France
graham.rickson
There's a Gallic flavour to this week's new releases, with two unusual recordings of orchestral music played on period instruments. And there's a set of seminal 20th-century ballet scores, played by a wonderful French orchestra under their much-missed Russian principal conductor.Poulenc: Concerto for Two Pianos, Concert champêtre, Suite Française, Anima Eterna Brugge/Jos van Immerseel (Zig Zag territoires)
Jos van Immerseel’s period-instrument band have already recorded exciting versions of Beethoven and Berlioz symphonies, and they’re also one of the few groups willing to tackle 20th-century Read more ...
Matt Wolf
History rears its harrowing head in Sarah's Key, a sometimes galumphing film that lingers in the mind not least because of the terrible tale it has to tell. Reminding us that the atrocities of the Holocaust weren't any one country's exclusive preserve, the film chronicles both the eponymous Sarah, a young girl who survives the French internment camps, and Julia, a Paris-based American journalist in the modern day whose life is taken over by Sarah's story. Are the film's two parts of equal value? Let's just say that fiction yet again is trumped by fact.That the contemporary sequences achieve Read more ...
ronald.bergan
When Jean Renoir returned to France at the end of 1953 after 13 years of exile, he felt as if he were beginning his career from scratch. His Hollywood films were not highly regarded, and neither The River (1951) nor The Golden Coach (1953), shot in India and Italy respectively, were successful enough to redeem his international standing among reviewers or at the box office. The critical consensus declared that he was an artist in decline. There were exceptions, of course, one of the most important being Cahiers du Cinéma, the magazine founded in 1951.Cahiers contradicted the received opinion Read more ...
David Nice
All aboard the chrome locomotive for composer-conductor Oliver Knussen’s annual magical mystery tour. You may notice rather few fellow passengers in the Albert Hall; that’s a given with this event (though the Proms could have thrown in and advertised one of Olly’s Top 10 OTT Favourites – I’ve heard him proclaim them - to drum up more trade). You may also find rather too many stops for change of crew. But so long as you sit forward to catch the results of his famously acute hearing, second only to Boulez’s, you’ll get something out of a long, unsexy ride.Part of the pleasure of multi-work Read more ...
charlotte.gardner
Vignette Productions is a bit of a one-off in the operatic world. It was established three years ago by the rising young British tenor Andrew Staples, his mission to create operas that were more exciting and told better stories than those generally on offer. Staples directs rather than sings; his casts are made up of young unknown singers, and the productions to date certainly fulfil the original aim. Last year, their summer production of Cosi fan tutte had the audience sitting in deckchairs atop of six tons of sand and ended with a beach party. With that in mind, a bit of youthful wackiness Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
One of the weirdest things about the Proms's "weird concerto" theme is that the concertos so far haven't been all that weird. Piano. Violin. Cello and violin. Cello, piano and violin. Pretty familiar stuff. Finally last night we got something bona fide off the wall: a concerto for string quartet from French rebel Pascal Dusapin. Was it weird enough?To be honest, not really. But no matter. We were engaged. The work followed convention. The soloists never really departed from their showman role; the orchestra remained the backdrop. At one stage the two seem to switch places, the Ardittis taking Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
If much of the Austro-German repertoire is about hiking to a spiritual peak, the Franco-Spanish is about diving down to the orchestral depths. The music of Ravel, Debussy and Falla has beefy shoulders and powerful legs. But the vast watery expanse of the Royal Albert Hall is hard-going even for these expert paddlers. I've never seen anything by these composers that hasn't drowned in this space. So I came to last night's concert hoping that the BBC Philharmonic's new Spanish conductor, Juanjo Mena (he takes over officially next season), would show us all how to ride out these waters.He Read more ...
Ismene Brown
An obsession with sex and death underlies many of the immortal works of 19th-century classical ballet. Giselle is seduced, La Sylphide does the seducing, the Sleeping Beauty is awakened by sex, the Swan Queen is an apparition of death to Prince Siegfried who is easily waylaid by her doppelgänger, Odile of the 32 fouettées. Roland Petit brought it all out in the open with his ballets in the next century. As one observer said in 1949 of the premiere in London of his ballet Carmen, you could see the men’s trouser buttons popping.In the three of his famous works on parade last night at the London Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The French national holiday of 14 July might be marked by parades and fly-pasts in Paris, but here on the Atlantic coast it’s the central date for Francofolies, the annual festival dedicated to French music. La Rochelle hosted its first Francofolies in 1985. Twenty-six years on, the festival remains the premier showcase for Francophone music. This year the bill took in David Guetta’s dance-floor cheesiness, Gotan Project's overhauled tango, actress Mélanie Laurent plugging her recent album and all points in between. A window like no other on the French mainstream, it also showcases up-and- Read more ...
fisun.guner
Who could argue that television isn’t a great medium for learning about art? In its pared-down, visually literate way it delivers what dull, theory-laden extrapolations often can’t (if only because artists don’t think that way when they make things, and we don’t think that way when we look at things). It can breathe renewed life and vigour into a subject we think we know well, and, as a medium for simplified, pocket-sized information, it can get straight to the heart of a matter. Perfect. Possibly. And so we come to The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution.Waldemar Januszczak gave us this Read more ...
alice.vincent
The battlefields of the First World War are frequented most by secondary school groups and military history enthusiasts. And by David Grindley: a man for whom the play Journey’s End is an obsession, and his direction of it award-winning. RC Sherriff's play follows a group of British officers preparing for battle in frontline trench warfare, and which places “ordinary men into extraordinary circumstances”. This month sees Grindley’s production returning to the West End. It’s the seventh incarnation of the production since he celebrated the 75th anniversary of Journey’s End’s first night in Read more ...
howard.male
I never thought I’d find myself saying that a French female vocalist reminded me of Howard Devoto. But there we are, what can you do? There’s just something in the way she sings the verses of “Hell be Damned and Look Out”: the pauses between words (“Let’s face it… you may only live… once”); the way the last note (word) of the line just kind of hangs there, emotionally ambiguous and philosophically inscrutable. But Florence Joelle also has the sensuous purr of a French Marilyn Monroe. So whichever way you look at it, you’ve got to sit up and take notice.Recorded straight to analogue tape, the Read more ...