19th century
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 ...
Robert Beale
The first two of the three in-house opera productions in this year’s Buxton Festival could be bracketed under a slogan of "love stories, Jim – but not quite as we know them". Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi is, of course, Romeo and Juliet … sort of. She comes round in time to sing a duet with Romeo, who is himself a mezzo en travesti, so it’s not Shakespeare. More of that later. Leonore , on the other hand, is very much Beethoven: in fact 20 minutes more Beethoven than you get in Fidelio, the version the composer created nine years after his original three-acter, and which we know better Read more ...
David Nice
That often-repeated truism about Verdi's craziest melodrama, that it needs four of the world's greatest voices, makes no mention of acting ability. Given the top-notch international approach to this kind of opera, impressively fielded by what's called "Cast A" here, German director David Bösch was right to build a dark, consistent visual world around mostly stand-and-deliver performances rather than demand too much of his stars. Conductor Gianandrea Noseda's febrile, focused musicality helps Bösch and his team deliver the essence of this tricky masterpiece.Noseda's is the most impressive Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Recently the television historian Bettany Hughes, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, energetic, enthusiastic and rather astonished, has tramped across the continents on our behalf, making a clutch of hour-long documentary introductions to the individuals with the most profound influence on human society. For this third and final film (made in association with the Religion and Ethics department of the Open University), she had as her quarry the medical man whose insights, however intuitive rather than scientific in the modern sense, formed and still form our view of ourselves.Yes, it was he: Sigmund Read more ...
David Nice
Enter the human - and superhuman demands for at least four of the singers - in the second, towering instalment of Wagner's Ring cycle. It says so much for Opera North's achievement so far that no one fell in any way short of the sometimes insane vocal demands. There were only varying degrees of characterisation and commitment, none of them less than fine.Bad luck, perhaps, that the lower, though not exactly low, temperatures came in the first act as we meet the hero Wotan has fathered as free agent, or so he thinks, and the heroine sister whose incestuous love is a case, as the chief god puts Read more ...