From playing a blood-weeping Bond villain in 2006’s Casino Royale to his repeated collaborations with directors such as Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive) and Susanne Bier (After The Wedding), Danish-born actor Mads Mikkelsen has carved out a respected niche on both sides of the pond. He can come out of questionable blockbuster material unscathed – as his recent turns in Clash of the Titans and The Three Musketeers demonstrate – and elevate good material with his relentlessly compelling, peculiarly intense screen presence.He’s recently been confirmed to play a villain in the follow-up to Kenneth Read more ...

With the obvious exceptions of Verdi’s twin masterpieces Otello and Falstaff, Così fan tutte is the most Shakespearean of operas. Centuries before anyone invented the term, it’s nothing less than opera’s most elegant study in sexual politics. Written with the textural richness and emotional reversals of Much Ado About Nothing, it needs acting/singing performances of true depth in order to succeed. Harry Fehr’s new production adds a framing device of conscious performance, but intriguing though this is, it distracts from true engagement with the heart of the work.Intent upon underlining the Read more ...

It’s one thing for UK Border Control to turn Heathrow’s Arrivals into a giant theme-park queue, but it’s quite another when they start messing with our music. Paperwork issues yesterday saw one Japanese and two Korean members of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra denied entry to the UK, leaving Ton Koopman and his band too under-staffed to attempt their planned Brandenburg Concerto. Fortunately, soprano soloist Dorothee Mields stepped up with Bach’s Cantata BWV 199, giving us a rather more vocal, but no less Bach-centric evening of music to open this year’s Spitalfields Festival.One of the Read more ...

Despite ever-more determined attempts by musicologists to broaden the baroque repertoire of our opera houses, Handel still very much has things his own way. But in this Olympic year a sly challenge has emerged from Antonio Vivaldi’s L’Olimpiade – its topical, Games-themed premise garnering it more performances in a single year than in the past 200 put together. Undeniably apt, unquestionably novel, but is the opera actually any good?Garsington Opera clearly believe so. For them, L’Olimpiade is no stand-alone rarity, but rather the celebratory culmination of a three-year Vivaldi project. Read more ...

“Bergen is the most beautiful city in the world when it doesn’t rain,” said one Norwegian to me. There was a pause. “It always rains in Bergen.” Mention Norway’s second city to anyone and the first reaction is always the same. They don’t describe the UNESCO World Heritage Site that is the quayside Bryggen quarter, nor the city’s astonishing outlook – caught between mountains and sea – nor even the annual Bergen International Festival, the largest festival of its kind in the Nordic countries. They talk about the weather.Not without good reason have Norwegians nicknamed Bergen the City of Rain Read more ...

Ask any young composer in this country who is the most important figure in modern British music, and the answer is likely to come back quick and sharp: Oliver Knussen. Himself a composer of dazzling brilliance when he gets round to it, and a conductor who gets far too much work for the peace of mind of those who want him to write more music, Knussen has also for years been a kind of guru figure to generations of young and not-so-young composers, sacrificing his own creative time and energy in their interests, advising, promoting, performing.At 60, after a spell of poor health and visibly in Read more ...

The first and most unusual aspect of Caro at Chatsworth is that it is there: 15 outstanding sculptures by Sir Anthony Caro, placed in an irregular pattern around the formal 950ft early-18th-century Canal Pond, situated facing the southern vista of the great Baroque house. For these sculptures are tough, the antithesis of any sentimental attachment to a rural Arcadia, almost relentlessly urban and even architectural. Caro once used the term "archisculpture" for his ambitious work.Caro objects to being called a living national treasure or any such sobriquet, although at the age of 88 it Read more ...

Dickens has been getting all the press in his 200th year, but there is another performer, even older, who celebrates: in 2012, Mr Punch, of Punch and Judy fame, is 350 years old, and Improbable, in revitalising the old showman’s tradition, has given him the best birthday present that can be imagined.Improbable’s Punch and Judy is the story of Mr Punch and his poor battered wife and child – not to forget Toby the dog – as presented by two old turn-of-the-century troupers, Mr Harvey and Mr Hovey, played by Nick Haverson (pictured right) and Rob Thirtle, dressed à la Chaplin, complete with tail- Read more ...

Wanted: classic novel, preferably 19th-century but 18th will do, or early 20th. Anything reeking of period before television acceptable, though preferably not too working class. English if poss. Barnaby Rudge need not apply.Is there a crisis in the adaptation industry? Is inspiration running dry? This Christmas a new adaptation of Great Expectations became the fifth – yes, the fifth – version of the work put out by the BBC. In a nanosecond or two the movie will follow with Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham and Mike Newell (Four Weddings, Harry Potter 4) at the helm. No matter that Dickens Read more ...

Coram Boy is a thrilling story of dead babies, teenage love, material greed and the redeeming power of music. This is Christmas entertainment that packs a powerful punch, borne aloft by the inspiring sound of Handel’s Messiah, with horrific events presented on stage, an emotional rollercoaster ride that is definitely not for the very young or the faint of heart.The production comes from the same team that launched the show, based on Jamila Gavin’s now classic young persons’ novel, at the National Theatre in 2005. Adapted by Helen Edmundson and directed by Melly Still, it has been re-imagined Read more ...

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has been transformed with a £7.6 million facelift. As a first-timer I confess I don’t have a clue what it looked like before, but I am assured it was dark and gloomy and had the air of a building cast aside in favour of Edinburgh’s better attractions. Built in 1889 by Robert Rowand Anderson as the world’s first dedicated portrait gallery – paid for by the proprietor of The Scotsman, John Ritchie Findlay, and inspired in part by the Doge’s Palace in Venice – the SNPG had, in fact, shared over half the building with the Scottish Society of Antiquaries.The Read more ...