17th century
Marina Vaizey
Music and art have been intertwined for millennia, the static, frozen and soundless moment of paint capturing the feeling and the meaning of ephemeral time-based music. And nowhere can the act of making music have so thoroughly infiltrated a society at all levels than the Golden Age of Dutch culture in the 17th century.Music is emblematic of time passing and its accompaniment, mortalityMusic was part of the entertainment in brothels, bawdy houses, taverns, inns, part of the energetic goings-on of the working classes, and also profoundly integrated into the life and mores of the burgeoning Read more ...
Nick Hasted
An English Civil War horror film which looks as if it was shot on authentic location in both space and time should convince his widest audience yet that Ben Wheatley is a major director. Released in cinemas, on TV, Video on Demand, DVD and Blu-ray on Friday, it’s yours if you want it.It starts with Whitehead (The League of Gentlemen’s Reece Shearsmith) and two companions fleeing a brutal battle. Wandering into a field which seems endless, all but Whitehead eat the mushrooms growing there. It’s when they happen upon O’Neil (Kill List’s Michael Smiley) that the screaming starts. He has papers Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Rijksmuseum is reopening after 10 years. What took it so long? Escalating costs, contractual problems, a protracted battle with the cycling lobby (this is Amsterdam, after all). I’m sure there’s more, but one whole decade’s worth? It’s a long time to go without a national museum that represents the best of Dutch art to the Dutch people, and to the world.It’s easy to forget what a spectacular Medievalist fantasy the building actually isBut it’s all OK now. It’s been worth the wait. In fact, the improvement is staggering. The crepuscular gloom has been lifted and light has flooded in. You Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jewels, gold, silver, arms and armour, silks, embroideries, tapestries and lace: the world of the very rich and very powerful royals – and merchants – in Russia and Britain half a millennia ago is set out in glittering array in the V&A’s latest exhibition. The English imported fabulous furs from Russia, delighting in the finest sables, but also wood, hemp and tar, the better to build British ships. The Russians acquired beautifully crafted objects and above all arms, a perennially sought-after commodity which the British were skilled at supplying.Britain’s Muscovy Company was established Read more ...
David Nice
Excess of light and heat sends sun-god Apollo’s son Phaeton tumbling from his father’s chariot. The light was iridescent and the temperature well conditioned as peerless Christophe Rousset led his period-instrument Les Talens Lyriques and a variable group of singers through a concert performance of Lully’s 1684 tragédie-lyrique, a specially pertinent, heliotropic operatic homage to le roi soleil Louis XIV. That there was never a dull moment probably owed more to Rousset’s extraordinary if always tasteful animating gift as both conductor and harpsichordist than to the work itself, sensitive to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It may look like a sure-fire hit to let Kansas mezzo Joyce DiDonato rip through the drama-queen repertoire of the Baroque. But last night’s exploration of the dustiest, most overgrown byways of 17th and 18th century Italian opera needed every drop of DiDonato’s star musical talents – not to mention those of her backing band Il Complesso Barocco – to convince us of the worth of these rarities. The audience bought it. I remain on the fence.Prepared in conjunction with that great scholar of this period, Alan Curtis, the concert didn’t disappoint in certain key respects. In mood, narrative flow Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Sensing economic opportunity, the Dutch artist Peter Lely (1618-1680) emigrated in his early twenties to London, and was thus the right man in the right place. After the early death of Sir Anthony van Dyck, followed by the Englishman William Dobson, Lely cleverly and charmingly utilised disarming ambition to open up a career for himself and become in due course the most successful painter of his time.Lely’s establishment in Covent Garden became a factory for the production of portraits of grandees, aristocrats, royals and their wives and mistresses. He was the pre-eminent portraitist in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the past few years, without any fanfare, the veteran playwright and Spooks script-writer Howard Brenton has not only made a comeback, but also become the chief chronicler of the nation’s past. One year he is telling the story of Harold Macmillan in Never So Good, then he’s doing a version of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. He might make a detour to pray with St Paul or to converse with Abelard and Heloise, but then he comes back to English history with the award-winning Anne Boleyn. His latest, which opened last night, is about the trial of Charles I. And it’s got Douglas Henshall Read more ...
graham.rickson
Kalkadungu: Music for didjeridu and orchestra William Barton (didjeridu) (ABC Classics)We all think that we know what a didjeridu sounds like. Mere words can’t begin to describe the noise made by William Barton in full flow. It’s a sonorous, low roar that sets your stomach wobbling, made more startling by the array of harmonics and overtones which buzz around over the top. There’s also Barton’s sheer technique, circular breathing allowing him to sustain notes for improbable lengths. Martin Buzacott’s notes refer to the didgeridu as “the sound of the Australian earth, the ochre-coloured Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
He arrives in a blaze of light and trumpets, but Jonathan Pryce’s King Lear seems as much charming, lovable father as imposing monarch as he sets about carving up his kingdom. What follows, though, brings a prickling sense of horror, as Michael Attenborough’s production lends a disturbing dimension to Shakespeare’s bleak tragedy. This is an account of an emotional despotism that has led to a hideous distortion of relationships; and Lear’s demand for absolute loyalty and devotion – his need to quantify love, and to receive proof of it – has damaged his elder daughters so profoundly that it Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Peter Sellars has a talent for controversy, from his early days when he was the director who brought you Così fan tutte set in a diner on Cape Cod, Don Giovanni as a cocaine-snorting, Big Mac-eating slum thug, and Figaro getting married in Trump Tower. At his best, in John Adams's Nixon in China, Saariaho’s L’amour du loin, or his Teodora at Glyndebourne, the results have been some of the freshest and most inspiring stagings of new music seen in recent times. Anyone who has met him knows he is a brilliant polymath, extremely charming and charismatic, even if many hate his haircut (see Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Purcell certainly doesn’t make it easy for the champions of English opera. His beloved Dido and Aeneas is barely half an evening’s entertainment, so condensed is its tragedy, and the dense political satire of Dryden’s King Arthur text all but requires translation if it is to make sense to a contemporary audience. And then there’s The Fairy Queen – the gauzy, gorgeous semi-opera whose music is the side-dish to a bastardised 17th-century take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.With Purcell’s music for the latter valued above its rhyming-couplet dialogue, it’s rare to see the work today Read more ...