19th century
David Nice
Any festival would be proud and honoured to end with the great Elisabeth Leonskaja playing the last three Beethoven piano sonatas. Here the Everest was swiftly scaled as the tenth concert of a packed Wigmore Hall weekend. How I wish I could have heard more than the final two on Sunday evening, all-Beethoven unlike some of the predecessors reviewed above by Jessica Duchen, but they served up the perfect contrasts: breathtaking sheen in the lighter earlier Beethoven from young players alongside the best in their middle years followed by poleaxing profundity. There can be no pianist alive who Read more ...
Heather Neill
Newly arrived from a much-lauded stint at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, Rachel O'Riordan has undertaken to make "work of scale by women" during her time as artistic director of the Lyric. What better place to start than with Ibsen's once-shocking heroine, her story reimagined by prolific playwright Tanika Gupta? Ibsen's understanding of the fears and frustrations of women in the Nineteenth Century stood out among writers and thinkers of his time and modern women writers are likely to warm to him. Stef Smith's version of A Doll's House, offering three manifestations of Nora and bringing her Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Albertopolis! The Royal Albert Hall, the Albert Memorial and countless Albert Squares, Roads and Streets all commemorate Britain’s uncrowned king. In this mesmerising biography, novelist and historian A. N. Wilson’s admiration and affection for Prince Albert – who spent 22 years as Victoria’s husband – make for an irresistible and informative read.The pace is akin to a novel – brisk and confident – and builds Wilson’s substantial volume on Victoria (2014). Wilson is sometimes criticised for his remarkable ability to popularise the complex. But he has examined a vast array of original sources Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It may sound perverse to say it, but Albert was the perfect twenty-first century prince. Thrust into the heart of the British monarchy he was simultaneously an oppressed outsider who – despite his reputation as the most handsome prince in Europe (not least when wearing white cashmere pantaloons) – struggled to make his voice and intelligence heard. This curiously female aspect of his plight certainly adds a frisson to a story that would be remarkable by any standards. Thank goodness for historians that it is: for two hundred years after both he and Victoria were born we are being Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Once more, gondolieri! Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers leaps into life to the sound of a saltarello: a blaze of Mediterranean sunshine and good natured exuberance that sweeps you some 20 minutes into Act One on the same unbroken surge of sparkling dance and ensemble song. To say that there’s nothing quite like it in all of G&S is to ignore the fact that there’s nothing quite like it in all of 19th century European operetta. It’s still too easy to dismiss G&S as a peculiarly British phenomenon. In fact, The Gondoliers’ Venetian setting and spirited dance numbers place it firmly Read more ...
David Nice
So many second-rate Italian operas with good bits have been served up by Opera Holland Park and glitzier UK companies; despite best intentions and fine execution, none of the works by Mascagni, Zandonai, Alfano, Leoni, Ponchielli or Giordano has really flown. There are, at least, three composers close to grownups Verdi and Puccini: Leoncavallo, Wolf-Ferrari and Cilea, whose Adriana Lecouvreur now seems to have found its rightful place in the mainstream repertoire. Would his L'Arlesiana be equally worthy? Thanks to grateful vocal writing, exquisite orchestration and a rare sense of fluent Read more ...
David Nice
Like Hamlet and both parts of Goethe's Faust, with which it shares the highest peak of poetic drama, Ibsen's Peer Gynt is very long, timeless enough to resonate in a contemporary setting and sufficiently ambiguous in its mythic treatment of the pursuit of self to take a wide variety of interpretations. David Hare's adaptation, moving between Scotland, Florida and Africa, finds its own nuanced language to mix with contemporary colloqualisms but hardly marks a radical break from the Norwegian master; so much the better. His Peter Gynt keeps so many possibilities fully in play and is a gift for Read more ...
Richard Bratby
It’s the saddest music in the world: the quiet heartbeat and falling melody with which Tchaikovsky opens his opera Eugene Onegin. Imagine a whole society, a whole lifetime of solitude, longing and disillusion, evoked in a single bass note and a few bars of tearstained violin. And then imagine it sustained over three acts. Is there another 19th century opera score that matches music to drama so simply, and yet so unerringly? – repeatedly finding the precise turn of melody or twist of harmony required to distil the poignancy out of a situation, and then letting it trickle straight back into Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
On paper, this might seem like a revival too far, a production clearly intended as a vehicle for world-class singers being tacked on the end of the Covent Garden season, and without any big names in sight. But it turns out that Laurent Pelly’s staging, now in its fourth London return, has enough charm and substance to justify an outing with lesser names. And the revival cast is certainly competent, with no obvious weak links, and a sense of ensemble that keeps the hackneyed plot ticking over and the light comedy just on the right side of cliché.The production was designed for big stages – it Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Félix Vallotton is best known for his satirical woodcuts, printed in the radical newspapers and journals of turn-of-the-century Paris. He earned a steady income, for instance, as chief illustrator for La Revue blanche, which carried articles and reviews by leading lights such as Marcel Proust, Alfred Jarry and Erik Satie. You can see the influence of Japanese prints in the flattened spaces, simplified shapes and unusual viewpoints that give a comic slant to scenes of Parisian life. A sudden downpour sends people scurrying for cover, hats are blown off by gusts of wind and a street is filled Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. Anne Boleyn is number two on the list, so anyone who can remember even that much Tudor history can guess that Donizetti’s Anna Bolena is not going to end well. The overture has hardly ended before we’re told that Anne’s star is falling, and it’s not exactly a spoiler to reveal that our social climbing heroine is destined (in the words of a better librettist than Donizetti’s collaborator Felice Romani) for a short sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block. We already know where we’re going. The success of the opera Read more ...
David Nice
Suppose you're seeing Musorgsky's selective historical opera for the first time in Richard Jones's production, without any prior knowledge of the action. That child's spinning-top on the dropcloth: why? Then the curtain rises and we see Bryn Terfel's troubled Boris Godunov seated in near-darkness, while a figure with an outsized head plays with a real top in the upper room before being swiftly despatched by three assassins. The playback repetitions are the thing to catch the conscience of the tsar-king. Later, chronicler-monk Pimen gives us the back-story about the murder of the heir-apparent Read more ...