19th century
Adam Sweeting
Though greeted ambivalently when it made its debut at the end of 2012, Ripper Street has looked increasingly like TV's undervalued secret weapon as it has surged purposefully through this second series. Maybe the title was misjudged, suggesting it was just another gruesome and mist-shrouded Victorian murder mystery. Turns out it was much more than that.Indeed, echoes of Jack the Ripper have been almost entirely absent as the series has taken the plunge into such factually-based issues as rent-boy networks and the Barings Bank crisis of 1890 (different only in scale from recent financial Read more ...
David Nice
For seasonal fare that’s also profound, few pre-Christmas weekends in London can ever have been richer than this one. Hearts battered by John Adams’ nativity oratorio El Niño last night, one hoped for more soothing medicine this afternoon in the naïve and sentimental music of Berlioz’s sacred trilogy, first performed some 145 years earlier. With similarly perfect casting of soloists, an even more remarkable chorus and a guiding hand that was both firm and tender from the versatile François-Xavier Roth, superlative standards continued – making me wonder what on earth’s the point of compiling a Read more ...
David Nice
In 1995 a new avian species with unfamiliar markings, the Bourne swan, drew unexpectedly large crowds to a run-down old Islington theatre. I remember it well: seats in the gods were being worn so tight then that feet attached to long legs couldn't be placed on the ground and, negotiating a tolerable view downstairs at the box office, I missed 10 minutes of the display. Since then the very masculine Cygnus bourniensis has been sighted in unlikely places all over the worldand has now returned to overwinter in a more spacious and comfortable Sadler’s Wells. Rapid evolution over nearly two Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The sense of an ending is a hard thing to achieve. The Paradise has garnered a loyal following over two series, and no doubt there will be viewers sad to see it depart. But unless options are still being kept open – no announcement either way seems to have surfaced from the BBC – last night’s episode looked like a finale.It certainly went out with a set-piece bang of a kind from which there would seem no way back. The marriage of Katherine (Elaine Cassidy) and Tom Weston (Ben Daniels) could hardly get any worse – it’s long strayed into the sinister territory of a Wilkie Collins novel, Read more ...
David Nice
Is anyone else sick of creepy brotherhoods skewering the transcendent in Mozart’s and Wagner’s late operas? Both Sarastro’s cult and the company of the grail are in sore need of change - "fresh blood" would be an unfortunate term under the circumstances - when we first encounter them. But both Simon McBurney’s production of The Magic Flute at English National Opera and now Stephen Langridge’s unleavened Royal Opera Parsifal suggest that these are sects not worth joining or saving. If I were Wagner’s hero in this unholy hall, I’d get the hell out of there and call the police.Langridge, who Read more ...
fisun.guner
Lizzie Siddal, Pre-Raphaelite muse and model for John Everett Millais’ 1852 sensation Ophelia, died a tragic death aged 32 from a laudanum overdose, the Victorian’s opiate of choice to which she had become addicted in her final years. Jeremy Green’s new play explores her relationship with Gabriel Dante Rossetti, who, with Millais and William Holman Hunt, formed the original PRB triumvirate. Artist and model eventually married, but only after the heat of Rossetti’s ardour had considerably cooled, leaving her devastated by his emotional rejection and thwarting her own ambitions to become an Read more ...
Heather Neill
Take a Victorian library and a play which had its premiere 100 years ago and - surprisingly - you have a new arts centre featuring a challenging, dystopian drama. Omnibus in Clapham has exchanged bookshelves for performance and is opening with a celebratory production of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck.Written when Büchner was only 23, and left unfinished when the playwright died of typhus in 1837, Woyzeck has had an extraordinary influence on dramatists from Brecht to Sarah Kane. It also inspired Alban Berg's intense, atonal opera, Wozzeck, completed in 1925. This year marks both the centenary of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Berlioz wanted to make the first arrival of his demon onstage unforgettable, with an extreme sound effect - violins and violas marked sul ponticello, strettissimo, starting fortissimo, with interjections from three trombones snarling in minor seconds. In last night's performance of La Damnation de Faust that moment was glossed over. It flashed past as if it had never happened.In many of the sections of the work which involved the vocal soloists and chorus, particularly in the first half, Valery Gergiev seldom looked up from his score. It produced a detached reading of the work. He took a Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
At the Wexford Opera Festival this autumn you could see a bicentenary performance of Verdi’s La traviata. Likewise Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. But that’s not why Ireland’s operatic showpiece is one of the most famous, admired and respected events on the European opera calendar (to prove it, Opera Europe, the forum for all companies across the continent, held one of its annual conferences in Wexford this autumn).The reason is quite simple. It’s repertoire. Since Dr Tom Walsh founded Wexford in 1951, spurred on by the writer and polymath Sir Compton Mackenzie, and helped along by legendary Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
This was Sakari Oramo's first concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra since taking over as chief conductor. Of course he knows the orchestra well already, but it was important to make this a good ’un, and so it was.It opened with the world premiere of a 20-minute work by French composer Tristan Murail, with the double title Reflections/Reflets. As the title perhaps suggests it offered an evocative, colouristic sound world. The first half, "Spleen", dealt in bells, swells and waves rising out of a murky brass and low string background. The second, "High Voltage", featured slow glissandi, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Proof that the BBC’s love of gritty realism is not solely the province of Luther and similar modern-day urban crime dramas comes just minutes into the second series of Ripper Street, before the credits even roll. In the East End of London a police officer is thrown from a window, only missing a little boy playing recorder for the amusement of the street below when his leg is gruesomely impaled on a railing.The writers allowed their leading man a bit of social commentarySo far so Ripper Street of course, given the criticism that the first series of the Victorian crime thriller collected for Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dulwich Picture Gallery, the oldest publicly accessible painting collection in England, is hardly on the bank of the Thames, but its compilation of prints, drawings, watercolours and paintings by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1902) concentrates on his absorption with London’s river. The shifting light of sky and water, not to mention working dockside life, which obsessed him during his lifelong residence in the city provides not only an overview of Whistler’s evolution as an artist but an evocation of the working life of the river which is long gone. He was fascinated by the hotch-potch, the Read more ...