
Jonathan Dove
Marx is having a terrible day. He is supposed to be finishing volume two of Capital but he’s distracted by his lust for the maid, workmen are taking away the furniture, his daughter thinks she’s caught a spy.... and what will his wife say when she discovers he’s taken her silver to the pawnbroker? Where is Engels when Marx needs him most?The answers are in Marx in London, my new opera opening in Theater Bonn on 9 December. If the plot sounds a bit like Richard Bean’s play Young Marx, that’s because at one point I asked Richard to write the libretto for my opera, and that gave him the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Before we hear a note, extras dressed as maintenance staff potter about the stage. They try to erase a scrawled slogan on a wall that reads “Hur allt började”: how it all began. “It” is the story of Wagner’s Ring cycle as presaged in the introductory drama of Das Rheingold, which kicks off the tetralogy. Prior, though, to the ominous, mesmeric swell of the E flat chord that anchors the Rheingold prelude, Stephen Langridge’s production for Gothenburg Opera shows us a busy, dogged human world of toil. This sphere may be alien to the passions and quarrels of gods, dwarves and giants we will soon Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Rob Smith & Ray Mighty are truly the unsung heroes of British bass music. Coming out of the same cultural melting pot in Bristol that gave us Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead and mega-producer Nellee Hooper, they looked to be among the city's big successes when they first emerged in 1987. Their debut single, a cover of the Bacharach / David classic "Anyone who had a Heart" on their own Three Stripe label was a club success, they produced Massive Attack's debut single "Any Love", and Fresh 4's 1989 rave and chart hit cover of "Wishin' on a Star".However an uncomfortable major label deal Read more ...
Heather Neill
Robert Hastie is a little late for our meeting. Directing Shakespeare's darkest tragedy in London while also running Sheffield Theatres must sometimes cause a logjam of simultaneous demands, but whatever the morning's problem in the north of England, he remains smiling, relaxed, thoughtful and gracious during a break from rehearsals.Hastie (pictured below right © James Stewart) began as an actor. After reading English at Cambridge he won a scholarship to RADA, benefitting, he says, from a small window when the course led to a degree and there was still funding available. He was in the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a story of a mad old man who imagines himself to be a knight errant. On his quests he sees virgins in prostitutes and castles in roadside inns. His adventures have spawned an adjective that describes delusional idealism, typified by the activity of tilting one’s lance and charging at windmills one has mistaken for an army of giants.For Milan Kundera, the modern era – “and with it the novel”, he adds – is born when Don Quixote rides forth on his nobbly nag Rocinante. The Adventures of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes was published in two parts, the first in 1605. By the time the second Read more ...
Calidore String Quartet
Classical musicians spend much of their lives inhabiting the realms of the past. To effectively practise and perform the music of Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and countless others, performers must combine research and personal intuition to time travel into the era of these great composers’ lives. After months of exploration, as one begins to comprehend the social customs, politics and science of the era, a clearer understanding of the composer's individual personality and musical aesthetic begin to emerge.Many performers spend their entire life unravelling issues such as how Beethoven’s Read more ...
Joe Turnbull
Classical music struggles to shrug off the perception of being something of a rarefied world. Or “hermetically sealed” as Charles Hazlewood, founder of the British Paraorchestra describes it. “Classical music has to break out from its ivory tower," says Hazlewood. That tower is exponentially harder to scale for disabled musicians looking to fight their way up, with all the extra logistical and attitudinal barriers they must contend with.“There’s data on disability in housing, employment, in almost every government department,” says Siggy Patchitt, Head of Bristol Music Trust's National Centre Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You get plenty of Dylan for your buck these days, with the Mondo Scripto exhibition currently at the Halcyon Gallery in London, and a totemic and arrestingly beautiful set of Jerry Schatzberg's photographs of mid-Sixties Dylan in all his fuzzy glory just published by ACC Art Books. And now, following on from last winter's gospel-era entry into the Bootleg Series, Trouble No More, comes another generous hawl from the tape archives.At first sight, the prospect of a single album’s worth of sessions spread across six discs and 87 tracks – even if it is Blood on the Tracks – is a daunting one, Read more ...
David Nice
Why are great Wagnerian singers the most down-to-earth and collegial in the world of opera? Perhaps you have to be to master and sustain the biggest roles in the business, ones which can't be performed in isolation, and a strong constitution helps, too. Birgit Nilsson, the farmer's daughter born in rural Sweden 100 years ago, had all those qualities and many more. So, too, does her compatriot and one-time disciple Nina Stemme, making her perhaps the most appropriate laureate of the Birgit Nilsson Prize in terms of carrying on the line (the previous recipients at various intervals since the Read more ...