17th century
alexandra.coghlan
Baroque operas are like buses. You wait years for some Cavalli to come along, and then three of his operas arrive almost at once. It all started with English Touring Opera’s Jason last October – a witty and endlessly shape-shifting work – followed by the Royal Opera’s glossy L’Ormindo at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last month. Now, undeterred by larger rivals, Hampstead Garden Opera continue the trend with La Calisto.HGO are a fixture of London’s fringe opera scene, staging considered, well-funded productions with strong young singers in the theatre above Highgate’s Gatehouse pub. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's been six years since Peter Flannery's lurid Civil War series The Devil's Whore, which ended shortly after the death of Oliver Cromwell. This sequel, co-written by Flannery and Martine Brant, speeds us forward to 1680, which means Charles II is on the throne and, in between attending bawdy Restoration plays, is hell-bent on tracking down the people who executed his father.To avoid getting stuck in any kind of rut, however, the writers have introduced a transatlantic dimension to the story. We catch up with Angelica Fanshawe, heroine of the first series (she was played by Andrea Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the new indoor Jacobean theatre at The Globe, is an absolute jewel of painstaking historical research and craftsmanship. It is small, seating around 350, and with its thrust stage lit by around 100 candles (with electric light only on the musicians’ gallery in this performance), it is a challenging space to put on an opera, but also a uniquely atmospheric one.It many ways this Royal Opera/Shakespeare’s Globe co-production is experimental, with everyone involved having to learn from scratch how to work within these limitations, and also what opportunities for Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Turning every concert into a party, baroque ensemble L’Arpeggiata are performers in the truest sense. Too often early musicians get away with being shy or downright awkward, visibly uncomfortable when forced to introduce an encore. Not so with these European virtuosi, whose signature improvisations give each member (yes, even the percussionist) the chance to step into a starring role. And don’t get me started on the baroque rap that concluded the group’s most recent London concert…For the second of their three-concert residency at the Wigmore Hall, Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata moved away Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If it's possible to have rather too much of a frolicsome thing, consider by way of example The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a giddily self-conscious 1607 romp from Francis Beaumont that would be more fun if it were at least a full scene or two shorter. Following on from The Duchess of Malfi as the second proper production to occupy the newly built Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Eileen Atkins's sublime solo essay in Shakespeare came in between), Pestle proves that the candlelit venue can accommodate knockabout theatrics just as fully as it can sotto voce villainy.The problem lies not in the space Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
Bury Court Opera acquired a pearl of great price when it persuaded Simon Over, music director of the Southbank Sinfonia and the Parliament Choir, to bring his 2010 production of Dido and Aeneas from Anghiari in Tuscany to perform in the beautifully appointed restored old barn just west of Farnham in Hampshire. It proved the launch of an alluring undertaking. Rigoletto, Cenerentola and Onegin followed, plus a clutch of visiting productions, while Over provided leadership that showed in the assurance of his young players.This year it’s the turn of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen. A stellar medley of Read more ...
David Benedict
It’s costume drama meets adventure story, it’s got smouldering manhood and heaving-bosomed women with sex, swordfights, politicking and even beautifully lit Prague doubling for 17th-century Paris, but the question hanging over the BBC’s lavish new Sunday-night primetime series The Musketeers is: what exactly is it? And then Hugo Speer’s Captain Treville loses patience and barks: “You three, my office, NOW!” and it hits you: this is Charlie’s Angels in thigh-length boots.Okay, we’re not in Seventies LA but there’s almost as much product on the (artfully arranged) hair of our three heroes who Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The term “snow day” may have been coined with the most recent spate of cold winters in mind, encapsulating the modern-day, not to mention British, consequences of winter weather, but Hendrick Avercamp’s Seventeenth-century “snow day”, painted in around 1615, is a hearty reminder that nothing changes. And just as today we tend to fall into two camps, those determined to enjoy the weather and those irritated by the disruption, Avercamp’s scene on a frozen Dutch river depicts all types, ages and temperaments.Amongst gleeful figures equipped with skates and sledges, tradesmen determined to Read more ...
David Nice
It was a bright idea which, thanks to careful programming, has delivered – among other special events – two rich concerts in the Tower of London’s unexpectedly welcoming Tudor church, courtesy of the enterprising Spitalfields Music Winter Festival. Bach left behind an exquisite volume, the “Little Organ Book”, designed to contain 164 chorale preludes. He completed only 46; organist William Whitehead decided to commission composers to fill in the gaps, basing their inspirations on (hopefully) the music and/or the meaning of the words in the original chorales. The notion of pairing the preludes Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Anatomy of Melancholy (or to give it its full title - The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up) is not a succinct sort of work. Running at over 1,500 pages in some editions, this 17th-century answer to self-help is as long-winded as some of the medical sufferers it depicts. Fortunately it’s also slyly witty and wonderfully wide-ranging (covering kissing, crocodiles and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Schalcken the Painter looks like a documentary shot inside a Dutch Golden Age painting, out of whose black depths the Devil one day materialises. Taking the truly ghastly guise of the invincibly wealthy merchant Vanderhausen (John Justin), he buys Rose (Cheryl Kennedy) for his wife from the great Dutch painter Dou (Maurice Denham). Dou’s pupil Schalcken (Jeremy Clyde), though thinking himself in love with Rose, does nothing to save her, and as the years pass, ambition for his painting career (destined to be minor) and brothel visits replace his callow feelings for the girl. But neither she Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
English Touring Opera has form when it comes to baroque opera. Handelfest in 2009 marked the composer’s 250th anniversary with a sequence of excellent stagings, while 2010’s The Duenna was a riotous and irreverent musical delight, and there was an Alcina back in 2005 that still sticks in the memory for all the right reasons.So a season of three period productions – Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, Cavalli’s Jason and Handel’s Agrippina – promised much. Some careful repertoire choices, deft direction, and the added enticement of a return to the Royal College of Music’s intimate Britten Read more ...