20th century
Daniel Baksi
Over the years, the legend of The Apu Trilogy has been much-repeated. Now widely considered India’s greatest filmmaker, Satyajit Ray was little more than a small-time commercial artist when, failing to find a sponsor for his script, he assembled what few funds he could in order to begin filming. Come the first day, Ray had never previously directed a scene, he had a still-photographer (Subrata Mitra) for a cinematographer, and a composer (Ravi Shankar) who was essentially unknown. Together, they combined to produce a set of films that have been acclaimed ever since as masterpieces of arthouse Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
The second half of Mark Cousins’ documentary on films by women filmmakers starts with religion; it ends with song and dance. This is a second seven-hour journey through cinema. It reconfirms Women Make Film as a remarkable feat of excavation and curation, as its twenty chapters showcase overlooked, excellent work by far-flung filmmakers. Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi and Wang Ping, socialist China’s first female director, are featured alongside film-school favourites like Denis and Akerman.The actresses Thandie Newton (pictured below) and Debra Winger are lead narrators now. Their Read more ...
David Nice
A brutal Greek tragedy and a rococo Viennese comedy, both filtered through the eyes and ears of 20th century genius: what a feast on consecutive nights from the Metropolitan Opera's recent archive. There's been real thought behind the wealth of programming in the company's attempts to keep the world happy for free during lockdown, including a whole Wagner week. These two of the top masterpieces by Wagner's natural successor - "Richard the Third", as Strauss was dubbed, because there could be no second - both reminded us of what worked and what didn't when Robert Carsen's sort-of-1920s Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-born French filmmaker, has a reputation that precedes her. Her upbringing was the subject of the acclaimed films Persepolis (2007) and Chicken With Plums (2011). Persepolis won the Cannes Jury Prize, two César awards and was nominated for an Oscar. Satrapi adapted and co-directed both films. She also wrote and illustrated the comic books on which they were based. Over the past ten years, Satrapi has parlayed her success as a cartoonist into a formidable career as a filmmaker. Her latest film is her biggest. Radioactive is a wide-ranging biopic about the life of Read more ...
Richard Bratby
No orchestra wants its conductor to cancel in the week of a concert. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s illness was announced only on Monday, but even in ideal conditions, if you needed to find a last minute replacement maestro for a programme of Bartók and Bruckner, you could hardly do better than Omer Meir Wellber: a conductor with whom the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has built a relationship that predates his recent appointment to the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester. And while it was unquestionably disappointing to be deprived of Gražinytė-Tyla’s first adventure into Bruckner (on these Read more ...
Richard Bratby
There’s a particular moment of a particular recording – I suppose every slightly over-obsessive record collector has one – that I just keep listening to over and over again. It’s in Fritz Reiner’s 1960 Chicago Symphony recording of Respighi’s The Fountains of Rome, and it comes right after the first flood of the Triton Fountain starts to recede. The violins glide up into their cadence; just two notes, but the gesture is so graceful, so effortless, and so gloriously, naturally stylish that it gives me shivers every time. I wondered if Kazuki Yamada would get the CBSO’s violins to do something Read more ...
Florence Hallett
These days, Bloomsbury rests in a state of elegant somnolence. The ghosts of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell linger on in the shabby gentility of Russell Square and its environs, the bookish institutions that are the bones of the place conferring tranquility, despite the many students and tourists. But so much for appearances – radicalism is the bricks and mortar of Bloomsbury’s university buildings and Georgian terraces, which in the early 20th century were home to countless figures who thrived in society's margins, among them artists and writers, academics and political thinkers.Francesca Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Take our country back!” is the rallying cry of the self-identified “real” Americans gathered to protest the arrival of immigrants. It could be a contemporary Trump rally – or, indeed, the nastier side of current British political discourse – but in fact this scene is from a 1986 musical, set in 1910, from an all-star creative team: book by Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof), score by Charles Strouse (Annie) and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked). Despite that pedigree, it bombed on Broadway, but this opportune revival, transferred from Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, gains potency by Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound” wrote Gustav Mahler of his Eighth Symphony. “There are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving.” It’s an image that captures the impossible scale and mind-boggling ambition of this so called “Symphony of a Thousand”. But it doesn’t begin to do justice to the freshness, clarity and sheer headlong energy of this performance by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and no fewer than five choruses under the direction of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. Doesn’t the Earth alone move at 67,000 miles per hour? With around 600 Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The greatest war films are those which capture the terrifying physical and psychological ordeal that soldiers face, along with the sheer folly and waste of it all – Paths of Glory, Come and See, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, most recently Dunkirk. Sam Mendes’ 1917, which has just won two Golden Globes and could well triumph at the Oscars, joins their ranks.Inspired by the stories of his late grandfather, who fought in the First World War, Mendes has forged a film that combines the contrivance of a race-against-time thriller with the verisimilitude of documentary, astonishing Read more ...
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, Martín, Barbican review - songs of protest and resilience
David Nice
In youth we trust. That can be the only motto worth anything for 2020, as the world goes into further meltdown.So it was startling, stunning and cathartic, two days after the big downer of 3 January – the American horror clown seemingly in competition with the Australian apocalypse – to witness 164 teenagers under a conductor they clearly adore, Jaime Martín, making their voices heard, sometimes literally, in 20th century music of fear, anxiety, protest, violence and just a smidgen of hope.Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, short though it is in time-span, has long been overlooked as one of the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Everyone’s doing Weinberg now, or so it seems. The Polish-born composer who became a close friend of Shostakovich was born 100 years ago, and there’s plenty of his music to go round. Raphael Wallfisch gave the UK premiere of his Cello Concertino (Opus 43B), with the Northern Chamber Orchestra in Manchester last night. The “B” is not insignificant – it’s a reworked and shortened version of his Cello Concerto of 1948, scored for string orchestra accompaniment only, and wasn’t published until two years ago.At 16 minutes in length but still with four movements, the piece is certainly an Read more ...