Christmas
Katie Colombus
If Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” makes you want to burn the nearest decorated pine tree and Michael Buble’s Christmas croons give you the urge to shove brussel sprouts in your ears, Pentatonix’s new festive album could be the perfect antidote to Xmas crabbiness.Known for their Christmas album of 2014 (in particular a hyper-hip version of The Nutcracker), this five-piece a capella group from Texas (Kirstie Maldonado, Mitch Grassi, Scott Hoying, Avi Kaplan and Kevin Olusola) offer up a few more festive songs with an unexpectedly cool twist. They sing in close harmony, combining Read more ...
David Nice
Second and third times lucky: after the migraine-inducing multimedia overload of Peter Sellars's premiere production of El Niño, first seen in London in 2003 and subsequently excoriated in eloquent prose by the composer himself, John Adams's layered masterpiece has had two further performances here proving that the drama is all in the music. Vladimir Jurowski's 2013 Festival Hall interpretation literally had the edge, in its razor-sharp focus, on last night. But it's always good to see the composer as conductor make light of his rhythmic complexity as he nears his 70th birthday, and we also Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Christmas - in the shape of Peter Wright's Nutcracker - has arrived earlier than usual at the Royal Opera House. This is to make space for a 70th anniversary run of The Sleeping Beauty that starts on 21 December: the two will run in tandem through the holiday period, scheduling that assumes audiences can't get enough of Tchaikovsky-and-tutus at Christmas. And I'm sure they can't, when the purveyors of said delights are the Royal Ballet.It helps that Wright's Nutcracker is a classic of the genre, almost perfect in every way. I say almost, because I began to feel, on last night's viewing, that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There are around 800 pages in a Dickensian doorstopper and it has been said around 800 times that if Dickens were working today he would be a show runner on a soap. Finally it has come to pass. Andrew Davies attempted something similar with his Bleak House, diced up into half-hour gobbets. But Dickensian is nothing less – or maybe that should be nothing more – than EastEnders in top hats and mobcaps.Its 20 episodes have been scheduled over that time of year which Dickens wishes could happen all the year round, two episodes a day. Its scriptwriter Tony Jordan, formerly of EastEnders, had Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Some time in the late 1280s, the artist Cimabue was wandering in the Tuscan countryside when he chanced upon a boy shepherd. According to Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists is the source for most such stories, the boy was “portraying a sheep from nature on a flat and polished slab, with the stone slightly pointed, without having learnt any method of doing this from others, but only from nature.” The young untrained artist was Giotto, who would be taken to Florence as Cimabue's apprentice and soon outstrip his master.Posterity has been deprived of the sheep scratched in stone. But Giotto would Read more ...
David Nice
Relatively recent tweaks to the abundant London concert scene have resulted in top-end events right up to Christmas. We have in part to thank the seasonal festival at St John’s Smith Square, postponing the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s holidays, putting them together with superb soloists and choirs, and serving up major Handel and Bach. One snag: their Christmas Oratorio when I last went to hear it turned out to be only four cantatas out of the sequence of six.You’d have to pay two period-instrument horn players if you included Part Four – the OAE didn’t – and yet as Richard Read more ...
Florence Hallett
On this dark, silent night as the world holds its breath in anticipation, everything is still but for the occasional whisper of a breeze ruffling the curtains. It is so quiet that a deer, that most nervous of creatures, has tiptoed all the way up to the window, gazing beyond us to a point further inside the room. The mirror on the dressing-table allows us to share the view into the room behind us, and there is a glimpse of a cot, the Christmas rose that hangs over it symbolising the Virgin Mary. And yet, something is wrong. It is far too quiet, the cot is empty: the deer has come to pay Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Is it possible for a carol concert to have a cult following? Ex Cathedra's annual Christmas Music by Candlelight performances in St Paul’s Church have quietly grown into a Birmingham institution. The audience has evolved its own rituals: camping out through the long interval in the box pews, and sharing improvised picnics of mulled wine and mince pies.The formula, devised by Ex Cathedra’s director Jeffrey Skidmore back when Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter was still lit by gaslight, is simple enough to allow creative elaboration: a candlelit sequence of mostly a capella, mostly modern choral Read more ...
Dylan Moore
While Christmas is the season when traditional theatres trot out the tired clichés of panto, the ever-innovative National Theatre Wales have decided, in their wisdom, to stage a surreal, psychedelic theatre-gig at the Sophia Gardens cricket ground in Cardiff. Based on an idea originally conceived by Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys, artist Pete Fowler and graphic designer Mark James that has already spawned Rhys’s 2007 solo album Candylion, the "insatiable, inflatable" and very much larger-than-life version sees the musical polymath reteam with writer Tim Price and director Wils Wilson Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Dickens’s public readings from his novels were almost as famous and popular as the novels themselves. He would write special scripts that gave prominence to particular characters and that dramatized the salient events of each story; and of all these performances, A Christmas Carol was one of the favourites, his and his audiences’. So what better idea than to turn this unforgettable tale into an opera: an opera for a single singer, dramatizing the story, impersonating all the main characters, being, as it were, Dickens himself with added music?Iain Bell’s opera, new last year but performed Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Christmas legends are not born; they are made. In the case of the Nutcracker, its Christmas indispensability in Britain and America stems not from the original 1892 St Petersburg production, but from 1950s reinterpretations by emigré Russians (Balanchine and Karinska in the US, Lichine and Benois in the UK). Like most other story ballets, there is no stable text - apart from the Tchaikovsy score, of course, but Balanchine was happy to cut and rearrange that too. The rest is a palimpsest of story treatments, costume designs, and questionable psychoanalytic interpretations, presenting many Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
I habitually skipped over Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Girl in my childhood fairy tale compendium because I couldn't bear the sadness (see also: The Happy Prince *sob*). Parents of sensitive children will therefore be relieved to know that in Arthur Pita's 2014 dance version, which is back at the Lilian Baylis Theatre at Sadler's Wells this Christmas season, any tears at the titular waif's lonely demise will be vastly outnumbered by smiles at the fun and fantastical world Pita and his imaginative collaborators have conjured up for her to inhabit before and after death.Pita sets the Read more ...