18th century
alexandra.coghlan
What if Handel, after his death, descended to an eminently civilised afterlife, where he spent his time making music and new friends with the likes of Beethoven and even Jimi Hendrix? That’s the premise of Louis de Bernières’ new play Mr Handel, a show that brings the author himself together with baroque chamber group The Brook Street Band and soprano Nicki Kennedy in a gentle meander through the life and works of baroque’s finest.It’s Christmas, and novelty shows are all around, if you can find them among the ubiquitous pantomimes and West End shows screaming ever louder for the attention of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a sadness to all lovers of the French horn that Mozart’s four horn concertos, the product of his longest friendship, make their appearance all too rarely in the concert hall. Though the building blocks of the repertoire, perhaps their apparent frivolity counts against them. But last night the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and its principal horn Roger Montgomery brought out of mothballs the best-known concerto, K495, and planted it in the middle of a programme celebrating Mozart the entertainer.First up was Symphony no 36, K 425, dashed off on the way back from Salzburg in 1782, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Don Giovanni – Coming Soon” winked and nudged the publicity posters for English National Opera’s latest production. And just in case the entendre wasn’t clear they added a picture of a condom. Playful, provocative and just a little bit sordid, it captured the spirit of Mozart’s damaged seducer with singular accuracy. Too bad the revival of Rufus Norris’s 2012 production, though much changed since we last saw it, is still about as enticing as a second-hand sex toy.Jeremy Sams has written a brilliant contemporary libretto – less a translation and more a free reworking of Da Ponte’s text. The Read more ...
Charles Saumarez Smith
Since becoming Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts almost exactly five years ago, I have become increasingly interested in why it was established. In particular, I almost inevitably got interested in the so-called Laws which govern its operation as a binding constitution. When I started in post, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, the then President, told me to sleep with the Laws under my pillow. At the time, I thought it was a joke. But, as time went by, I realised that he was deadly serious. At every meeting of the so-called General Assembly, which is when the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s Beethoven all right, but not as you know him. The scowl is there, and the broad heroic shoulders too, but the iconic tousled hair is glowing a rather unexpected shade of orange. A purple cloak sweeps down to the floor, setting off a jaunty pair of Elton John-style glasses and a leopard-print waistcoat.Wherever you go in Bonn during the 2012 Beethovenfest lifesize models of the city’s favourite son greet you, brooding out from inside shop windows, or posing casually (as casually as a bright green hulk-inspired mannequin can) on a street corner. Photos from previous years reveal a waxwork Read more ...
stephen.walsh
For some reason, the Welsh have revived their Così fan tutte, from last year, with positively unseemly haste – if not quite so unseemly as the haste with which their La Bohème, from this spring, was wheeled back on last month barely three months after its first airing. It looks as if the outgoing intendant John Fisher, never notable for lively repertory planning, was either clearing his desk, or had simply scarpered. His successor, David Pountney, has bravely been much in evidence on company first nights this year, but cannot yet be blamed for what he, and we, are hearing and seeing.This Così Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Shouldn’t it be a stiff lower lip? When a person loses control of his or her emotions, and gives in to the instinct to blub, the telltale sign is not the unstiffening of the upper lip but the wobbling of the lower. In short, we have been saddled with a national characteristic that is an anatomical inaccuracy. It was an American who got it wrong in the late 19th century. But that’s not until next week. In fact in part one of this history of British repression, we weren't very repressed at all. We – or rather our Enlightenment forebears – had not yet learned the art of keeping a lid on it.Ian Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
When you hear Christian Tetzlaff play you hear Brahms, or Beethoven or, in this case, Bach. What you don’t hear a lot of is Tetzlaff himself. I mean that in the best possible way – so willing is the violinist to submerge himself, to set aside ego and agenda. It’s an approach that is at its purest in Bach’s solo violin music, and as he presented the sonatas and partitas to a full Wigmore Hall last night the generosity of this extraordinary musician allowed his audience to set ourselves aside for a moment too as we listened.It has been almost 20 years since Tetzlaff first recorded Bach’s Read more ...
philip radcliffe
What’s in a name? Pinchwife, Fidget, Horner, Squeamish, Sparkish… William Wycherley labelled his characters blatantly. No one is hornier than Horner, the womaniser who puts it about (sorry) that he is impotent after surgery for the pox. Pinchwife’s wife gets pinched and no one is more cuckolded than he. Mind you, he takes the “if you can’t beat 'em, join ’em” approach in the end when he says “cuckolds, like lovers, should themselves deceive”. Lady Fidget has ants in her pants and her not-so-virtuous group of ladies can hardly move for sexual desire. They are the cougars of their day. Even the Read more ...
mark.kidel
John O’Keeffe’s 18th century classic Wild Oats is a play about players and an uproarious love letter to the theatre: a perfect fit for the re-opening, after 18 months of massive refurbishment, of Bristol’s Old Vic, originally constructed in 1766 and the oldest surviving working theatre in the UK. When a group of players approached the city’s merchants at the end of the 17th century, seeking help with the establishment of a venue in which they might perform, Bristol’s plutocrats sent them packing, as theatrical activities were considered too subversive. Bristol’s first theatre was set up Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Not all geese are swans, and not all Handel oratorios are like Messiah – storyless, spiritual, monumental sequences of reflective arias and choruses. By definition, though, they aren’t operas either, and it’s always a calculated risk to put them on the stage, as Iford Arts are doing with Susanna, a quasi-oratorio that Christopher Hogwood has described as “a pastoral opera verging on the comic”.The production’s director, Pia Furtado, would probably question that description. Iford Manor, near Bath, does, it’s true, have a pastoral touch. One looks out from Harold Peto’s wonderful semi-formal Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: Serenade for tenor, horn and strings; Nocturne; Finzi: Dies Natalis Mark Padmore, Britten Sinfonia/Jacqueline Shave, with Stephen Bell (horn) (Harmonia Mundi)Britten’s Serenade and Nocturne are still indelibly associated with the voice of Peter Pears. His tenor, undeniably characterful, could never be described as a thing of beauty, and his 1960s recordings of both works show him sadly past his prime. Mark Padmore’s new recording is terrific - his voice is expressive, beautiful and terrifying by turns. Britten’s unique talent for word-setting deployed unnerving skill in the Read more ...