1940s
Inner Voices, BarbicanFriday, 28 March 2014
We’ve now learned from the films of Paolo Sorrentino and honorary Roman Ferzan Ozpetek what great and nuanced ensemble acting the Italians can produce. Even so, the towering star of the current scene is the chameleonic Toni Servillo, already hailed... Read more... |
DVD: Dead Of NightTuesday, 04 March 2014
Ealing Studios was known for comedy, but when it released Dead of Night in 1945, it unleashed on movie-goers the classic template of portmanteau horror for decades to come. The film comprises six tales – five supernatural stories and a framing... Read more... |
Repin, Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra, Fedoseyev, RFHTuesday, 25 February 2014
Valery Gergiev once described Yevgeny Svetlanov’s USSR - later Russian - State Symphony Orchestra to me as “an orchestra with a voice”. Then Svetlanov died and the voice cracked. Which are the other big Russian personalities now? Gergiev’s own... Read more... |
The Book ThiefMonday, 24 February 2014
Derived from Markus Zusak's bestseller, director Brian Percival's movie is well cast and brimming with good intentions, but it's too long, too safe and too uneventful to do justice to its subject matter. The story charts the rise of Nazi Germany... Read more... |
Peter Grimes, English National OperaThursday, 30 January 2014
“Mind that door.” With the hurricane howling outside it’s no wonder the locals gathered in Auntie’s pub are yelling... but there is no door. Instead, a stage-wide sheet of corrugated iron rears up to let in Stuart Skelton’s storm-tossed Peter Grimes... Read more... |
DVD: 1944: The Final DefenceTuesday, 21 January 2014
The “Good War” was so vast and intricate, its moral perspectives shift according to dozens of national points of view. 1944: The Final Defence lands us in the middle of Finland’s second battle for national survival against the Soviet Union, whose... Read more... |
Albert Herring, BBCSO, Bedford, BarbicanSunday, 24 November 2013
Three cheers for good old Albert, natural laugh-out-loud heir of Verdi’s Falstaff and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, and the best possible way to mark creator Britten’s being one hundred years and one day old. Youth has its day in both those earlier... Read more... |
DVD: GaslightFriday, 22 November 2013
That Thorold Dickinson (1903-84) directed only nine features can be attributed to the British film industry's mistrust of the intellectual left-wing cineaste and union activist – and his own distaste for making pablum. That he didn't make 30... Read more... |
Belcea Quartet, Wigmore HallSaturday, 02 November 2013
Pure, unorthodox genius: the terms apply both to the three works on the Belcea Quartet’s programme – Haydn at his most compressed, Britten unbuttoned and sunny, Shostakovich hitting the tragic heights – and, if the term “genius” can be applied to re... Read more... |
The Rape of Lucretia, Glyndebourne TourSunday, 20 October 2013
“Aren’t you sick of Britten yet?” asked a colleague three-quarters of the way through the composer’s centenary year. Absolutely not; there have been revelations and there still remains so much to discover or re-discover. Yet re-evaluation can sour... Read more... |
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Duchess TheatreThursday, 26 September 2013
Arturo Ui, king of the Chicago cabbage trade, is Brecht’s Richard III. Egad, he even speaks in iambic pentameters, with a fair few nods at Shakespeare, though a certain cowlick and moustache locate him firmly at the centre of the 20th century... Read more... |
Paul Bunyan/The Secret Marriage, British Youth Opera, Peacock TheatreThursday, 12 September 2013
It’s raining Bunyans, and since Britten’s early American operetta with its sights originally set on Broadway teems with song and invention that can’t be a bad thing. A fortnight after Welsh National Youth Opera commandeered Stephen Fry to voice-over... Read more... |
