19th century
Robert Beale
Buxton International Festival offers one thundering success, one uneasy compromise and one surprisingly enjoyable experience, in its three mainstage operas this year.Verdi’s Ernani is the thundering success. For the first time in years, the festival has the Orchestra of Opera North in the pit at Buxton Opera House, under artistic director Adrian Kelly’s hand, and the size of its string section and richness of its sound (with cimbasso underpinning the brass) are there from the moment the overture starts. The festival chorus – 24 of them if you count in the minor roles some members take – are Read more ...
First Person: Katharina Kastening on directing slimline Bizet in a year rich in 'Carmen' productions
Katharina Kastening
Peter Brook's reimagining of Bizet's Carmen condenses the scale of the original into a more intimate theatrical experience. The score has been starkly cut, the orchestra reduced, and only four singing roles remain: Carmen, Don José, Escamillo and Micaëla. There are also three speaking roles: Zuniga, Lillas Pastia and Garcia (Carmen's husband). In Bizet's opera, Lillas Pastia is only briefly portrayed, and Brook incorporates Garcia, who does not appear in the opera, from the original story – Merimée's novella Carmen.As Brook uses Bizet's music, it is only natural to think of the original Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You have to tiptoe around the edge of the set just to take your seat in the Park’s studio space for Lidless Theatre’s Miss Julie. There’s a plain wooden table, a few utensils on it, wooden chairs and a small cabinet – not much, but, we’re smack inside this 19th century country house kitchen, uncomfortably close to discomfiting passions. It may be the longest day outside, but we're in a dark, claustrophobic space in more senses than one.The cook, Christine, hair tied back ferociously, is cooking up poison to effect an abortion for the house dog, but there are sounds of revelry in the Read more ...
Heather Neill
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an actor tends to take a sympathetic view of the character he inhabits, however morally questionable. Adrian Lukis, who played the handsome, roguish militiaman, George Wickham, in Andrew Davies's (still delightful) 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's most popular novel, is no exception.Looking back 30 years later at how Wickham was treated in Pemberley and Longbourn, Lukis allows him to put his own spin on events then and to give a glimpse of what he has made of life subsequently.Jane Austen's characters are so vivid they frequently jump off the page Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are many women whose outstanding science was attributed to men or simply devalued to the point of obscurity, but recent interest in the likes of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin and NASA’s Katherine Johnson has given credit where credit is due. Marie Curie was never diminished, the woman with two Nobel prizes and the discoveries of radium and polonium on her CV needs no such championing, a figure known by schoolchildren the world over. And yet there’s something that stirs in the back of the mind, something that complicates a story of stunning success often against the odds. When the Read more ...
Justine Elias
Stéphanie Di Giusto, who directed the Belle Époque arts biopic La Danseuse, about the groundbreaking Paris Opera performer Loie Fuller, explores the life of another maverick – albeit a reluctant one – in Rosalie. Whereas La Danseuse embraces the contradictions of artistic fame and backstage rivalries, Rosalie narrows its focus to the circumscribed life of a bartered bride in 1870s France.The film begins with its heroine’s cautious introduction to a small factory town. Naive Rosalie (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) appears to be a perfectly traditional and obedient wife-to-be. Resplendent Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong, the Hallé’s principal conductor from the coming autumn season, presided in the Bridgewater Hall for the first time yesterday since the announcement of his appointment.It was in the last of the four “Rush Hour” concerts recently introduced, which begin at 6pm and are shorter than usual evening programmes, with fairly mainstream classical content and no interval. They seem to be succeeding very well in attracting audiences of all ages.But this one was a bit special, because Wong had his first chance to conduct the Hallé Choir along with the orchestra. The centrepiece of the menu Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The last of the old maestros is standing tall. Marco Bellocchio was a Marxist firebrand when he made his iconoclastic debut with Fists in the Pocket (1965). Now aged 84, he makes intellectually and emotionally muscular, hit epics about abused Italian power.The Red Brigades’ fatal 1978 kidnap of former, reforming Prime Minister Aldo Moro in Good Morning, Night (2003) was followed by Mussolini’s persecution of his mistress and illegitimate son in Vincere (2009), a haunted turncoat’s survival of the Sicilian Mafia’s apocalyptic Eighties in The Traitor (2019), and a return to Moro in the six-hour Read more ...
Robert Beale
Billed as a “Viennese Whirl”, this programme showed that there are different kinds of music that may be known to the orchestral canon as coming from Vienna.For a start, there’s the classical tradition of Mozart, Beethoven and those who aimed to be their successors. Then there are the 19th century dance creations and operettas of Johann Strauss II and his contemporaries. And there’s also the “Second Viennese School” … and conductor Anja Bihlmaier (pictured below) offered all three.The last was represented by Berg’s Violin Concerto, probably the most endearing and enduring of works written Read more ...
Robert Beale
If ever more evidence were needed of Sir Mark Elder’s untiring zest for exploration and love of the thrill of live opera performance, it was this ground-breaking collaborative event with Opera Rara – a performance coupled to a new studio recording of the original version of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.It was probably one of the greatest triumphs of Elder’s near quarter-century as musical director of the Hallé, with a mainly youthful cast, as perfectly suited to their roles as could be hoped for, singing superbly for him, the Chorus of Opera North and the Royal Northern College of Music Opera Read more ...
David Nice
When will the Royal Opera give us a totally electrifying Carmen, rather than just a vocally perfect Carmen (as Aighul Akhmetshina surely is)? Supposed firebrand Damiano Michieletto’s production is mostly tepid after Barrie Kosky’s half-brilliant take. Kosky didn’t seem to care for his Don José or Micaëla, but as this officer turned smuggler fails to develop and the girl from his village is a plain-Jane cliché, there’s not much improvement on that front.Ukrainian soprano Olga Kulchynska’s Micaëla (pictured below) deserves better – as nuanced a delivery as Akhmetshina’s, promising great things Read more ...
Heather Neill
The Brontë sisters and their ne'er-do-well brother will always make good copy. The brilliance of the women constrained by life in a Yorkshire parsonage contrasts dramatically with the wild moors around their home, while their early deaths lend romance and tragedy to their life stories. Mythologised they may be, but their strength and determination are indisputable; to be successfully published novelists, albeit to begin with under men's names, was a notable feat. Charlotte, Emily and Anne cannot but be feminist heroines.In her new play, which won the Nick Darke Award in 2020, Sarah Gordon Read more ...