19th century
Robert Beale
Adaptability is the name of the game for big companies in the music business now. And Opera North’s streamed presentation of Beethoven's Fidelio from inside Leeds Town Hall is a prime example of just how adaptable things need to be.The orchestra is down to 33: single (hardworking!) woodwind, two horns, two trumpets, no trombones, in a score reduction by Francis Griffin. The chorus numbers 24, and between them that’s going some for a socially distanced ensemble these days. The soloists are spread along the front of the extended platform, with space to act and interact to some degree. Lighting Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Hallé have been slow off the mark, compared with some, in their response to the challenge of concert-giving in the Covid era. But now that they have delivered on the first of their winter season performances, it has clearly been worth the wait. They are offering not merely online musical performances but a set of newly made, highly creative films, watchable on Vimeo, built around the works they’re playing and the sight and sound of them doing so. Not less than a "live" performance, but quite a lot more.In "normal" times, you wouldn’t get as close to musicians in full flow as you do in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On the face of it, this new Sky Atlantic series sounded as though it might be a grave and sombre slice of American history, telling the story of the anti-slavery crusader John Brown and how his raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia helped push America into the Civil War. Instead, it’s a riotous ride through a primitive America whose identity is still in the process of being formed, led by an outsized performance from Ethan Hawke as Brown.Though the story (based on James McBride’s 2013 novel) is rooted in factual events, this looks nothing like a history lesson, and you just have to sit back and let Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“This year was supposed to be so very different” said Stephen Maddock, Chief Executive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra when he spoke to theartsdesk earlier this year. Talk about an understatement. The CBSO has hardly been alone in having cherished plans wrecked. But in the orchestra’s centenary year, the sudden cancellation of a programme of celebrations that had taken the best part of a decade to plan felt like a particularly cruel blow. And having finally pieced together a skeletal replacement season (the CBSO’s main venue, Symphony Hall, was able to re-open its doors only Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In a bold first strike – straight to the gut, surely, for many in the audience – the Wigmore Hall’s “Proust Night” began with an old recording of the Berceuse from Fauré’s Dolly Suite. Clever. How apt that the signature tune from Listen With Mother (a beloved old BBC radio show of stories for younger children) should have been composed by a friend – and idol – of the writer whose own rapt entanglement in the mother-child bond threads through his life and work. Memory, elegy, nostalgia, lost bliss, solace beyond pain, the quest to recapture in art whatever time has snatched from Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Among the French composer Claude Debussy’s greatest and characteristically subtle innovations was to put the titles at the end of his pieces. He did this in his piano collection Preludes: the titles, trailed by ellipses and clothed in brackets, appear more like suggestions than statements. Completing the collection a few years before his death in 1918, with it Debussy seemed to fulfil his mission of edging the cerebral late 19th century musical language towards the more sensuous zone of timbre, texture and colour. The player (Debussy’s ideal listener) is made to handle these Read more ...
Owen Richards
With Netflix releasing Rebecca on Wednesday, who’d have thought that a kid’s film would be this week’s best adaptation about an estate haunted by the memory of the deceased lady of the manor? Written and directed by the team behind Channel 4’s National Treasure (a very different production), The Secret Garden manages to recapture the warmth and familiarity of a classic weekend family film, with just a pinch of darkness.Based on the classic children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, we find recently orphaned Mary (newcomer Dixie Egerickx) on the way from her parent’s Indian house to her Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It’s no secret that Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous creation lays claim to more appearances on screen than any other fictional character. Over the past several decades, we’ve seen Sherlock as a pugilist action-hero, a modern-day sleuth, and in a painfully unfunny slapstick guise. Now there’s a feminist spin in which "The World's First Consulting Detective" is pushed aside in favour of his younger sister Enola, played by Millie Bobby Brown, in a peppy adventure yarn.Based on the young adult novels by Nancy Springer and adapted by Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), we are thrust Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Viennese operetta is like that other great Central European treat, goulash. It comes in many forms. In Vienna it’s coffeehouse comfort food; in Slovenia they add bacon for a smoky tang. And in the marketplaces of Transylvania it comes in bubbling iron cauldrons, practically fluorescent with paprika. But it’s all goulash. You know it when you taste it, and all that matters is that it tastes good. And when it’s really good, it tastes even better when warmed through and dished up second time around.Which is by way of saying that I can’t honestly get too worried about the authenticity or Read more ...
Charlie Stone
Edgar Degas is famous for his depictions of ballet dancers. His drawings, paintings and sculptures of young girls clad in the uniform of the dance are signs of an artistic obsession that spanned a remarkable artistic career. One work in particular – a sculpture of a young ballet dancer in a rest position – cemented his reputation as a pioneering spirit, unafraid of provoking controversy in the pursuit of perfection. It is this sculpture and the story behind it that Camille Laurens explores in Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, whose immersive translation by Willard Wood conveys a deeply Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights was meant to hit cinemas this summer, but, in response to Covid-19, has been put back to 2021. Instead, we get the early release on Disney+ of Miranda’s Hamilton – filmed, NT Live style, with the original Broadway cast at three performances in June 2016, and now available to a wide audience for the first time. Who could say no to this? Stage director Thomas Kail also helms the film, and the result is an exhilarating, immersive experience of this dynamic musical about America’s forgotten Founding Father, who travels from Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Alarm bells start ringing whenever you discover an author is adapting their own work for a screenplay. In the case of New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton, the alarm proves to be false. Over the course of seven years, and apparently 200 drafts of the first episode alone, Catton has eloquently distilled her 848-page novel The Luminaries into six 60-minute episodes for the BBC. In the process, she’s stripped away the novel’s structure and a lot of its detail to create something more appropriate for a visual medium. The result is spectacular, but very different from the original Read more ...