1920s
David Nice
2015, Sibelius anniversary year, yielded no London performances of the composer's last masterpiece, the Prospero's farewell of his incidental music to The Tempest. With Shakespeare400, 2016 has already made amends: even if the Bardic input came solely from Simon Callow doing all the voices, and summing up the plot – "elsewhere on the island", "meanwhile..." – Osmo Vänskä served up more of the original numbers for the 1926 Copenhagen production than I've encountered live before.Previous "editions" from Neeme Järvi and John Storgårds gave us more of the play, the last with an abridged version Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"One... Two... You know what to do": that coolly delivered rehearsal intro from a trombonist called Cutler (Clint Dyer) could serve as a synoptic appraisal of the simply overwhelming National Theatre revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. The play in 1984 launched the late August Wilson on to Broadway, where I first saw it, and here announces itself as a bellwether achievement in artistic director Rufus Norris's still-young National Theatre regime and as, very possibly, the finest Ma Rainey yet.For that, credit the surpassing empathy of a director in Dominic Cooke, who brings much the same easy Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Tweaked and polished to within an inch of its life, The Danish Girl is the latest shamelessly awards-seeking effort from British director Tom Hooper, whose last two period films The King’s Speech and Les Misérables were certainly showstopping pieces of cinema. Yet, despite the latter’s ostensible grit, both specialised in human anguish prettily presented for your viewing pleasure; Hooper’s unapologetically indulgent, highly embellished approach isn’t to everyone’s taste but you’ve got to admire his bravado.The Danish Girl is based on David Ebershoff’s fictionalised account of the life story Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On Monday ITV showed BAFTA Celebrates Downton Abbey, in which a massed gathering of cast and crew plus a few celebrity guests toasted Downton's five-year stampede to global acclaim. Its creator Julian Fellowes waddled onstage and told an anecdote about how he'd been accosted by a Downton fan while browsing in a Barnes & Noble bookshop in New York. "Just let Edith be happy!" she wailed at him.As it turned out in this double-length finale, he did, exercising the God-like authority the Emmy, Golden Globe and BAFTA-scooping show has bestowed on him. In fact it all went a bit Richard Curtis as Read more ...
David Nice
Great Estonian Neeme Järvi’s two conducting sons have had varying success in London this week. Kristjan did what he could with a dog’s dinner of a Britten Sinfonia programme on Wednesday night, while older brother Paavo presumably chose the three surefire masterpieces in his Philharmonia concert yesterday evening. The climax was Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony, one of the greatest of the 20th century; certainly there’s none to cap its sheer physicality. But the same tension and uncertainties had a different kind of impact in the Flute Concerto, one of Nielsen’s later enigmas, and while Haydn’s “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They said there'd never be an audience for a period drama about an aristocratic Edwardian family. Six series later, we're bidding adieu to a national (and indeed global) institution, as Julian Fellowes's motley band of ridiculous, ahistorical and frequently exasperating characters potter off into the fading TV sunset. There's still the Christmas special, but – though we might not admit it – we'll miss them.It was the casting wot dunnit. Some will undoubtedly argue that you can find more plausible characterisations in CBeebies or the new-look Thunderbirds, but despite the non-sequiturs and Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Switching between the orderly and the chaotic, David Jones’ depiction of Noah’s family building the ark immerses us in the drama of the moment while simultaneously holding us at some point out of time, to emphasise the story’s ancient roots. Viewpoint and scale shift unnervingly to evoke the watery unsteadiness of the scene, building an intense psychological charge that balances the disorienting, claustrophobic treatment of space with patterns and reiterations that provide respite for the eye; pieces of timber, bricks in a wall, and pairs of figures and birds serve as punctuation to control Read more ...
David Nice
Never use one word when you can get away with two: that seems to have been the maxim of Eugene O’Neill even in one of his shorter plays. After all, when is an ape not hairy, and why does stoker Robert “Yank” Smith, a natural hulk brought low by mechanised capital, have to bang home the title at every opportunity? Yes, this must have been an astonishing play to see on Broadway in 1922, and it still gives director Richard Jones a chance to throw every stylised trick in his very singular book at its eight diverse scenes. But masterpiece it isn’t.Its ensemble is in some ways the opposite of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For the final instalment of its season of 20th-century classics, the BBC left the world of fiction behind and took a Rosie-tinted amble along the leafy byways of Laurie Lee’s youth. The first part of Lee’s autobiographical trilogy is much the most read. Sales of six million means Cider with Rosie has a lot of fans who will have watched this dramatisation anxiously fearing the worst.They can rest easy. This amiable, elegiac adaptation’s commitment to honesty extended to filming in Slad, the Cotswold village where the author grew up – and, in a touching final shot, now rests in a graveyard Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It began with the sinking of the Titanic all those series ago. However many holes Julian Fellowes has seen fit to build in to the design, his own ocean-going liner has valiantly refused to go down with all hands on deck. But by Christmas we will have seen the last of Lord Grantham and his household, until such time as they all get resurrected for a big-screen reunion, even the Dowager Countess Maggie. For some, the bereavement will be too much and they'll rewind to the start of the first boxset. For others it'll be like the end of a long prison sentence.As for the inhabitants of the Abbey, Read more ...
David Nice
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark attended Nielsen’s 150th birthday concert earlier this year in Copenhagen’s glorious new concert hall. Her grandparents were there at the premiere of Nielsen’s blithest work, his cantata Springtime in Funen on 1921. Our own dear Queen has never shown such interest in music, but all the same last night's Prom celebrated the day on which she became our country’s longest reigning monarch with Gordon Jacob’s fanfare-laden arrangement of the National Anthem. Then it was off with a gust of fresh air into national celebrations of a far quirkier nature by the greatest of Read more ...
David Benedict
Nearly 10 years ago to the day, an almost unknown 24-year-old Venezuelan conductor came a cropper when valiantly stepping in at short notice to conduct Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony at the Proms. (His name was Gustavo Dudamel. Whatever happened to him?) To pull off successful performances of Sibelius’s seven symphonies you need not just the ability to fire up players but the intellectual grasp to grip their elusive, fluid structures.So after handing the first four symphonies in this year’s anniversary cycle to relatively young guns Thomas Dausgaard and Ilan Volkov, the BBC was taking no chances Read more ...