19th century
David Nice
Another season, another new production of Verdi’s nastiest masterpiece. For which we should be profoundly grateful after the tribulations of the last 18 months. Yet how quickly elements of the routine can corrode the soul of the spectator, just as fresh, urgent communication can set it alight.That communication Royal Opera Music Director Antonio Pappano displays with a true magician’s sense of pace and sleight of hand, deftly transitioning from hollow comedy to ugly tragedy, alert as ever to the needs of his soloists, and the Royal Opera men’s chorus is with him all the way. On the other hand Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s perhaps unfortunate that The North Water arrives on BBC Two only a few months after The Terror, since it’s impossible to avoid the parallels between them. They’re set only a few years apart (1859 for The North Water, 1845 for The Terror), both involve doomed voyages into Arctic waters, and each of them gets darker and bloodier as it depicts man’s inhumanity to man (and not just man) and the encroaching horror of a heart of darkness.But there are differences, too. The North Water is based on Ian McGuire’s novel, but this five-part series is indelibly stamped with the mark of screenwriter Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Welcome back, WNO! Yes, emphatically, and with a loud hurrah, which is precisely what the company received, and rightly received, from the somewhat arbitrarily scattered first night Millennium Centre audience for their opening revival of The Barber of Seville. But what possessed their new(ish) General Director, Aidan Lang, to celebrate the return, with all its lively hopes for the future, by digging up Giles Havergal’s 35-year-old production of Rossini’s masterpiece, is a mystery I am unable to unravel.Havergal’s stage-within-a-stage concept perhaps seemed chic and suitably postmodern in 1986 Read more ...
David Nice
“Time-travelling” is how Enrique Mazzola, the superb first conductor of Glyndebourne’s last new production of the main season, described the slow-burn trajectory of Verdi’s semi-masterpiece Luisa Miller in his First Person here on theartsdesk. Possibly it’s more a case of conservative opera-by-numbers evolving into something truly deep and personal – ultimately two duets and a final scene among the very best in Verdi’s substantial output. In most of the first two acts, you simply need five of the best voices to pull focus and a production that doesn’t get in the way too much.That happened Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
If you’re looking for a distraction from the apocalyptic headlines that seem to be the norm right now, then it may appeal to descend into the pleasantly air-conditioned surroundings of Jermyn Street Theatre and take a trip to 1888. Here you will be greeted by literature’s most famous nobody, Charles Pooter, whose comic fictional diary – after an initially lukewarm reception – came to be celebrated by figures ranging from Hilaire Belloc to Evelyn Waugh.In this stage version, written by Keith Waterhouse in the 1980s, his account of his life commuting between Holloway and the City of London, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Harnessing the enthusiasm of youth has always been what Clonter Opera, on a farm in Cheshire, is about with its summer productions. The house is relatively small (there’s always a reduced orchestration as accompaniment), and the idea is that promising young voices can get a chance to try their luck with an audience and learn in the process.It's been notably successful in the past, as star after star has taken the first steps towards a durable career under the care of Clonter’s music staff and directors. This production was no exception: in fact the maturity of the lower male voices on display Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Rounding out a decade of personal success – beginning with his Cannes Jury Prize-winning The Puppetmaster (1993), followed by a best director award for Good Men, Good Women (1995) – the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien travelled to the Japanese harbour city of Hirado as part of his research for Flowers of Shanghai (1998). An unexpected work, the film emerged out of the ashes of a failed project to shoot a biopic of Zheng Chenggong, otherwise known as Koxinga, a Chinese Ming loyalist who fought against the emergent Qing Dynasty. Set at the close Read more ...
Robert Beale
Tabita Berglund is that rare species, an up-and-coming orchestral conductor attracting enough attention to secure repeated international bookings in even these straitened times. She also happens to be female and young, which until relatively recently would have been seen as another major handicap to success. But this was her return to the Hallé, having conducted a set of concerts in late 2019 with them - and she’s no stranger to the north west of England, either, since she took part as a young cellist in Lake District Summer Music’s masterclasses 10 years ago.Berglund is a more mature, but Read more ...
Gaby Frost
To this day, if you take a stroll down Paris’ Boulevard de l’Hôpital, you’ll come across an imposing building: the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière. It’s one of Europe’s foremost hospitals. It’s the place where 20th-century icons Josephine Baker and Michel Foucault departed this world, and its halls buzz with budding young medical students from La Sorbonne. But this is only the most recent chapter in the Salpêtrière’s long history. Dig a little deeper, and it doesn’t take long to discover the building’s violently troubled past. In the 19th century, it served as an institution for mentally ill women Read more ...
Florence Hallett
When Turner’s Modern World opened at Tate Britain last autumn only to close again days later, we might have felt then an echo of sensations and sentiments powerfully expressed in the exhibition itself. Its subject is the dirty cacophony of newly industrial Britain, the startling modernity of which is often neglected in discussions of Turner that focus instead on the visionary aspects of his style. Conceived as a counterpart to 2014's Late Turner: Painting Set Free, also at Tate Britain, this exhibition, by the same curatorial team, considers Turner as a creature of his age, when the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Sir Mark Elder is back with the Hallé for the latest (and penultimate) filmed concert in their “Winter Season” of 2020 and 2021, including the world premiere of Huw Watkins' Second Symphony. He introduces it from the Bridgewater Hall foyer, and mentions plans for a six-concert summer series with audiences present in the hall – well, let’s hope so.There’s the usual “tuning up” brief clip of the busy streets of Manchester, and it’s straight into Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, with principal flute Amy Yule’s delightful solo, the harps of Marie Leenhardt and Eira Lynn Jones, and Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The screen lights up, the Zoom link connects and there, blinking back at you (30% awkward, 70% enthusiastic) is a familiar face. Is it definitely working? Can you hear me? What do we say now? God, I'm getting old. Even after 12 months of conversation through webcams it still feels forced to me; something to one side of real life, simultaneously weird and routine, intimate and alienating, even as memories of the Old Normal grow increasingly remote. Is that a piano? Well, why not, these days? And then the face on the screen – I knew I recognised him; it’s the tenor Joseph Doody, who I last saw Read more ...