19th century
Robert Beale
The Victorians liked their oratorios long and loud (most of the time), and when Dvořák wrote St Ludmila for the Leeds Festival of 1886 he got the style exactly right. Sir Mark Elder brought his and the Hallé’s celebration of Dvořák to a thunderous close with a performance which deftly abbreviated the score and also unveiled a new English version derived from a working translation of the Czech text by David Pountney.The story is about the conversion of the Bohemian Princess Ludmila to Christianity and her role in the subsequent conversion of Prince Bořivoj and, naturally, the whole nation. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A celebration of the power of words and music (leaving aside, briefly, that more troubling business about the Fatherland), Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a natural opener for the summer opera season. Art triumphs over all, but in David McVicar’s production it’s a triumph of peculiarly human complication – a victory that leaves a hero in tears, that crowns some of opera’s most reactionary stick-in-the-muds with laurels, and leaves us asking: did Eva really pick the right man?It has been well over a year since Richard Jones’s Mastersingers came to English National Opera, but it’s Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Today we amuse ourselves with Facebook clips of talking cats, but in the 1850s they had stereographs, pairs of identical photographs that, viewed through special lenses, become suddenly and gloriously three-dimensional. Vistas open up as if by magic, the illusion of space all the more beguiling for its transience. The act of looking through a special pair of glasses is a little bit like peeping behind a curtain, the intimacy of the encounter adding a slightly voyeuristic frisson to all manner of subject matter from landscapes to mock-ups of popular paintings. Stereoscopic photographs have a Read more ...
David Nice
You rarely see a full production of Shakespeare's dream play so magical it brings tears to the eyes. But then you don't often get 42 players and 14 voices joining the cast to adorn the text with Mendelssohn's bewitching incidental music, plus the Overture composed 16 years earlier – certainly the most perfect masterpiece ever written by a 17-year-old. Add a fluent ensemble of actors, a sense of high style in costume design and, above a simple stage with audience on three sides and the orchestra on the fourth, a hammerbeam oak forest in the very hall where Twelfth Night had its first known Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It can be given to few commercial galleries to have sustained a relationship with the same artist for over 130 years, but such is the link between The Fine Art Society and James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903).The FAS was founded in 1876, and is still in its purpose-built original home in New Bond Street. The frontage was designed by EW Godwin, who also designed Whistler’s White House in Chelsea. It has many firsts to its credit, including commissioning Whistler to produce his superbly atmospheric etchings of Venice, which were published by the gallery in 1880. In 1883 Whistler’s monographic Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There aren’t many opera choruses I’d want to hear singing Brahms’ Requiem, and still fewer I’d rush to hear. But the Olivier Award-winning ENO chorus is a different beast altogether – as responsive and flexible of tone as it is skilled with an all-out musical punch – and more than capable of finding the interiority as well as the intensity in this choral classic.Singing the English translation in the composer’s own arrangement for chorus, soloists and piano-duet, the ENO choristers showed their full dramatic range in a performance that all but blew the doors off St George’s Hanover Square, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Lucia di Lammermoor is an opera in which men spend an awful lot of time talking about women, and very little actually talking to them. (Which, if nothing else, ensures a rather more dramatic denouement than a frank conversation about everyone’s hopes and dreams would produce.) Enter director Katie Mitchell and her “strong feminist agenda”, determined to give Donizetti’s women back their voices, and with them the agency every plot twist in the opera conspires to deny. If the result is by no means a classic production, neither is it the all-out assault on tradition and decency the Royal Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In London, seeing the same ballet company do three different pieces in three different theatres over four nights would be some kind of festival. In Berlin, it's just business as usual – albeit quite a busy week! – for the hard-working Staatsballett. Wednesday night saw the opening of a new run of John Cranko's Romeo and Juliet, with Polina Semionova as Juliet, at the Deutsche Oper, Thursday a performance of Artistic Director Nacho Duato's Multiplicity: Forms of Silence and Emptiness at the Komische Oper, while last night the Schiller Theater was packed out for Giselle with the Stuttgart Read more ...
David Nice
In the Wigmore's Lieder prayer meetings, baritone Christian Gerhaher is the high priest. There are good reasons for this, but given that the innermost circle of Wigmore Friends pack out his concerts, you do feel that the slightest criticism might merit lynching by the ecstatic communicants. His Schubert is never less than fascinating, but 2011's Winterreise kept its distance, while last night there were more question marks hovering over a Schubertiade of mostly semi-precious stones and only the odd jewel.Where is the unbroken line most of us first heard in his Wolfram at the Royal Opera Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A good half of the portraits in Russia and the Arts are of figures without whom any conception of 19th century European culture would be incomplete. A felicitous subtitle, “The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky”, provides a natural, even easy point of orientation for those approaching Russian culture, and with it the country’s history and character, without particular advance knowledge.Much is new here, not least the artists themselves, none of whose names are anywhere near as well-known as their subjects. The wider intellectual world they inhabited may seem remote, with its conflicts between Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As the camera lingered lovingly over landscaped gardens and ravishing English countryside with a stately home parked squarely in the back of the frame, one could hardly avoid slipping into a Downtonesque reverie. Even more so when the assembled posh personages arrayed prettily on the greensward began to discuss marriage and inheritance, triggering echoes of the fabled Downton "entail".Clearly, screenwriter Julian Fellowes is not minded to relinquish his grip on ITV's plum 9pm Sunday slot, and his motto may be "if it ain't broke, don't fix it any more than you have to". If he couldn't bring us Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
One of the secrets to enjoying life is mastering the creative use of disappointment. Many in the Covent Garden audience last night were no doubt deeply disappointed not to be seeing Natalia Osipova's legendary portrayal of the title role in Giselle, injury having removed the Russian superstar from the opening night cast. If Royal Ballet regulars they might have been even more disappointed to realise they would therefore be seeing two of the company's more underpowered actors, Sarah Lamb and Matthew Golding, headlining this most dramatic of ballets.All credit to Lamb and Golding; considering Read more ...