19th century
alexandra.coghlan
You can forget “I am Heathcliff”. And abandon hope of “I cannot live without my soul” and “I love my murderer” while you’re at it. Andrea Arnold’s newest addition to the canon of Wuthering Heights adaptations is the story flayed so raw you can see bone. Jettisoning such fripperies as dialogue, fixed cameras and even for the most part avoiding professional actors, she takes period drama by the wing-collared throat and throttles it with gonzo relish. Brooding and brutality is in generous supply, but when we get down to the sharp end of this blighted romance Brontë’s passion seems oddly dulled, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Nikolai Ge retrospective at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery marks the 180th anniversary of the artist’s birth – not the kind of round centenary or bicentenary landmark that often brings such projects to fruition. But the show is literally a revelation – at its centre are the religious works from the last years of his life, many of which returned only this year to Russia from abroad. A series of pencil drawings based on the Crucifixion show the artist working in a style that seems astonishingly ahead of his time.The last time I visited these exhibition halls, part of the Tretyakov’s “new” Read more ...
william.ward
World cinema – like its cousin world music – is an awkward generic term that we generally apply to the output of those far-off countries or cultures about which we know (and perhaps if we are really honest, care) little. Watching movies with subtitles which attempt to parse actions and customs that are alien to our Western mores may give us a cosy, self-righteous glow inside, but we are also relieved to know that we don’t have to live those deprived (though perhaps somewhat colourful and picturesque) lives.But over the past few years, as we have watched our hemisphere’s economic security Read more ...
fisun.guner
What a curious curate’s egg Tate Liverpool has pulled out of its hat with Alice in Wonderland. And what a complete rag-bag of minor, uninteresting artists. It starts with a disparate mix of recent works by a few better-knowns – neatly beginning at the end, as it were (Jason Rhoades’s neon-sign euphemisms for the female sex, Luc Tuymans’ dreamy Wonderland), but by the end proper we are left befuddled by the impression that any artist whose work features feeble wordplay, has some passing reference to burgeoning female sexuality, or simply contains a passing reference to a “looking glass” has Read more ...
Patrick McGrath
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, son of a Protestant clergyman and grand-nephew of the playwright Sheridan, was born in Dublin in 1814. He spent part of his boyhood in County Limerick, where from local storytellers he heard legends of fairies and demons. Later he became a journalist. For some years he was proprietor and editor of the Dublin University Magazine, a conservative publication that spoke for the Protestant ruling class in Ireland, also known as the Ascendancy. When Le Fanu took over the magazine, however, far from ascending, the ruling class was in fact in steep decline. The anxiety both Read more ...
David Nice
Those of us un-Zeitgeisty enough to miss the Royal Ballet’s first new full-length ballet in 20 years during its first run can now catch up. Opus Arte’s DVD release of the televised Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland tells a different story from the one any audience members other than front-of-stalls ticket holders would have caught. With more focus on the characters and less on the potentially overwhelming special effects, we probably get a better deal.Jonathan Haswell’s stylish screen direction is dominated, as it should be, by the loveable mug of Lauren Cuthbertson's Alice. She guides us in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“An elixir with a kick, sir, one that really packs a punch”, sings Adina in Jonathan Miller’s Midwestern The Elixir of Love, and she couldn’t be more right. A night spent among the floral prints, perky ponytails and pastel wipe-down surfaces of this production is like being battered around the head with a bouquet of roses wielded by Doris Day. Frame the encounter in a Hopper-inspired set from which all traces of menace have been expunged – no nighthawks dare lurk in bustling Adina’s Diner – and you have the perfect operatic antidote (more effective than any of Dulcamara’s potions) to the Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week there's another new Mahler symphony recording, along with some disquieting British piano music and an enjoyable disc of originals and transcriptions played by a young Baltic accordionist.Frank Bridge – Piano Music Vol 3 Mark Bebbington (Somm)The bolder, more challenging pieces are the stand-outs in Mark Bebbington’s handsomely played and produced Frank Bridge recital – yet they’re sometimes curiously reticent to lodge in the memory. Bridge, still best remembered as the young Britten’s most influential teacher, possessed an acute sense of economy and scale – few of the miniatures on Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As fresh and enchanting as the first flushes of spring, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s imaginative retelling of Charlotte Brontë’s 19th-century proto-feminist novel captures the thrill of attraction with rare perception, sweep and tenderness. It foregrounds the book’s Gothic elements and the lovers’ links to the natural world, showing love itself as both a benign and devastating force of nature. Rochester’s voice is carried to Jane on the wind, their passion burns like fire and Jane’s heartbreak is as bone-chilling as the blanket of cold earth she weeps upon.Screenwriter Moira Buffini (Tamara Drewe) Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
After filing for bankruptcy earlier this year, the Philadelphia Orchestra seemed poised to be the flagship cultural casualty of the financial crisis. Five months on and the bills continue to rise, but in the best Titanic tradition the band are determinedly playing on. It’s been five years since we last heard them at the Proms and their return last night under Chief Conductor Charles Dutoit saw a capacity crowd turn out to show their support and to hear the glossy music-making for which this orchestra is so justly celebrated.For a partnership so synonymous with French repertoire, the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In a week that sees Proms visits from two major American orchestras, it fell to Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to raise the curtain for their blue-blooded “Big Five” colleagues the Philadelphia Orchestra. With Tchaikovsky featuring large in both programmes comparisons are only natural, and it will be interesting to see what response Thursday night offers to an energetic but at times rather unsubtle evening of music from Pennsylvania’s “other” orchestra.As titles go, Fantastic Appearances of a Theme of Hector Berlioz is a particularly fine one, getting bonus points for Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
While revered and respected, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis has never inspired audiences with the same affection as Bach’s B minor Mass, Haydn’s Nelson Mass, or even Mozart’s Coronation or C minor settings. Perhaps it’s the austerity, the monumentality of the work Beethoven knew to be his greatest that rejects the easy assimilation into secular concert life, perhaps it’s more simply the lack of big tunes to wash down all that liturgy. Furtwängler famously drew back from the work’s sacred challenges as he grew older, but Sir Colin Davis is evidently determined to keep tackling a work whose Read more ...