17th century
Matt Wolf
A prevailing sense of farewell ripples through this closing production in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse's hugely welcome season of Shakespeare's final quartet of plays. That valedictory feel is traditionally true of The Tempest, a text commonly regarded as Shakespeare's own leave-taking and one that here also marks the final staging after a decade at the helm of the venue's sure-to-be-missed artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, who now hands over the reins to Emma Rice.It's tempting, of course, at such moments to view the staging itself as some sort of summary achievement whereby a director's Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Given that Edmond Rostand’s 1897 tragicomic verse play Cyrano de Bergerac gave the word "panache" to the English language, it’s an irony that panache is the quality most woefully lacking in Russell Bolam’s production of Glyn Maxwell’s adaptation. It ought not to be so. With its all-female cast and stripped-down staging, it ought to feel radical and fresh, stimulating new lines of enquiry into the nature of role-play and what constitutes maleness and male heroism, shedding new light on a familiar text.The story of Cyrano de Bergerac, the soldier-poet who selflessly uses his literary gift to Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Spoiler Alert. It’s Act Three of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. The witches have done their worst, Aeneas is about to take ship, and the tenor Guy Simcock steps forward as the drunken sailor to sing what – as music director Christopher Monks has confided to us before the overture – will be his first solo role with Armonico Consort. At which point, the leader of the orchestra suddenly leaps up onto a chair behind him and starts belting out the sailor’s song himself, reeling tipsily about and fiddling all the while as Simcock slumps disconsolately back to the chorus.“Brilliant,” you think, laughing Read more ...
aleks.sierz
As a subject for drama, theatre history is always popular in the West End. Between Mr Foote’s Other Leg, which has recently closed at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, and Mrs Henderson Presents, which opens soon at the Noël Coward Theatre, comes Nell Gwynn, a West End transfer of the popular show from Shakespeare’s Globe, with Gemma Arterton as the eponymous heroine. But is this rowdy Restoration romp deserving of the lavish praise it has already garnered?The story of Nell, which begins in the 1660s once the anti-theatrical Puritans have been sent packing, is well known. Her rise from orange- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.” So promise Dryden and Purcell in their hypnotic song, a high-stakes closer for Andreas Scholl and Tamar Halperin’s "Exquisite Love" recital. But beguiling away cares on the eve of a national return to work is a big ask, even in the other-worldly surroundings of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and something that, on this occasion, the countertenor himself couldn’t quite deliver.Scholl’s has never been the biggest of voices – it simply hasn’t needed to be. Where others use vibrato and volume to project, Scholl has always relied on the bladed Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
For his latest journey Michael Palin, actor, writer, novelist, comedian, Python, traveller, has gone beyond geography in search of the visual arts with his characteristic enthusiasm, eclectic curiosity, and sense of discovery.With his usual exuberance, here he persuasively described the packed life – and art – of that most unusual baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c.1655). He was inspired by sighting her ferociously violent take on Judith decapitating Holofernes (pictured below) in the Capodimonte Gallery in Naples where Artemisia lived – aside from several years in London – for the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
An evening of Rameau was never going to be a neutral event. Last Friday all things French became painfully, irretrievably politicised, and while there were no speeches or acknowledgements last night, when Christian Curnyn dispatched the opera’s final ensemble not in fanfares and crescendos but the slyest of diminuendos, it was the perfect response –a Gallic shrug of a gesture, defiant in its charm and wit.Castor and Pollux shouldn’t work in concert – especially not, as in St John’s Smith Square, without surtitles. Rameau’s music describes and emotes, but never really dramatises, relying on Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
What is it about Vermeer? Just mention the name and there will be queues around the block. It’s true that there are a handful of other artists with that charisma, but none so rare as Vermeer. The Girl with a Pearl Earring is not only the subject of a recent novel and a film, but also a kind of poster for Holland as a whole, and the star of the recently reopened Mauritshaus in the Hague. At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam you can hardly see the handful of Vermeers for the crowds.Such power to attract is shared by a few others, including several Dutch masters – think Rembrandt and Van Gogh – Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Anyone lamenting the current trend for “wellness” and other associated holistic, pseudo-medical fads might want to take themselves for a medicinal trip down to Wilton’s Music Hall for L’Ospedale. There you will discover (best keep the homeopathic drops handy) that 17th-century satirists were there long before fancy Surrey clinics got in on the action.Anonymous, one-act opera L’Ospedale is a sharply observed piece of social commentary – an operatic Private Eye, with its gaze turned mercilessly on the healthcare system. If that sounds bracing rather than delightful, it’s worth pointing out that Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The curse of Tamerlano strikes again. The last time London saw Handel’s darkest and most sober opera was in 2010. Graham Vick’s production for the Royal Opera House lost its unlikely star Placido Domingo before it even opened in London, ran interminably long and lost any emotional impetus somewhere in the course of its three-and-a-half hours. To say, then, that last night’s concert performance from Maxim Emelyanychev and Il Pomo d’Oro made an even poorer job of the piece is not to dismiss it lightly.The Barbican have fine form where baroque opera is concerned. We’ve become used to concert Read more ...
David Nice
It’s Orfeo in the original Italian: not Monteverdi’s, nor yet another version of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, but a cornucopia of invention in the shape of the first Italian opera for the French court. When the Ensemble Correspondances presented its very much slimmed down version of a 13-hour “Ballet Royal de la nuit” for Louis XIV at the Chaise-Dieu Festival this August, it was the fragments of ravishing music from Luigi Rossi’s work which stood out among the six featured composers. Furnishing a finer line-up of soloists than the French group could muster, the Royal Opera’s second opera to be Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
And so the Academy of Ancient Music’s triptych of Monteverdi operas at the Barbican comes to an end, three years after it began with Orfeo. If 2014’s Poppea was the cycle’s sexually-charged climax, then this Ulisse is the dark, contemplative coda – a sobering moment of morality after the victorious excesses of opera’s most venal couple.Il ritorno d’Ulisse is always a harder sell than Poppea. Virtue, chastity and constancy don’t make for quite such an obvious drama, and the opera’s structural oddities – a complicatedly large cast, an awkward final act – make it tricky to pull off. Benedict Read more ...