19th century
David Nice
So for one last time this season the impossible colosseum of Albertopolis became the Wagnerian holiest of holies – to be precise, the Cathedral of the Holy Grail - and once again I fell in love with the beast transfigured. Justin Way, the one artist common to all seven Wagner operas as their subtle semi-stager, should be the delegate to receive the award the Proms deserve for highest achievement of bicentenary year; and it seemed right to have Sir John Tomlinson, albeit by dint of another bass’s indisposition, giving his benediction as the witness of a final miracle.No mere ghost of Wagnerian Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It may not be the land of milk and honey, but as the home of wine and apricots Lower Austria’s Wachau might just be even better. Bookended by the towns of Melk and Krems, this stretch of the Danube valley is absurdly picturesque, strewing the banks of the river with enough wooded hillsides and ruined castles to fill a Gothic novel (or several).But at just 50 miles from Vienna this storybook-wilderness is really anything but wild. The crags are neatly terraced into vineyards (earning the region its nickname of “the Tuscany of Austria"), while the abbeys and castles tell a tale of religious and Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
Blame the weather: it works every time. In 1858, the long hot summer thwarted the building of an 11-mile glass-covered network of roads and railways that would have linked all existing London stations, crossed the river in three places and, it was believed by its architect Joseph Paxton, relieved the congestion that was making crossing the capital an anxious business.His track record was proven, and spectacular, as discovered in Dreaming the Impossible: Unbuilt Britain, the first of three programmes visiting castles in the air – high-minded, often high-flying, projects that never left the Read more ...
David Nice
On the one occasion I went to Bayreuth, I made the mistake of seeing The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin after the best of Ring cycles. At the Proms we’ve had a week of serious Wagnerian withdrawal symptoms, so Tannhäuser was never going to feel like too much or too little of a good thing. In any case, this always fascinating if dramatically primitive early clash of sex and religion is shot through with later passages composed in between work on the Ring, most of them included in last night's 1875 hybrid version. And Donald Runnicles is not a conductor to stand in the shadow of Daniel Barenboim Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The moment when Alfred Brendel shuffled on stage during the Verbier Festival’s 20th Anniversary Concert not to play, but to turn pages for long-time colleague Emmanuel Ax, expressed everything that is so special, so extraordinary about this festival. Walking off together, arms around each other’s shoulders, these were not just international soloists, they were two great old men and two even greater musicians. Verbier has made a lot of good friends during its 20-year history – a mere blink of the eye, as classical festivals go – and in this birthday year it was no surprise that they might just Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is the most Melvillean of modern Westerns. It is the American conquest tragedy allegorised in a sprawling semi-fictional account of the 1892 Johnson County range war, in which the big ranchers of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, supported by President Benjamin Harrison, waged a vigilante campaign against the region’s small farmers, settlers, and rustlers. The film’s Ahab is Frank Canton (Sam Waterston), the supercilious, monomaniacal leader of the WSGA’s mercenary Regulators.Cimino included the conflict’s two most fabled incidents. One was the brave stand Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Does it always have to be so flipping grim up north? In Channel 4's new four-parter, the Mill in question is at Quarry Bank in Cheshire. The date: 1833, during the Industrial Revolution. Villains du jour: the Greg family, industrialists and merciless exploiters of child labour.As the first episode opened with the tolling of the wake-up bell calling the poor, struggling young workers to another dismal day on the factory floor, it all felt terribly familar. We were back at Lowood school with Jane Eyre, enmeshed in the proles-versus-fatcats class struggle of South Riding, reliving the grinding Read more ...
David Nice
How do you solve a problem like The Birth of a Nation? Do you admire the first part and turn away from the second (after all, the Germans screened The Sound of Music for years in a Nazi-free version ending with the marriage of Maria and Captain von Trapp)? Can you balance social, historical and aesthetic responses?My own were to admire every technique D W Griffith throws at the story-telling of the American Civil War as a fine, at times Tolstoyan interweaving of truth with the fiction of two families from north and south, only to throw in the towel at the flabbergasting rewritten history of Read more ...
Heather Neill
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is essential to quote the famous opening line in any reference to Jane Austen's best-loved work. Pride and Prejudice is 200 years old and being celebrated with balls, literary walks, readathons, television programmes and this adaptation for the stage. Notwithstanding several films (including Joe Wright's in 2005, with Keira Knightly as Lizzy) and Andrew Davies's memorable BBC version screened over six episodes in 1995 (with Colin Firth making Darcy a sex symbol in a wet shirt) another truth has to be acknowledged: no other medium truly Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles is an unfashionably generous indulgence of a score tethered to an unfashionable and unredeemable plot. There’s not a contemporary director alive who can make the wretched thing work, so perhaps it would be better if we all just accepted this and closed our eyes through a Covent Garden revival from the 1980s with some of the finest voices in the business. It certainly gives everything to singers and orchestra that it so cruelly takes away from any director, but sadly the opera’s own faults do tend to end up at the door of those who attempt it anyway.Opera Holland Read more ...
stephen.walsh
"This," Lizzie Graham writes in the programme book of the current Longborough Festival, “is definitely the test of whether or not it is possible to put on a convincing Ring in a small, privately-owned country theatre.” I don’t think Lizzie or her husband, Martin, the festival’s founders and owners of the theatre, can have seriously doubted that the answer would be yes. Serious doubts seem not to be part of their entrepreneurial make-up; or if they are, they suppress them. But the noisy acclaim of the far from provincial or rustic audience at the end of Götterdämmerung on Saturday must all the Read more ...
judith.flanders
My great-grandmother used to say, "In the fall, leaves fall," meaning that as the weather gets colder, people die. The Royal Ballet has had leaves falling all year, and in the height of the (ha!) summer one of the most tenacious, and most beautiful, finally fluttered down. Leanne Benjamin, a principal since 1993, retired in the role of her choosing, Kenneth MacMillan’s Mary Vetsera, a crazed, sexed-up nymphet with a death-wish.Benjamin (pictured below right) has had a longer career than most. She is, unbelievably, 49, although you would probably have to see the picture in her attic to prove Read more ...