19th century
Adam Sweeting
DW Griffiths's 1915 silent epic, The Birth of a Nation, became notorious for its pejorative portrayal of black people and its heroic vision of the Ku Klux Klan. For his directorial debut, Nate Parker has appropriated Griffiths's title and whipped it into a molten onslaught against America's history of slavery and racial prejudice.Arriving in an America outraged – yet again – by police violence and witnessing the rise of Black Lives Matter, Parker's The Birth of a Nation was uncannily timely, and it prompted a studio bidding war when it premiered at Sundance in January this year. It's a Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The chances are, you’ve only ever seen Flaming June in reproduction: since 1963 it has resided in the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, an out-of-the-way location that reflects the universal disdain for Victorian art in the post-war period. When the painting disappeared and then resurfaced in a house on Battersea Rise it was rejected by every British museum imaginable, eventually being bought by the enterprising curator Luis A Ferré, to form part of what is now recognised as a world-class collection of Victorian art.Returned to the studio at Leighton’s fabulous "House Beautiful" for the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Thank God for Akram Khan, English National Ballet, and Tamara Rojo. Their new Giselle, which finally arrived at Sadler's Wells this week after its Salford premiere in September, is a work of intelligence, power, beauty, and - most gratifying of all in this age of lies, damned lies and politics - stunning integrity. This is a ballet about issues that matter, made by people who know what they're doing.Giselle, thematically much the richest of the 19th-century ballets, is a strong choice for a remake, with a tight two-act structure on which to hang the exploration of all sorts of interesting Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Is there anything on a concert programme more guaranteed to make the heart lift – or to prove that a conductor has their musical priorities straight – than a Haydn symphony? If you're tired of Haydn, you're tired of life: there’s no music more joyous, more inventive or more resistant to vanity. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla chose his Symphony No 6 of 1761, called Le Matin for its opening sunrise and the freshness of its ideas, and it was a delight.The six wind players stood up to play, and the CBSO strings were slimmed down a little, but not a lot. There was no serious attempt here to fake a period Read more ...
EV Crowe
It’s a strange time to be alive. Has it always felt like this? When else was there a time when so much felt to be at stake, and the ground moved beneath our feet with the continuous emergence of technologies that affect our everyday lives and our very being, where we know little of our interior selves and yet publish so much about our lives to strangers? We are the chosen generation, we are the people who will be witness to the most radical change in society the world has ever seen! We are fated and also incredibly special! I am special, I must be! And then I remember it has been like this Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
James Ensor? Who he? A marvellous Anglo-Belgian artist (1860-1949) little known outside Belgium, whose masterpiece, The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, 1888, is a trophy painting at the Getty, California. It is present here in his own print version, its crowd scene mixing reality and fantasy typical of his wild imagination and extraordinary technical skill. The overwhelming majority of his paintings, drawings and prints are in private and public collections in Belgium, a country the thought of which makes many people succumb to ennui, despite a rich artistic heritage. Magritte – Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This tragicomic romp is loosely based on a bizarre footnote in Spanish history. The Italian Duke Amadeo was offered the throne after the previous occupant’s violent overthrow. But when the kingmaker who invited him was assassinated just before his 1870 coronation, the new monarch went from guest of honour to gatecrasher at a convoluted constitutional party, where the last thing anyone wanted him to do was rule.As Amadeo, Alex Brendemühl is quietly dignified, looks smoulderingly good in uniform, and yearns to bring enlightened reform to a sclerotic, corrupt nation. Humiliations are heaped on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having served her time as dutiful, self-effacing Anna Bates in Downton Abbey, here's Joanne Froggatt grasping with both hands the role of Mary Ann Cotton, "Britain's first female serial killer". No more wearing herself out desperately trying to save Mr Bates from the gallows. This time she's turning the tables, and making sure useless men aren't going to hold her back any longer. After a short prologue in which our anti-heroine was preparing to meet her maker, we joined her as she returned to her mother and stepfather's pub in Seaham, County Durham in 1857. She had eloped to Cornwall Read more ...
David Nice
It felt oddly disrespectful showing up in time for Schumann's wake on the fifteenth and final day of this year's Oxford Lieder Festival. Having started with the early piano music and many of the chamber works before moving on to Schumann's annus mirabilis of song, 1840, with frequent leaps backwards to influences and forwards to the influenced, pianist Sholto Kynoch’s labour of love reached the troubled final years dogged by whatever that insanity for which Schumann was institutionalised might have been – bipolarity, syphilis, poisoning for the mercury used in its treatment. Fortunately the Read more ...
David Nice
What a relief to find Semyon Bychkov back on romantic terra firma after his slow-motion Mozart at the Royal Opera (performances speeded up somewhat, I'm told, after a sticky first night). On his own, dark-earth terms, there's no-one to touch him for nuanced phrasing, strength of purpose and the devoted responsiveness he wins from the BBC Symphony Orchestra - foot-stamping its approval at the end, a rarity - in Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. This week's two concerts in his "Beloved Friend" Tchaikovsky series both hit the heights and plumbed the depths, if not always entirely where expected.The Read more ...
David Nice
It's harder for young professional musicians to be judged in standard repertoire – the very greatest music, in short – than to make their mark tackling the unknown in a wacky venue. High levels of energy and technical skill married to interpretations with something to say are what it takes, and what we got from the London Firebird Orchestra last night.They were blessed in their choice from three "inner circle" conductors, Jonathan Bloxham, newly appointed Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla's assistant at the City of Birmingham Orchestra, with concerts of his own to come there. Blessed, too, that as a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One down, eight childbirths to go. The young Queen Victoria was delivered of her first child at the climax of this moreish opening series, and the bells of Windsor tolled for joy. ITV, debutant scriptwriter Daisy Goodwin and biographical consultant AN Wilson will be feeling parental pride that between them they have given birth to a healthy 10-pound whopper that looks very much like the natural heir to Downton.Victoria took its cue from dynastic romance to tell the story of a proto-feminist teen thrust into the limelight like a 19th-century pop starlet forced to grow up on the job. The story Read more ...