19th century
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 ...
graham.rickson
We head east this week - new pieces by a contemporary Russian composer, and a bargain box set showcasing the flamboyant orchestral music of a neglected Russian. And a famous viola player leads a young Moscow orchestra in electrifying accounts of Brahms and Tchaikovsky.Brahms: Symphony No 3, Tchaikovsky: Symphony No 6 Novaya Rossiya State Symphony Orchestra/Yuri Bashmet (ICA Classics)
You don’t expect to find these two composers sharing a disc, in the light of an infamous quote attributed to Tchaikovsky in 1886: “I have played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard!” Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Richard Wagner has probably only himself to blame if his operas have become a laboratory for the testing-to-destruction of the intellectual preoccupations of that Opera Führer of our time, the stage director. Wagner it was, after all, who transferred the mythic concept of concealed meaning to the opera house: Wagner who recreated legend as psycho-social allegory, and made musical narrative the handmaiden of philosophy and political ideology. What he would have thought of the latest manifestation of these processes in the staging of his works in the opera house he built at Bayreuth is a good Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“The text of Britain’s teaching, the message of the free…”. No, not the Last Night of the Proms or the Olympic Games ahead of time. This is the final chorus of Elgar’s concert-length cantata Caractacus, which was given a vigorous work-out in this star concert of the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester Cathedral under Sir Andrew Davis. And before you start jeering and bringing up the problems on Britain’s streets, let me tell you that the choruses in this work are as brilliant as any in the language, and quite thrilling enough to persuade you that the message, however facile and inopportune, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is there a place for the travelling fun fair any more? Static attractions like Alton Towers and Thorpe Park have rides that are bigger, grander, more varied and scarier than anything a traditional, transient fair could ever transport. All the Fun of the Fair’s answer was that the fair has survived by winding the clock back, rekindling the past with original Victorian and Edwardian rides. There’s still room for something less bombastic.All the Fun of the Fair traced the history of the travelling fair in its familiar form. What we now recognise as the fair, with rides, sideshows and snacks Read more ...