19th century
Marina Vaizey
Jules Dalou, Edouard Lantéri, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Charles-François Daubigny, Alphonse Legros, Giuseppe de Nittis? Perhaps not household-name Impressionists, but the subtitle of Tate Britain's exhibition, French Artists in Exile 1870-1904, makes things clearer: this is really an examination of cross-channel conversations occasioned by the drastic military and political crisis in France in 1870-1871 – the Franco-Prussian war, followed by the Commune.Not only did some 230,000 or more combatants and civilians die, but many a familiar landmark was pulverised as central Paris was profoundly Read more ...
Maria Milstein
I remember very well the first time I read Swann’s Way, the first part of Marcel Proust’s monumental masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu). I was struck not only by the depth and beauty of the novel, but also the crucial role that music played in the narrative. For those who haven’t read the novel, here is a brief summary of the part that particularly fascinated me, "Swann’s Love".Swann, one of the main characters in the novel, is a rich young man living in Paris who is connected with the highest Parisian aristocracy. At a musical soirée one evening he hears a Read more ...
David Nice
You won't have seen much of magisterial Russian pianist Dmitri Alexeev recently, unless you happen to be a student at the Royal College of Music, where he is Professor of Advanced Piano Studies (they were out in force last night, cheering enough to elicit five encores). His guest appearances at various commemorative concerts, chiefly his towering interpretation of Prokofiev's Sixth Sonata, remain carved in the mind, but this is the first time I've heard him give a full recital. Predictably, although he celebrated his 70th birthday in August, there was no loss of the colossal and well-weighted Read more ...
David Nice
Such introspective subtlety might be mistaken for reticence. But from the rare instances when the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes lets rip - and they're never forced - you know he's wielding his palette with both skill and intuition, waiting for the big moment to make its proper mark. Flyaway passages in Chopin which in other hands bubble like pure champagne flow like pure spring water; the source is everything. And such is the concentration that the wider spaces of the Royal Festival Hall melted away and a sizeable audience was drawn, intensely silent, into the spell.The only aspects of Read more ...
The Lady from the Sea, Donmar Warehouse review - Nikki Amuka-Bird luminous in a sympathetic ensemble
David Nice
What a profoundly beautiful play is Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. It stands in relation to the earlier, relatively confined A Doll’s House, Ghosts and Rosmersholm as Shakespeare's late romances do to the more claustrophobic tragedies. And with what apparent ease, art concealing art, do director Kwame Kwei-Armah, the Young Vic’s next Artistic Director, and the diamantine new performing version by Elinor Cook transport us in the Donmar Warehouse from a Norwegian fjord in the 1880s to the Caribbean of the 1950s.Nothing is lost of the play's essence, the race issue only brushed in with the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The awful mother, the celebrity-obsessed teenager, the mediocre old writer who wants some young sex in his life – there are motifs in Chekhov’s The Seagull that fly merrily from one century to another, and Simon Stephens and Sean Holmes’ new modern-dress update for the Lyric, starring Lesley Sharp, is fresh and accomplished, even if the classic bird's flight is rather lopsided. The comic wing turns out to flap more strongly than its tragic one, but it's good the Lyric’s notably young audience can think of a 120-year-old play as a play for today.The vision borrows something from reality Read more ...
David Nice
"Mitsuko Uchida plays Mozart" might have been the marketing tag to sell out this first concert in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's 2017-18 season (despite student and free under-18s take-up, the Usher Hall still wasn't full). "Dvořák Symphony No. 8" was in fact the headline, marking the launch of Robin Ticciati's last series as the SCO's hugely successful Principal Conductor. As it turned out, Berlioz's early Overture Les Francs-Juges offered the real shake-up of the evening, the shock of the new as good as a contemporary work – better than most instances – with an unusual complement for Read more ...
graham.rickson
Guy Johnston: Tecchler’s Cello - From Cambridge to Rome (King’s College Cambridge)Acquiring a second-hand instrument always leads one to wonder what sort of a life it led before. Did said instrument enjoy a flourishing professional career, or was it abandoned in an attic for decades? Cherished by a master or mistreated by a bumbling amateur? Guy Johnston’s enjoyable anthology celebrates his recent acquisition of a 300-year-old cello made by one David Tecchler. He was a Bavarian-born craftsman who pitched up in Rome towards the end of the 17th century, one of his workshops being situated Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Apparently it was Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s idea to invite Jörg Widmann to be the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Artist in Residence this season – indeed, according to backstage rumours she made the phone call herself. If that’s true, it’s a hugely encouraging bit of intelligence. Widmann’s the perfect choice of artist to surf the energy that Gražinytė-Tyla is currently generating in Birmingham. He’s a charismatic soloist, and a composer of music with real potential audience appeal: flamboyant, vivid, grounded in (but never inhibited by) tradition, and madly in love with the sound Read more ...
graham.rickson
Pairing Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana with Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury makes for a pleasingly schizoid evening in the latest of Opera North's The Little Greats series. Mascagni’s crashing final chords precede a longish interval, and when you re-enter the auditorium it’s not just the set that’s changed, but much of the audience. Karolina Sofulak’s Mascagni production is a sombre triumph, relocating the action from Sicily to a similarly repressed 1980s Poland.Instead of Mediterranean sunshine we get harsh strip lighting and peeling wallpaper: Lucia’s village shop is a distinctly bare Read more ...
Robert Beale
Juanjo Mena memorably began his tenure as chief conductor at the BBC Philharmonic with a Mahler symphony (the Second), and chose to enter his seventh and last season with them at the Bridgewater Hall with the Third. It was a testimonial to an era at the end of which he leaves with the orchestra in at least as good shape as he found them, and in some ways better still. His time has included wide-ranging repertoire, and apart from a Fifth at the Proms, I believe this was the only other Mahler symphony performance he’s directed since that September day in 2011. But it’s been worth waiting for, Read more ...
Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell Collection review - guilty pleasures at the National Gallery
Florence Hallett
If only a modest fuss is being made about the rare and prestigious loan currently residing in Trafalgar Square, it could be that the National Gallery is keen to forget the role of its former director, Dr Nicholas Penny, in a row about art transportation that centred on the very collection to which these objects belong. Of the 13 Degas pastels that form the core of this small but wondrous exhibition, most have never been seen outside Glasgow, where they are among the highlights of the magnificent art collection bequeathed to the city in 1944 by the shipping magnate Sir William Burrell.In an Read more ...