19th century
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 ...
David Nice
Not your usual blockbuster for Holy Week, this. In other words, neither of the Bach Passions but a Requiem, and not – these days, at any rate – one of the more often-performed ones (it's not among the 79 works listed in The BBC Proms Guide to Great Choral Works). Dvořák's laments and optimisms may not soar as consistently as Verdi's, but the (late) style is invariably the man here, and the pay-off for a broken back in the early stages is a bigger healing later on and a final cathartic lament. Certainly no conductor could be more devoted to Dvořák's steady wonders than the great Jiří Read more ...
Richard Bratby
How well do you know your bad Victorian poetry? “When through the purple corridors the screaming scarlet Ibis flew/In terror, and a horrid dew dripped from the moaning Mandragores.” Go on, guess the author. Or how about this? “What time the poet hath hymned/The writhing maid, lithe-limbed,/Quivering on amaranthine asphodel". Got it yet? The first is Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, from 1881. The second, WS Gilbert’s libretto for Patience – written in the same year, and skewering Wilde with gleeful relish and lethal precision.If Liam Steel’s new production of Patience for English Touring Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Is there something about the recessive life of Emily Dickinson that defies dramatisation? I'm beginning to think so after A Quiet Passion. The Terence Davies film may attempt a more authentic take on the unrelievedly bleak, and also great, 19th-century American poet than the stage vehicle about her, The Belle of Amherst, now long past its sell-by date. But whether serving a film biography or a solo theatre venture, Dickinson seems somehow to elude aesthetic capture, or maybe it's just that she turns out to be as oblique as the landscape of her most enduring poems.On the face of it, Dickinson Read more ...
David Nice
No-one has ever matched costume drama to psychological depth quite like Luchino Visconti. Much of it has to do with what Henry James termed a "divided consciousness": as a nobleman who became a communist in World War Two and was relatively open about his homosexuality, Visconti was able to depict the warped opulence surrounding Ludwig II of Bavaria with a meticulous eye for detail and composition, while analysing the causes of his dramatic decline as a despised outsider (and no, Ludwig was not mad; Visconti was among the first to say so).There's little of the hysteria and excessive Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The social permutations of love are beguilingly explored in the 90-minute stage traffic of Marivaux’s The Lottery of Love, with Paul Miller’s production at the Orange Tree Theatre making the most of the venue’s unencumbered in-the-round space to dance the action along at a brisk pace. The only adornment in Simon Daw’s design is an elaborate chandelier, bedecked with candles and hanging roses, but the sheer élan of the piece more than occupies the stage in itself.The theatre's Richmond location couldn’t be better either, the Georgian villas around its Green and along the Thames just the kind Read more ...