18th century
Gary Naylor
Cricket has always been a lens through which to examine the legacy of the British Empire. In the 1930s, the infamous Bodyline series saw the new nation, Australia, stand up to its big brother’s bullying tactics. In the 1970s, the all-conquering West Indies team gave pride to the Windrush generation when they vanquished an England whose captain had promised to make them grovel. In the 2010s, the brash and bold Indian Premier League saw the world’s largest democracy flex its financial muscle as global power shifted eastwards. Kate Attwell’s 2019 play, Testmatch (receiving its UK Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are genres of theatre that demand buy-in from the audience – musicals, opera and the daddy of them all, pantomime. The usual entry price to the house, the suspension of disbelief, requires supplementing with an active desire to meet the production halfway. So it is with comedy. Crudely put, we could all sit there like Mount Rushmore if we wanted to, but what good would that do?April De Angelis’s new play makes that demand and rolls in another: that we civilians take an interest in the in-jokes and squabbling of actors (yes, the dread word "luvvie" hove into sight on a couple of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It is Passion season, and Bach’s St John and St Matthew – as well as his less well-known Easter Oratorio – have been well covered on theartsdesk in the last few weeks. Whether with large choir, small choir, or one to a part with no separate chorus, there have been plenty of great performances to be heard this year. The Academy of Ancient Music’s St Matthew Passion at the Barbican yesterday was an example of the latter and was up there with the best, if not perhaps benefiting from the acoustic of Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall, as reported on by Simon Thompson.The Barbican, both in its size and Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater is one of the most ineffable masterpieces of the 18th century, its poignancy increased by the fact that the 26-year-old composer died shortly after writing it. A medieval meditation about Mary at the foot of the cross, it pitches two voices against a small orchestra, presented in a dramatised production this week by the young historical performance ensemble Figure.The original two voices (mezzo and soprano) became five singers, the music democratically shared between them: the legendary Emma Kirkby and Catherine Carby (pictured below by Kristina Allen) Read more ...
David Nice
Abandon hope of the human comedy so precisely charted in Hilary Mantel’s related historical fiction The Giant, O’Brien, prepare for a vision of outsized body and soul revealed in sleep, and your patience will be rewarded. Sarah Angliss’s haunting Giant, premiered at last year's Aldeburgh Festival, is perfectly served by her own soundscape, a dedicated team of musicians and Sarah Fahie’s pitch-perfect production.Its stated intention is to avoid making too much of a God out of Irish giant Charles Byrne and too much of a Satan of Scottish surgeon, scientist and collector John Hunter, who may Read more ...
David Nice
Light and grace must flood the concert hall in Haydn’s The Creation, after a striking-for-its time evocation of Chaos, and periwigged creatures skip around the Genesis picture. With Edward Gardner keeping the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus on their dancing toes, as ever, and three fine soloists carrying the creatures’ share of the beauties, it was a good time for happy creativity.Happily, too, Haydn inclines more in this often intimate oratorio to the instrumental originality of his symphonies than to the strangely vacuous world of his operas. You still sometimes feel that the arias Read more ...
Robert Beale
Placing the UK premiere of Katherine Balch’s whisper concerto (for cello and orchestra) after Haydn’s Symphony No. 100 was probably an inspired idea from the BBC Philharmonic and conductor Joshua Weilerstein.In its day, the so-called “Military” Symphony was not only striking on account of its use of novel instrumental effects – the “Turkish music” sound of triangle, cymbals and big drum for one, and clarinets (heard, military-band style, alongside oboes and flute) for another – but the clever and comical way they were brought into a context that was otherwise seemingly orthodox and almost Read more ...
Robert Beale
Reviving Tim Albery’s production of Così fan tutte, now almost 20 years old, again at Leeds Grand Theatre, Opera North have a bet that’s as safe as Don Alfonso’s in the story – that “Women are all the same”. It’s a sure-fire winner, and the best part this time round lies in the balance and contrast of both voices and personalities in the casting of the central pairs of lovers.Albery sees the piece as a kind of Enlightenment-era scientific demonstration, in which truth is to be revealed by an unblinking camera lens. Almost all the action takes place inside a giant “camera obscura”, as we Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
What Zoe Cooper has concocted in her loving rewiring of Jane Austen’s first completed novel looks at first sight like a knockabout satire of a satire. But her aim is more sober than that: a queer rereading of this text as she first experienced it as a student.The Orange Tree’s in-the-round space is ideal for what Cooper does here. The venue has no “fourth wall” to break, more like a fifth wall, an invisible membrane separating stage area from seats. This Cooper cheerfully breaks too, from the outset. The three period-costumed cast members arrive, survey the audience and wave, preparing us for Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There’s a game called Whamageddon, where people see how deep into December they can go without hearing “Last Christmas”. I’m like that, but with the Bach Christmas Oratorio, and this year I made it four days. And who would want to wait any longer? Last night I was at the Voces8 Centre in London as part of a live audience for a concert also streamed in the ongoing Live from London series, started during the Covid summer of 2020 and continuing to flourish.The programme was titled “Christmas with JS Bach” but could equally have been called “Blackadder Goes Forth” for the determination to get Read more ...
David Nice
If ever a marriage was made in heaven, it would have to be the one between Lucy Crowe’s beleaguered Queen Rodelinda and Iestyn Davies’ King Bertarido, the husband she believes dead and almost loses a second time. The duet at the end of Handel’s gem-packed Act Two where they’re reunited and then separated again was peerlessly moving as they performed it last night in Saffron Hall with the vibrant English Concert under Harry Bicket (more about the circumstances later).Concert performance never hampers the Handel operas of Bicket's team, and the countertenor may well have suggested what happened Read more ...
David Nice
Fascinating for the history of opera, less so for opera. The most interesting thing about Gazzaniga’s take on the libertine and the stone guest, apart from a couple of sprightly numbers, is the libretto by Bertati, repurposed with better dramatic shape by Da Ponte for Mozart, whose masterpiece opened in Prague eight months after the lesser work’s Venice premiere of February 1787. We have a right, though, to witness Gazzaniga’s unadulterated original. This wasn’t it.For most people in the audience, the first surprise – apart from discovering that the opening scene is Mozart/Da Ponte’s in Read more ...