19th century
alexandra.coghlan
Few would dispute the supremacy of Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford among the BBC’s current fleet of costume dramas. Measured, domestic and infinitely gentle, there are no Machiavellian footmen or illicit trysts here, just wholesome country adventures championing those unfashionable values of honesty, neighbourliness and hard work. The lamentable histrionics of the recent Upstairs Downstairs could have done well to note these successes, adapting material free from obvious drama (and in the case of Flora Thompson’s autobiographical trilogy, almost entirely without plot) and fashioning from Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The last time I saw Wolfgang Holzmair in concert (at last year’s Oxford Lieder Festival, delivering one of the finest live performances of Winterreise I have heard) the silence that followed the cycle lasted almost 30 seconds – an absolute age where a fidgety post-concert audience is concerned. Last night’s programme of Schumann saw Holzmair finish and pause, hands raised prayerfully, holding his listeners’ attention like so many butterflies within his cupped palms. The release that followed was ecstatic, a spontaneous homage to the musical and narrative mastery of this extraordinary singer. Read more ...
graeme.thomson
So this is Christmas, a time to seek comfort in traditional nourishment both culinary and cultural. In Edinburgh, the King’s Theatre has been home to mainstream panto - the equivalent of serving up a hearty turkey with all the trimmings – since time immemorial, which leaves the capital’s other theatres jockeying for position. What to do? Hedge all bets and aim for different-but-not-too-different, or raise the stakes and try something more adventurous altogether?This time of year tends to produce a bit of hit and a whole lot of miss. Last year the Lyceum disappointed with a sluggish, dull-as- Read more ...
fisun.guner
There is probably only one thing that Ann Widdecombe and I have ever agreed upon: we both think it might be a really good idea to stick William Wilberforce on the Fourth Plinth. Why not? It’s nice to have contemporary art in Trafalgar Square, of course, but surely there are few other reforming characters as worthy as the great abolitionist? And Wilberforce was many other things besides – though not all of them would necessarily impress the nation to quite the same degree.In his youth – which here means before the age of 25 when he had already spent a year as a Tory MP in the county of Read more ...
judith.flanders
The National Portrait Gallery is a national treasure. Not because it has nice pictures (although it does have that too), but because it has the most amazing archive. An archive that is, almost literally, a treasure trove. It is, of course, out of sight and therefore out of mind to the casual visitor. But for a history buff, there is a visceral thrill knowing that there are a million or so objects (the number is give-or-take), many of them only superficially catalogued. Anything may turn up.But even the NPG staff were a little startled to find that they were unknowingly storing part of a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Russia marks the centenary of the death of Leo Tolstoy on 20 November – but the level of local tribute to one of the country’s greatest writers seems markedly muted for a figure two of whose novels, Anna Karenina and War and Peace, are regularly ranked in Top 10 lists by writers and readers around the world. We may forget today, however, that Tolstoy almost abandoned fiction for much of the second half of his life to concentrate on social issues that saw him become a figure whose opinions were listened to around the world. At home he became increasingly a thorn in the side of the ruling Read more ...
fisun.guner
Give me a small side order of Cézannes over a great feast of Gauguins any day. This small, perfectly formed survey will surely be noted as one of the best exhibitions this year, the type of exhibition at which the Courtauld Gallery clearly excels: small, tightly focused, and exploring just one aspect of an artist’s output in order to illuminate his practice as a whole.This approach, though limited by resources, easily competes with that of the flashiest blockbuster. What’s more, it’s an approach that frequently outdoes the big tub-thumbing surveys. And given the paintings on view in this Read more ...
mark.hudson
If you'd been a painter at the time of Impressionism, what would you have done? Rushed to Paris to become a disciple of Manet or Monet? Taken the Symbolist route with Odilon Redon or headed to Brittany to whoop it up with Gauguin and co? No, the chances are you'd probably have got it wrong and, like the so-called Glasgow Boys, hitched your talents to a now virtually forgotten figure like Jules Bastien-Lepage. Jules who? Exactly.A loose group of some 20 painters, the Glasgow Boys worked at a time when Scotland’s industrial capital, the second city of the Empire, was asserting its cultural Read more ...
Nick Hasted
John Landis will always be loved for writing and directing An American Werewolf in London (1981), the definitive horror-comedy. That - and The Blues Brothers, and Trading Places - was reason enough for Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis to agree to star as 19th-century grave-robbers Burke and Hare in Landis’s first feature for 12 years. Pegg’s Spaced co-star Jessica Hynes (playing Hare’s slatternly wife), Sir Christopher Lee, Stephen Merchant and Ronnie Corbett are also among those queuing to work with the legendarily affable and energetic director. Burke and Hare won’t, sadly, recruit future Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Thomas Lawrence was a child prodigy; from the age of 11 he supported his family by making pastel drawings of the fashionable elite who spent the season in Bath. The next step for an aspiring young artist was to learn how to paint in oils and Lawrence taught himself by doing self-portraits. He learned fast. The first painting in this exhibition of sumptuous portraits shows a diffident 19-year-old sitting sideways and glancing nervously towards us, as though fearful that his efforts will be laughed at.Thirty-seven years on, we see him again (main picture). What a difference! He may have lost Read more ...
howard.male
The recurrent image in this somewhat staid documentary is a monochrome photograph of Poe’s moon of a face with its panda-like eye sockets. Occasionally the camera moves in for a close-up on those eyes - perhaps hoping they’ll reveal something that mere biographical detail doesn’t - but appropriately enough the grim Gothic writer’s eyes are more black holes than windows on the soul, and they give nothing away. The horrors, scandals and tragedies of Poe’s life had to be exhumed from his words, and the words of those who came into his orbit.With Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” throbbing away in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Debuting last February at the height of the economic crisis, Jonathan Miller’s freshly minted Bohème was a timely operatic glance in the social mirror. Almost two years on, and the hardships of his young Bohemians seem no less apt. With fiscal collapse so conveniently on the horizon, a lesser director might have succumbed and offered up a “relevant” contemporary treatment. It is to Miller’s credit (and one in the eye to those critics who so routinely deplore his smugness) that he not only avoided this dramatic dead end, but eschewed the self-conscious cleverness of Così or Rigoletto, instead Read more ...