19th century
Florence Hallett
Munch’s The Scream is as piercing as it has ever been, and its silence does nothing to lessen its viscerally devastating effect. It was painted in 1893, but it was a lithograph produced two years later – now the star of the biggest UK exhibition of Munch’s prints for a generation – that would make it famous. Munch's now rare black and white lithograph includes an inscription, which translated from the German reads: “I felt a large scream pass through nature”. Perhaps by spelling out the true subject of The Scream it gilds the lily, but in conveying the agony of empathy it offers an Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Soon after his death, Van Gogh’s reputation as a tragic genius was secured. Little has changed in the meantime, and he has continued to be understood as fatally unbalanced, ruled by instinct not intellect. Van Gogh’s characterisation of himself as a blue-collar artist-worker has only compounded this, so that the real revelation of Tate Britain’s new show is not Van Gogh’s affection for this country, or the influence he would himself have on British art, but the sophistication of his inner life, which acquired breadth and depth through his lifelong interest in British art and literature.Van Read more ...
David Nice
When "Maestro" Riccardo Muti left the Royal Opera's previous production of Verdi's fate-laden epic, disgusted by minor changes to fit the scenery on the Covent Garden stage, no-one was sorry when Antonio Pappano, the true master of the house then only two years into his glorious reign, took over. He's now unsurpassable in the pace and colouring of the great Verdi and Puccini scores. Signs from his previous collaborations with once radical director Christof Loy and the glorious cast assembled were that this time round Forza would be a total triumph. In the end, several mountains gave birth to Read more ...
David Nice
Vibrant rustic dancing to conclude the first half, a heavenly barcarolle to cast a spell of silence at the end of the second: Bernard Haitink's 90th birthday celebrations of middle-European mastery wrought yet more magic in Dvořák and Mahler after his first concert of Mozart and Bruckner. He seemed perhaps a little more frail, less spiritually concentrated this time; but that wasn't going to get in the way of the phenomenal stick technique nor of the London Symphony Orchestra sounding, once again, more like its counterparts in Amsterdam, Berlin and Vienna than ever before.It's possible that Read more ...
David Nice
Asked to choose five or ten minutes of favourite Berlioz on the 150th anniversary of his death (yesterday), surely few would select anything from his giant Requiem (Grande Messe des Morts). This is a work to shock and awe, not to be loved - music for a state funeral given a metaphysical dimension by the composer's hallmark extremes in original scoring. It cries out for an ecclesiastical edifice to resonate with the masses and provide the voids, but St Paul's Cathedral has always been one step too far: glorious to be in, not the place for a true musical experience. All things considered, John Read more ...
David Nice
Would Verdi and Puccini have composed more non-operatic music, had they thrived in a musical culture different to Italy's? Hard to say. What we do know is that they both became absolute masters of orchestration – Puccini rather quicker than Verdi, living as he did in an entirely post-Wagnerian era. Verdi left us one great mass, the Requiem, Puccini a youthful and honest expression of the liturgy as well as other early pieces he mined for Manon Lescaut and La bohème. It made a pretty, occasionally stirring climax to an evening which could have done with an absolute masterpiece.One such, even Read more ...
Robert Beale
The BBC Philharmonic and its chief guest conductor John Storgårds introduced their Manchester audience to two new things – possibly three – in this concert. One was a world premiere, and you can’t get much newer than that. The other big item was a symphony that’s already nearly 40 years old, yet having only its third performance in Britain.The first piece was Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale, which is hardly new, but still rarely heard. It dates from soon after the "Spring" Symphony, though the finale was re-written some time later, and is in reality a symphony without a slow movement Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time is an intoxicating cinematic collage-compilation that embraces social history – in microcosm, via its story of the titular Canadian mining town – as well as the history of film itself. But it goes further, too, to achieve something that's close to a meditation on history itself, on time, on the organic process of development and decay. In the 21-minute interview that is the main extra on this Second Run release, Morrison calls it a “window into a time that’s gone”, his phrase capturing nicely the film’s treatment of the four decades or so of North Read more ...
David Nice
It seems an almost indecent luxury to have heard two top mezzos in just over a week with so much to express, backed up by the perfect technique and instrument with which to do so. Georgian Anita Rachvelishvili with Pappano and the Royal Opera Orchestra the Friday before last only had to hold the spell through a Rachmaninov sequence in the middle of an all-Russian concert. For her long sold-out Wigmore Hall recital, Latvian Elīna Garanča chose a daunting sequence of song series by Schumann, Wagner and Mahler, ending the official programme with other-worldly poise in what sounded exactly as it Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The power of seeing was the bedrock of John Ruskin’s philosophy. In the bicentenary of his birth, a revelatory exhibition at Two Temple Place in London opens out the idea and makes it manifest through both his own work and the treasures of his collection.Born in 1819, Ruskin was one of the Victorian era's great polymaths. Almost 200 objects are displayed across two floors of a neo-Gothic mansion, a grand domestic setting in keeping with Ruskin’s own childhood environment. Here a Burne-Jones design for stained glass, there a Dürer etching, Victorian copies of Verrocchio and Tintoretto, the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Berlioz called it a "concert opera". His telling of the Faust story is in scenes and highly theatrical, but a bit of a challenge to put on in the theatre, with its marching armies, floating sylphs, dancing will-o’-the-wisps and galloping horses. It seems he expected it to be a kind of giant cantata, and that’s the way the Hallé and Sir Mark Elder perform it. But it’s still operatic in concept, and that very theatricality demands much of its chorus as well as its soloists – the assembled choir has to represent "peasants, penitents, drinkers, gnomes, sylphs, soldiers, students, will-o’-the- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It took the best part of six episodes, but we got there in the end: the reason David Oyelowo accepted the confusingly underwritten part of Inspector Javert in BBC One’s adaptation of Les Misérables was finally revealed. His pursuit of an ex-convict for the theft of a coin stretched across hours and years, and in the process became not so much a single-minded obsession as a kind of exoskeleton that held the character in place. The motive which guided him towards this destination was, alas and bafflingly, never explored.Before the big moment came, Javert spent some of the last two episodes Read more ...