18th century
David Nice
His transformational Brahms series with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra may have been truncated by slipped disc troubles - he was much missed at Glyndebourne too - but Robin Ticciati is back with renewed energy and purpose. To judge from the brilliant but focused party they seemed to be having with Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony last night, the players are as overjoyed as he is.There was much to celebrate just in the evening alone: the last symphony came as the cathartic third act of an opera for orchestra which had led us from the majestic 39th into the woods of the radical 40th and out into the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Australian Ballet's cinema broadcast on Tuesday night appears to have been a little under-publicised
– at least in my local multiplex, which was deafeningly empty with just five spectators. I suspect a combination of circumstances to be at work: the lower international profile of Australian Ballet relative to others who do cinema screenings, like the Royal Ballet or the Bolshoi; the multiplex location, where the culture on screen market is less developed than at arts cinemas which show plays/ballets/operas/exhibitions much more often; and perhaps also the fact that the Sleeping Beauty Read more ...
David Nice
Pace-perfect musical articulation and meaningful surprises in the direction: both were to be expected after the conductor-generated sludge and the production overkill of the new Royal Opera Così fan tutte. Mark Wigglesworth has form in Mozart at ENO, with the best of Cosìs way back and a bewitching revival of The Magic Flute this year. Last night he and the ENO Orchestra put no foot wrong. Richard Jones, his dream first-time collaborator, offered the expected twists and symmetries though perhaps not all the connections in between. But that's the eternal problem of Don Giovanni for you.Much Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In a world of terrifyingly serious news, the opening of the Royal Ballet season with Frederick Ashton's pastoral frolic La Fille mal gardée might seem like a wanton disregard for reality, like a brass band playing "Oh I do like to be beside the seaside" as the Titanic goes down. But that is to misunderstand the reason Fille is so beloved is that it has at its heart a perfectly serious and realistic topic: young love.The ballet's roots are in comédie sérieuse - meaning "true to life" - and it is true to life, in a rose-tinged, shiny photo album sort of way. Most young agricultural swains do Read more ...
David Nice
Prospects hadn't seemed that great for this new Covent Garden Così. Could Semyon Bychkov, powerful earth-and-fire conductor of Richard Strauss's darker operas, possibly find the right proportions of air and water in Mozart? Would German director Jan Philipp Gloger prove better than his Bayreuth reputation? As it happened, the sextet of half-unknown principals never sang less than respectably, and the production had some good ideas, though mostly linked to the look of expensive sets rather than to focused work on the psychology of confused lovers. It was Bychkov who nearly sank the evening. Read more ...
Helen Wallace
Papa Haydn might have been tickled to see his early intermezzo, La Canterina, pack out the Wigmore Hall on a Monday night. A night for connoisseurs, then, but Classical Opera has form when it comes to refreshing classical repertoire with the elixir of vocal youth. And with a line-up boasting Susanna Hurrell, Rachel Kelly, Kitty Whately and Robert Murray, this was no exception.Each was neatly introduced through solo arias by Haydn’s Czech contemporary, Josef Mysliveček (b 1737). Prised from his opera Semiramide, with its bewilderingly convoluted backstory, they revealed a composer of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A gorgeous white horse with flowing mane, poised and alert in a rocky landscape next to a watchful lion, is an extraordinary study of suppressed tension. A wistful North American moose, a herd animal living on its own on the Duke of Richmond’s estate; a monkey about to eat a crab apple
– these are some of the subjects depicted by that artist of genius, the Liverpudlian George Stubbs (1724-1806). Just under 30 paintings, drawings and prints gathered from private and public collections worldwide tell a story well beyond the equine subjects for which Stubbs is best known.His father was a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), which has been re-released, is one of the most stately costume dramas films ever made. It is also a monument to tedium, a tale told so deliberately, ponderously, and humorlessly that it raises the question, as do Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut, of whether their maker was a genuine master or is a sacred cow. In his adaptation of William Thackeray’s 1844 The Luck of Barry Lyndon especially, Kubrick’s meticulously achieved “realism” (which avoids the squalour of the poor), lugubrious grandeur, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Happy returns of various kinds last night at the Wigmore Hall, where hall regulars the Brook Street Band (violins Rachel Harris and Farran Scott, cellist Tatty Theo and harpsichordist Carolyn Gibley) took to the stage along with a number of musical friends for a 20th birthday celebration concert. An all-Handel programme paid tribute to the composer whose London address gives the group its name, expanding outwards from the opening intimacy of trio sonatas and suites to finish with soprano and baritone cantata Apollo e Dafne.The Trio Sonata from Saul offered an overture of sorts, previewing all Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Once confined to the concert hall, it’s a rare oratorio these days that doesn’t duck under the fence and sneak into the opera house. Bach’s Passions and most of Handel’s religious works have already made the transition, but this season it’s the turn of Haydn’s Creation. Rejecting the classic staged route, Garsington Opera have invited Mark Baldwin to choreograph it for his Rambert dancers. Add a trio of superb solo singers, Garsington’s own chorus and orchestra and artist Pablo Bronstein as designer, and you have an extraordinary hybrid conception.But any opera-goers expecting an oratorio Read more ...
David Nice
To reach Sarastro's temple of wisdom, you have to climb a series of exquisitely manicured terraces to a tiny cloister in one of the world's great gardens. Iford Arts have been inviting high-quality small opera companies to perform and produce their own operas since 2005. Charles Court Opera, paragon of G&S and boutique panto, was the right team to ask to provide a Magic Flute tailored for a cast of nine and an audience of 80.The peripherals matter here, not least because you can enjoy a picnic in peace and quiet before the show, unencumbered by evening dress ("smart casual" is the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The huge and gorgeous Titian, The Vendramin Family, c.1540-c.1560, displays a frieze of males of all ages, three or four generations – and an adorable lap dog held close by the youngest boy – in marvellously sumptuous costume. The painting is surrounded with portraits by an ardent admirer of Titian's, Anthony van Dyck, our interest in the Titian deepened by the fact that Van Dyck once owned it. It is but one of the stars of this fascinating sampling of the collecting habits of artists themselves.These consummate portrait painters are separated by nearly a century but we are told that Van Dyck Read more ...