19th century
Adam Sweeting
There has always been an air of incipient doom hovering over Ripper Street, since the show is more of a laboratory of lost souls than a mere detective drama. Now, as it embarks on its fifth and final season, there’s every reason to suppose that the going will get seriously apocalyptic, not least because the unspeakably evil DI Jedediah Shine has been brought in to helm the Leman Street police station in Whitechapel.Studious viewers will recall that Shine, the godfather of all bent coppers, was not only the murderer of the Elephant Man but also the arch enemy of Matthew Macfadyen’s Edmund Reid Read more ...
David Nice
Tears were likely to flow freely on this most beautiful and terrible of June evenings, especially given a programme – dedicated by Vladimir Ashkenazy to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire – already prone to the elegiac. It could hardly be otherwise with the music of Elgar and Sibelius, two Europeans with a penchant for introspection whose works Ashkenazy knows well. What ended up nearly breaking us, though, was an encore – none I've heard has ever been more astonishing – by that ever unpredictable violinist Pekka Kuusisto.He told us he'd planned to play a "jolly Read more ...
aleks.sierz
History is a tricky harlot. She is bought and sold, fought for and thrown over, seduced and betrayed – and always at the mercy of the winners. In a general election week, it is hard to deny that still now we are the progeny of the possessive individualism of previous centuries. This idea, that we are the children of dispossession, is at the heart of DC Moore’s epic new play which occupies the main Olivier stage of the National Theatre with a large cast led by the ever-pugnacious Anne-Marie Duff.It is England, 1809. In the countryside, a rapacious Lord is hell bent on enclosing the common Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Just as the 200th anniversary is about to be celebrated of the great genius of 19th-century classical ballets, Marius Petipa, the creator of The Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, La Bayadère, half of Swan Lake, and many other masterpieces, his oeuvre's most remarkable reconstructor has died suddenly, aged only 55. Sergei Vikharev was the passionate pioneer of a brave new movement to install period sensibilities in an artform that had long become the plaything of its performers and coaches rather than its creators, and his death is devastating timing for ballet as well as for his family and Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Standing inside the Gemeentemuseum’s life-size reconstruction of Mondrian’s Paris studio, the painter’s reputation as an austere recluse seems well-deserved. Returning from Holland to France after the First World War, he lived and worked in what seem like impossibly cramped conditions, a narrow and unforgiving-looking bed the only comfort in a room dedicated to the rigorously geometric compositions for which he had become famous. Walls, furniture and even books were painted white, with selected features like the stove and an ashtray left black, and squares of primary colour pinned here and Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The CBSO is justifiably proud of its association with Benjamin Britten. There’s rather less proof that he reciprocated, dismissing the orchestra as "second-rate" after it premiered his War Requiem in 1962. Throughout the 1950s, he’d repeatedly promised to write an orchestral work for Birmingham, only to renege on the deal after the orchestra’s then chief conductor Rudolf Schwarz moved on to the BBC in 1957. What the CBSO did get from Britten, in September 1954, was the world premiere of an unwieldy Symphonic Suite from what's generally agreed to be one of his patchier operas, the 1953 Read more ...
Florence Hallett
With its striking design, characteristically restricted palette and fluent use of line, Hokusai’s The Great Wave, 1831, is one of the world’s most recognisable images, encapsulating western ideas about Japanese art. First seen outside Japan in the 1880s, Van Gogh was one of the first Europeans to really engage with the print, and he was one of a number of 19th-century artists who tried to incorporate aspects of Japanese style into their work.For all that, The Great Wave is the result of Hokusai’s longstanding interest in European art, its use of perspective and the pigment Prussian Blue Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Make no mistake about it, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright to watch. London receives its first opportunity to appraise his vibrant, quizzical talent with this production of An Octoroon, for which he received an OBIE in 2014 (jointly with his second Off-Broadway work of the same year, Appropriate). His follow-on play Gloria, opening at the Hampstead Theatre in June, was a finalist in the Pulitzer drama category in 2016.An Octoroon is a cracking piece of writing. Jacobs-Jenkins has taken on that defining American subject, slavery, and deconstructed it via the prism of an 1859 melodrama by Read more ...
David Nice
It's funny how Parisians grumble about any major new venue which lies outside their chic central stamping ground. First they moan about having to trundle out to the Philharmonie concert hall in the Cité de la Musique, and now they look as if they'll need some persuading to support major music-making in Les Hauts-de-Seine, an administrative département which generously supports its culture. In fact the Seine Musicale on the Île Seguin, part of a projected cultural hub which was the brainchild of Jean Nouvel, is only an efficient 20 minutes' metro journey from just about anywhere in the centre Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Sure, there are things not to like about Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling. Confusing plot. Plethora of characters. Unsympathetic (anti-)hero. Borderline melodramatic choreography. Tense, scary dénouement. But to be at the Royal Opera House last night was to be convinced that Mayerling's merits far outweigh its demerits. A piece which can provoke the whole Royal Ballet company, dancers and musicians alike, to make such focused, sincere theatrical magic as we witnessed last night is a repertoire jewel, and seeing it done by its home company is an experience every ballet fan should have at least Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Scottish play’s traces are faint in this bloody, steamy tale of feminist psychosis. Based on Nikolai Leskov’s Dostoevsky-commissioned novel Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, its 1865 setting is transferred from Tsarist Russia to Northumberland. Little of the isolated, feudal oppression is lost in translation, as teenage Katherine (Florence Pugh) finds herself chattel to the sullen, impotent, older Alexander (Paul Hilton), till lust for a servant sparks her to life, and consumes everything around.Though Katherine is lady of the manor, this is a tale of gilt-edged slave days from a female Read more ...
David Nice
Traditional musical formats rarely suit the individual talent, but the highly-motivated player always finds a way. I first got to talk to Alec Frank-Gemmill in the very sociable surroundings of the Pärnu Festival in Estonia, a gathering most musicians describe as the highlight of their year, with the phenomenal Estonian Festival Orchestra brought together by Paavo Järvi as its core. Frank-Gemmill's secure base is the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, another army of unusual generals. His solo engagements take him to extraordinary places, and thanks to the long-term support of the Borletti-Buitoni Read more ...