Reviews
David Nice
All 23 of Massenet's mature operas boast memorably melodious quarters of an hour and fastidious orchestration, so why Werther’s special status as a repertoire staple? Three or four great arias may have been enough to clinch it. There’s also the fact that the source, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, confers a highbrow status the opera, a pale shadow of the original, doesn't really deserve. At any rate it came over last night as no more than an after-dinner mint to a dark day's dining on scorpions.The chief reason for going to this third revival of Benoît Jacquot‘s under-nuanced Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It begins promisingly, a dark Gothic fairy tale – both Grimm and grim. The writhing witches (four, oddly) are summoned from a pile of dead bodies, Stefan Fichert’s eerie puppetry all chopped-up limbs and interchanging demonic heads, hands scuttling across the floor like a spider, and disembodied voices chanting and haunting. Then the spell is broken and “what seem’d corporal melted”.Unfortunately, that’s also when the air goes out of Iqbal Khan’s lacklustre production, which plods along from one incident to the next without any clear intent. Ray Fearon’s Macbeth is a mellifluous speaker Read more ...
graham.rickson
Aukai Markus Seiber (Aukai Music)In a week where there’s been rather too much news to get one’s head round, a spot of ambient calm is very appealing. Aukai is the pseudonym of German guitarist and ‘soundscape artist’ Markus Seiber, and this debut disc is a sequence of 13 brief instrumentals. No notes are provided other than a list of Seiber’s collaborators, but this eloquent, appealing music has enough charm to stand up on its own. The pace is unhurried and the textures are spare; think of this disc as a more consciously melodic backward glance at Brian Eno’s 1970s ambient LPs. Similar Read more ...
Barney Harsent
And so we come to the end of the most spiteful, divisive and downright deceitful political campaign in living memory. And while we’re on the Ds, I’ll have disingenuous too, thanks. The remain camp was captained by a mildly Eurosceptic prime minister, who called the referendum in an attempt to secure an election victory, while Brexit has been spearheaded by a shambolic, and mildly Europhile, thatched homunculus, who simply wants the other guy’s job. We are, essentially, collateral damage in a spectacularly damaging career move.But with the shouting is over, it’s time for the really important Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There are often times as adults, that we feel ill-prepared for dealing with situations that arise. There is no equivalent of a Brownie’s badge for “taking responsibility” “progressing the career ladder”, “finding your life partner” or “coping with grief”. But by age 30, somehow, inexplicably, we’re supposed to have it all under control. Rachel Tunnard’s debut feature film departs from this social norm, and takes a look at what happens when the dream is derailed.Anna is a sub-functional almost 30-year-old living in a shed at the foot of her mother’s garden. She dresses, acts and speaks like a Read more ...
David Nice
ENO's new artistic director Daniel Kramer must regret having gone on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week to talk about suspending Janáček "and other obscures" from the company's repertoire for several seasons to come. Good God, if Jenůfa, Janáček's first searing masterpiece, can't move an ENO novice to tears then something's wrong. I can only repeat what I wrote about the recent concert performance, that I'd always recommend it as the first port of call for anyone who loves theatre and is wary of opera.Fortunately everything is right in this revival of David Alden's industrialised Czech setting, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's amazing that they've managed to sustain The Good Wife over seven series and 156 episodes which have, by and large, maintained a standard of writing and acting which can stand toe to toe with anything else on TV. Apparently it's now being dubbed "television's last great drama" in some quarters, not just because of its quality but also because it aired not on some boutique cable channel or on-demand subscription service but on the mainstream CBS network. You don't miss 'em until they're gone, and all that.That said, this final series has sometimes felt as though its creators were a little Read more ...
Marianka Swain
As we finally go to the polls, casting votes based on our view of national identity and Britain’s place in the world, here comes Shakespeare’s ever-topical play. Robert Hastie’s thoughtful take is contemporary dress but stripped back, not so much holding up a mirror as inviting us to project modern concerns onto it.Of course certain elements ring out in the current context, from negotiations with a supercilious French representative to the fraught justifications for foreign conflict and fractured clans back home. So, too, does the Chorus’s direct address, asking us to summon vast battlefields Read more ...
David Nice
Natural disaster, in the shape of a metaphorical sea-monster ravaging classical Crete, might make a director's imagination work overtime on Mozart's first, jagged masterpiece. Alas, only unnatural disasters have been inflicted upon us in productions at Glyndebourne, ENO and the Royal Opera, with singers going some way to make amends. Now, at last, the green and pleasant valley of the Wormsley Estate has given birth to a clear and sober staging by Tim Albery that gives both the human beauties and the inhuman surrounding phenomena of the score their due. A near-perfect cast that can sing and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Take Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, and add Handel and Mozart and the Frenchman Massenet, and you have the composers whose operas the Kansas-born mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato has made her own. She's one of the few who has become a classic opera diva while remaining true to her roots (she was born in Prairie Village, Kansas, and one of her all-time favourite songs is "Over the Rainbow": remember Dorothy was a Kansas girl too.)Melvyn Bragg’s empathetic interview, conducted in the Crush Bar of the Royal Opera House, was a real treat. Question and answer was interspersed with clips of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Shamed and reviled, Richard Nixon had the misfortune (albeit self-authored) to be the star of one of the murkiest chapters in American Presidential history. It's not much compensation for him now, but he has become something of a goldmine for film-makers.Anthony Hopkins went to town on him in Nixon. Zack Snyder brought us a grotesque, parallel-universe Nixon in Watchmen. Frank Langella revelled in the wily, devious President in Frost / Nixon. Now here's Kevin Spacey with what could be the best Nixon yet, in Liza Johnson's delicious fantasy-satire about the day when the President met the King. Read more ...
Miriam Gillinson
There's a one-man play inside every politician – and a one-woman play behind each male leader. Linda Griffiths's and Paul Thompson's solo show, Maggie and Pierre, explores Maggie Trudeau's struggle with bipolar disorder and her temptestuous relationship with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (father of current PM Justin Trudeau). Written in 1979 but only now receiving its European premiere, this is an ambitious attempt to explore the personal fissures that politics creates.The play races through Maggie and Pierre's whirlwind relationship, which begins following a chance encounter on a Read more ...