19th century
alexandra.coghlan
If ever there was a Prom to put London’s classical crowd in their place, to remind us (as those outside the capital so frequently and justifiably do) that the city isn’t the be-all and end-all of concert-going, then this was it. It featured three major debuts – all of them overdue, two of them musical hand-me-downs from Birmingham. The CBSO’s much-anticipated new music director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla made not only her Proms but also her London debut, bringing with her Hans Abrahamsen’s RPS and Grawemeyer Award-winning song-cycle let me tell you, a London premiere lagging almost three years Read more ...
David Nice
More than just a great and serious pianist, Leif Ove Andsnes is a Mensch. His special gift in recent years has been to bring young musicians just establishing their careers together with star players like himself in beautiful and/or interesting places. I feel privileged to have heard him and his juniors in a programme of rare Sibelius melodramas in Bergen, Kurtág and Liszt in the main room of Grieg's humble home at Troldhaugen, and two shared recitals linked to the revelatory exhibition of little-known Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Now Andsnes has just curated a Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
H Division has a new home in Whitechapel that basks in the white heat of the technological revolution. The police station not only has a telephone but a “microreader” that allows the user to check thousands of miniaturised card indexes. Alas, a wry smile is all the viewer is likely to get from this opening episode of the fourth season. Nothing happens until the last ten minutes.When it was originally broadcast on Amazon Prime, Ripper Street 4 began with a two-hour episode. Terrestrial viewers on BBC Two have to make do with 60 minutes of scene-setting, throat-clearing and explanation. Three Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Concert halls, as Gregg Wallace might observe if he ever went to one, don’t come much bigger than the Royal Albert Hall, nor violin concertos than the Tchaikovsky. Faced with this awesome combination, the temptation for a soloist is to play up to the occasion. Volume gets louder, vibrato faster, emotions are amped. But not for Pekka Kuusisto. This Finnish violinist has always gone his own way, as likely to be found playing jazz, electronica or folk music as a concerto, and his Tchaikovsky last night was no different.From the long opening melody to the Finale’s boot-stamping dance of a theme, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If Ashley Pharoah's superior chiller began with its 19th century protagonist, Nathan Appleby, trying to apply science and reason to seemingly irrational events, by the end of this sixth and final episode he had strayed way beyond the outer limits. Not only had the murky past of the Somerset village of Shepzoy reared up in numerous terrifying manifestations, but Nathan and his wife Charlotte were also receiving vivid and disturbing flashes into the future.To a soundtrack of eerie old English balladry, we've already had a parade of demonic possession, hauntings and murder. Last week, Shepzoy Read more ...
Richard Bratby
By the end of Act One of The Yeomen of the Guard there's been a jailbreak, a clandestine marriage, a swapped identity and a cancelled beheading. The chorus sings, halberds are brandished, and a jester jests. Even by Gilbert and Sullivan standards, it’s one heck of a tangle. And then, in John Savournin’s touring production, the stage clears and, true to Gilbert’s directions, Elsie faints in Fairfax’s arms while silhouetted behind them, masked and motionless, stands the grim figure of the executioner. At which point you start to realise that the only way Gilbert’s going to be able to solve his Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
"If you know anything about dance," I was told last night by an aged balletomane at the Royal Opera House, "you know that Russian ballet companies are the best." If this is true then the Bolshoi Ballet, biggest of the Russian companies, in Swan Lake, that most quintessential of ballets, must be awe-inspiring.In many ways, it is, and deliberately so. Yuri Grigorovich's production may be less bombastic than his Sleeping Beauty, but it's still heavy on grandeur and light on naturalism. Instead of a forest or pastoral setting for Act I, Grigorovich presents a dignified, ruthlessly scripted and Read more ...
David Nice
Locations count for little in most of Shakespeare's comedies. Only a literal-minded director would, for instance, insist on Messina, Sicily as the setting for Much Ado About Nothing. In Béatrice et Bénédict, on the other hand, Berlioz injects his very odd Bardolatry with lashings of the southern Italian light and atmosphere he loved so much. So turning it all grey as Laurent Pelly does and putting everyone into boxes except the loving enemies who think outside them - get it? - goes against the grain. But then colour is leached away from just about everything in this far from vintage Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Programming a concert is a tricky business. Programming an entire Proms season almost unthinkably difficult. But even allowing for the odd evening of leftovers, those artists, anniversaries and concertos that just can’t be fitted in anywhere else, last night’s Prom 15 was a muddle.A first half of Tchaikovsky and Anthony Payne might look reasonable on paper, but in practice two nature-driven, symphonic tone-poems for chorus and orchestra – variations on a theme – offered too little contrast and no discernable emotional or narrative arc, leaving us much where we began, and not in a Four Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Graeme Murphy's 2002 Swan Lake for Australian Ballet stitches together plot elements from Swan Lake, Giselle and Lucia di Lammermoor, among other things. No bad thing, that; such mash-ups can work well (see Moulin Rouge), and Matthew Bourne proved way back in 1995 that Swan Lake's story can be totally reconfigured and still work gloriously (we do not talk about the 2011 film Black Swan). But last night's peformance at the Coliseum places Murphy's work for me in the category of might-have-been; lacking either Bourne's mastery of storytelling or Moulin Rouge's campy extravagance, his Swan Lake Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Edward Gardner gives the downbeat, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra bursts into Verdi’s great opening guffaw. Enter stage left Graham Clark, as Dr Caius. Enter stage right Ambrogio Maestri, as Falstaff. And before a note has been sung, the audience is laughing. I know that in the post-Dumpygate era we’re not supposed to discuss a singer’s physical appearance. It’s just that everything about Maestri – his stature, his gait, his rolling eyes, his genial manner and his big rubbery smile – suggests that he was born to play the Fat Knight. He simply is Falstaff.That being so, he’s not Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This emotive, even emotional half-hour programme focussed on a famous children’s book, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, and its author, one of those totally astonishing Victorian polymaths, the Reverend Charles Kingsley (1819-1875). It was a surprising example of the ways in which words can change the world.With immaculate side whiskers and upright appearance, Kingsley, a devoted pater familias, could have seemed simply a confident and conventional Victorian. In fact he was a fascinating proponent of evolution, a Christian socialist, a controversialist, deeply disturbed by Read more ...