Renaissance
Boyd Tonkin
Suitably enough, this year’s musical Christmas arrived at the Wigmore not in a dazzle of joyful light and bedecked with winter greenery, but with a lonely band of singers facing the gloom of an unlit, empty hall as fear and confusion multiplied outside. In both of yesterday’s concerts, the closing events of the venue’s defiant and courageous autumn season, a cappella choral music from the Renaissance ushered in a festival more austere than ecstatic. It proved deeply beautiful in its sombre way, but quite free of tinsel jollity. Black-clad singers on a bare stage, surrounded by cavernous Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s hard to remember that distant time back in March before we were all digital experts, when the idea of watching a live-streamed performance was still novel and intriguing. Fast-forward eight months and serious screen-based fatigue has set in. But if you’re after something to stimulate and soothe, a concert so thoughtfully programmed and lovingly presented that it’s almost as good as being back in the hall, then the Dunedin Consort have the answer.Filmed at Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk, evocatively lit for the occasion, the concert is a musical journey through an empty city – a meditation Read more ...
Tom Baily
Once again the whodunit becomes the whoforgedit in the newest installment of the Britain’s Lost Masterpieces series. Host and art historian Bendor Grosvenor introduces us to what is one of the most beautiful he’s ever seen: a Madonna and Child believed to have been done by Sandro Botticelli, one of the members of “painting’s Premier League”. Much sleuthing is needed to verify the work, and to satisfy Grosvenor’s appetite.Social historian Emma Dabiri delves into the background of the work’s previous owner, the wealthy Gwendoline Davies, who bequeathed it to Cardiff Art Gallery in 1952. Davies Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It is a commonplace to describe Leonardo as an enigma whose genius, and perhaps even something of his character, is revealed through his works. But as his works survive only in incomplete and fragmented form, it is drawing, the practice common to all his various endeavours, that brings coherence and perhaps even a comprehensive view of a lifetime’s labours.The 200 drawings on display at the Queen’s Gallery are a selection from the Royal Collection’s peerless Leonardo holdings. They were left to his pupil Francesco Melzi on his death and have remained together ever since, having been acquired Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
By some strange alignment of the stars, Peter Sellars’s staged version of Orlando di Lasso’s Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of St Peter) arrived at the Barbican Hall just as – next door in the theatre – Pam Tanowitz’s directed her dance interpretation of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. Not only does Tanowitz’s choreography come with a commissioned score by Kaija Saariaho – a regular Sellars collaborator. Both works mix their media to present a spare and unflinching journey into age, remorse and grief. Those soul-searing lines of Eliot from Little Gidding about “the gifts reserved for age” – “the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Pitched as “a tale of two artists”, the National Gallery’s big autumn show promises a history woven in shades of friendship and rivalry, marriage and family, privilege and hard graft. Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini were brothers-in-law, Mantegna’s marriage to Nicolosia Bellini in 1453 a strategic match that brought fresh blood to Venice’s greatest artistic dynasty. The marriage kept commissions, and so money and prestige, safely within the family, but the two artists pursued entirely separate careers, Bellini distinguishing himself as a painter of landscapes and Mantegna as a master of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Titian! Mantegna! Rubens! Dürer! Veronese! Van Dyck! Raphael! Velazquez! About 140 works which were once part of Charles I’s 2,000-strong collection are reunited in a sumptuous collaboration between the Royal Academy and the Royal Collection. It is a marvellous selection covering the 15th to the 17th centuries, the Northern and Southern Renaissance and the baroque. Charles I may have been a wretched king and politician, but he was an outstanding and original connoisseur collector and commissioner of art. Among the greatest hits exhibitions, there are even surprises: take Rembrandt' Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The “concert drama” is on the up, offering audiences a mingled-genre means to experience music and its context simultaneously. The author and singer Clare Norburn has an absolute peach of a story to tell in the "imagined testimony of Carlo Gesualdo, composer and murderer," the legendary musician who knifed to death his wife and her lover upon catching them in flagrante.Norburn's Breaking the Rules received its London premiere on Saturday (it has been performed before in various other venues) in the splendid new festival Baroque at the Edge, and it shows us the composer, on the last day Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Dedicated to a foundation stone of western artistic training, this exhibition attempts a celebratory note as the Royal Academy approaches its 250th anniversary. But if the printed guide handed to visitors offers a detailed overview of working from life, the exhibition itself is a far flimsier construction that never really establishes the purpose of a practice that it simultaneously wants us to believe is thriving today.The study of nature was fundamental to Renaissance thinking, and as artists aspired to the naturalism they perceived in Antique sculpture, working from the life took on a new Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Might a painting ever achieve the veracity of a sculpture, a "real" object in space that we can walk around and view from every angle? Could the documentary quality of an engraving ever be equalled by a painting? And how could painting respond to photography – drawing with light – an invention that in the 19th century prompted a thorough reconsideration of painting’s purpose.From the paragone debate of the Renaissance, in which the relative merits of painting and sculpture were considered in a spirit of fierce competition, to more recent challenges presented by new and changing technologies, Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Peter Phillips and the Tallis Scholars have nothing to prove when it comes to Renaissance choral music – few ensembles can match them for clarity, balance and purity of tone. They are perfect guides, then, for this tour of the late Italian Renaissance, an era, as they demonstrate, of surprising musical variety and fast-changing tastes.The choir is small, just 10 singers, and Cadogan Hall has a dry acoustic, at least compared to the vast basilicas of Northern Italy, so these were intimate readings. The broadly chronological survey began with Palestrina, whose opulent Laudate pueri lacked Read more ...
Florence Hallett
As a line flows or falters, registering each slight change in pressure, pause, or occasional reworking, it seems to offer a glimpse into the mind of the artist at work. The line is the instrument of the artist’s eye, the often unpolished, provisional nature of a drawing offering a spark and freshness that tends to gradually lessen as a composition is rethought and worked up in paint.Portraits only intensify this sense of immediacy, and from likenesses of loved ones hastily dashed off, to awkward first sittings for a commission, such drawings offer an unparalleled sense of encounter with an Read more ...