19th century
Tom Birchenough
If Britain has created a national myth about slavery, it’s surely been centred on the pioneering abolitionists whose actions in the early 19th century led first to the ending of the slave trade across the British Empire in 1807, later to the abolition of the institution in 1834. It’s a record of which, compared to the approach of other nations to the same issue (and the speed of their actions), we may even feel a hint of pride.It’s a myth that BBC Two’s Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners put deservedly to rest, confronting us with harsh facts of history that have been conveniently forgotten. Read more ...
David Nice
Operatic hit parades have always been subject to fashion. For people of my parents’ generation, the famous number from Delibes’s Lakmé was the heroine’s coloratura Bell Song, immortalised at the movies by Lily Pons and Kathryn Grayson. Now it’s the Flower Duet, courtesy of British Airways. But there are other numbers equally worthy of attention in a glorious score stockpiled with the kind of thing the French call la mélodie eternelle. This is an opera that outside France has been in need of singers and a not too violent concept to do it justice.At Holland Park second time around – the company Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The gable end of Martin Graham’s converted barn opera-house at Longborough is surmounted by statues of three composers: pride of place, not surprisingly, to Wagner – the festival’s raison d’être – and with Verdi and Mozart on either side. It’s true one approaches Italian opera here with somewhat less confidence than Wagner. But it’s refreshing to have it at all, and the new Rigoletto, though patchy, has enough good points to make it worth the visit, if not the detour.Caroline Clegg’s production, it’s true, struggles to achieve the pace and tension that can always give Verdi the Read more ...
David Nice
It may only be a revival, but this is what the Royal Opera does best, above all in fielding a living legend of a Falstaff for Verdi's last masterpiece who’d probably be beyond the pockets of many other houses. Italian baritone, masterchef and filmstar Ambrogio Maestri is flanked by a good ensemble including two of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme’s finest graduates, with top orchestral standards for Verdi's most elaborate score under the perfectly-pacing Danish conductor Michael Schønwandt, and a staging high on style, culminating in a dazzler of a final scene which is a return to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Linnaeus Tripe? Shades of a minor character in Dickens or Trollope, but in fact the resoundingly named Tripe (1822-1902) was an army officer and photographer, the sixth son and ninth child of a professional middle-class family from Devonport, his father a surgeon in the Royal Navy. He joined, as so many of his background did – younger son, but of a certain social status – the East India Company’s army (the 12th Madras Native Infantry) aged only 17, the third Tripe son to do so. The Company was the de facto and implacable foreign ruler of India until, following the trauma of the Indian Mutiny Read more ...
David Nice
There are two operatic types who should leave Rossini’s epic swansong for the stage well alone. One would usually be a conductor who ignores many of the notes written by a master at the height of his powers, since even the least dramatic numbers have musical idiosyncrasy in them. Antonio Pappano still omits, among other things, Rossini’s superb Mozartian canon-trio for women's voices and wind ensemble; but what he does conduct is so focused and shapely that he must be forgiven. Not so his director, Damiano Michieletto, who not only jettisons a choreographer for the essential swathes of ballet Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
The Watts Gallery in rural Surrey is a very genteel setting for a show by a figure who for most of his life was denied polite society. Richard Dadd spent 42 years in mental hospitals, first at Bethlem, then Broadmoor. As one can infer, he was criminally insane, and despite a disarming interest in fairies, his life and work cannot be spun into a happy-ever-after narrative.It's the fairies not the diagnosis that won him acclaim, inspiring his two greatest works: The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, 1855-64 (main picture) and Contradiction. Oberon and Titania,1854-58 (pictured below) are both Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Hamlet instructs his players to "hold...the mirror up to nature”, advice taken literally in this arresting 120-year anniversary staging of Chekhov’s homage to the Bard. Jon Bausor’s set is dominated by a vast angled mirror, offering an appropriately bird’s-eye view and lending cinematic scope to this familial tale. It’s also the perfect encapsulation of a group who need their image reflected back at them through the admiration of others in order to satisfy their egos. The lakeside country house might be teeming with passions, but this love, notes Torben Betts’s pithy free adaptation, “is all Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Verdi's La Traviata has become one of the best-loved and most-performed works in the operatic repertoire, but this is no thanks to sections of the English press. In this entertaining romp through the opera's history, presenters Tom Service and Amanda Vickery drooled over the juiciest bits from some of the reviews from La Traviata's London debut in 1856 – for instance The Times of London deplored "an exhibition of harlotry upon the public stage", adding that this was "the poetry of the brothel" – before splitting up to examine the musical and historical background of the piece.Once you'd got Read more ...
Florence Hallett
For all the wrong reasons, the work of Dexter Dalwood serves as a useful metaphor for this exhibition. Trite, tokenistic and desperate to look clever, Dalwood’s paintings are as tiresomely inward-looking as the show itself, which is a dismal example of curatorial self-indulgence at the expense of public engagement. It’s not always a bad thing to give free rein to theorising curators, but this show compares unfavourably with exhibitions at, notably, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Courtauld Gallery that have successfully introduced the public to sound, but arguably arcane academic Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Heimat was already one of cinema’s most extraordinary, majestic achievements. Edgar Reitz’s three series of films for German TV spent 53 hours exploring the humanity of the inhabitants of Schabbach, a Rhineland village much like Reitz's own roots, throughout Germany’s cataclysmic 20th century. It was a chronicle built from often fond, sometimes horrifying memories, mesmerically deep, leisurely detail, and a gorgeous cinematic eye. Reitz was 79 when he added nearly four further hours, revisiting Schabbach in 2012. This could have been hubris. Instead it’s a wonderful (presumably) last visit to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is irresistible to watch Andrew Roberts, the ambitious historian of one of history's most ambitious figures, narrating a three-part account of his hero’s life and times. He is giving us a superb analysis of Napoleon Bonaparte’s gifts, flaws, insecurities and achievements. The first instalment opened with a glorious sunset over the South Atlantic, and several views of the dramatic scenery of the volcanic island of St Helena where the exiled Napoleon was held for six years, 4,000 miles from home, as the prisoner of the British, until his death in 1821 at the age of 51. We saw pivotal Read more ...