19th century
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 ...
Demetrios Matheou
Like all great literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final, eccentric, playfully wondrous short story seems to have been written just for us – across two centuries and on the other side of the world. It’s a resonance that ripples through Laurence Boswell’s eloquent, beautifully acted and staged, and sweetly optimistic production. As sole performer, Greg Hicks is Dostoevsky’s narrator and unnamed protagonist, as well as the numerous people, real and imagined, that the man meets on his journey from suicidal anguish to enlightened optimism, and a new lease of life as an albeit unheeded Read more ...
Robert Beale
The overture to Rossini’s La scala di seta is a frequent and familiar concert piece – not so the opera itself.It’s a light and frothy one-acter from 1812, just under two hours long including an interval, a farsa in Italian opera terms, and designed and presented with much and opening and closing of doors and comic business in Robert Chevara’s production (design by Jess Curtis).There are just six roles: I saw the “blue” cast of this double-cast show. It calls for talent beyond simple singing ability in every one of those roles, and it seems that with Chevara’s help the RNCM’s performers have Read more ...
Robert Beale
There was a common factor in the superficially disparate elements of this Hallé concert, and it wasn’t just the fact that both soloist and conductor were female. It was an experience of the colours of the music and a sense of enjoyment of what orchestral music offers.The conductor was Kristiina Poska, chief conductor of the Flanders Symphony Orchestra and herself Estonian, with a firm track record in concert hall and opera house. She has a reputation for her interpretations of Sibelius and brought her reading of his First Symphony to this podium, but first she offered us Brits something Read more ...
Robert Beale
Just a few days after the Hallé’s Bruckner 8, the BBC Philharmonic weighed in with his Seventh Symphony for its Manchester audience. We’re all getting a lot of Bruckner in his 200th anniversary year, and this was a wise choice, being one of his shorter creations in the genre – only about an hour and 10 minutes in playing time – and containing some of his best melodic ideas and rhythmic inventions.It also benefits from the tonal qualities of an orchestra at the top of its game to realise the richness of the textures he created, and this was amply fulfilled in the sound of the Philharmonic, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At the turn of the 20th century, London’s smart set queued up to get their portraits painted by American-born artist John Singer Sargent. Sitting for him was a performance, a way to show the world just how rich, glamorous, clever or important you were. And everything – from the pose to the hair, jewellery and clothing – was stage-managed to create the best impression.At Tate Britain, the brilliance of Sargent’s showmanship is on display from the start in his 1907 portrait of Lady Sassoon, who stands decked in an opera cape. Beside the painting is the garment itself, a gorgeous confection that Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera North have a new pairing for Mascagni’s popular but clichéd Cavalleria Rusticana in this double bill: an early Rachmaninov one-acter, written when he was 19. The production of the former is a revival of the one seen in 2017 in their Little Greats season, and its director then, Karolina Sofulak, has returned to create this Aleko alongside it.So interest is inevitably more in what she has done with the new piece, and, intriguingly, how she has used the overlapping casting of the two to find striking resonances in their stories.Both are tragic tales of murder born of infidelity and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novella The Picture of Dorian Gray has given the world a trope built for flattery, along the lines of: “You look so young, you must have a portrait growing old in your attic”. But how many who use this line have read the text itself? Kip Williams of the Sydney Theatre Company has and has retooled it inventively for a 21st century audience. What emerges is a dazzling display of virtuoso acting and technical wizardry. And it isn’t just gratuitous whizz-bangery. Williams is making a serious argument for the tale’s modernity by telling it via contemporary technology.At Read more ...