John Wilson has built a reputation as a conductor which marks him out as a musicians’ musician. He doesn’t present himself with any pomposity, even wearing a neat black tie and lounge jacket on this occasion, while the male musicians around him were in white tie and tails. He doesn’t play to the gallery either: there’s a smile and a bow, but no flamboyance in his on-stage demeanour. He does deliver in performance, though – with a crystal-clear beat, lots of cues and anticipation, and calm and gentle reminders of points of expression and phrasing.His niche in the gallery of conductor Read more ...

Painted in ice-cream shades punctuated with vivid red, the series of portraits made by Picasso in the early weeks of 1932 are as dreamy as love letters. His mistress Marie-Thérèse Walther – we assume it is she – lies adrift in post-coital languor, her body spread before us as a delicious and endlessly fascinating confection. But the mood shifts from picture to picture, and she appears by turns as a wisp-like erotic reverie, an imposing, moon-faced goddess, and, in a flash of humour that teeters on the edge of cruelty, a cartoonish blob of a creature with a long, upturned snout (Pictured below Read more ...

That this 1948 Tennessee Williams play is rarely performed seems nothing short of a travesty, thanks to the awe-inspiring case made for it by Rebecca Frecknall’s exquisite Almeida production. Aided by the skyrocketing Patsy Ferran, it also makes a case for director Frecknall as a luminous rising talent in British theatre.During a long, hot summer in early 20th century, small-town Mississippi, minister’s daughter Alma (Patsy Ferran, pictured below) – whose name means “soul” in Spanish – yearns hopelessly for the boy next door: dissolute doctor’s son John (Matthew Needham), who believes Read more ...

Inspired by the astonishing true story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the Iranian refugee who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years, Jonathan Dove’s Flight is a humorous, touching, uplifting yet profoundly poignant study into human relationships, interactions and emotions. This is opera buffa for the modern age – relevant, relatable, lighthearted and often downright silly, but still revealing some very pertinent truths. Stephen Barlow’s slick production, first seen in an outdoor setting at Opera Holland Park in 2015, is transported to Glasgow's Theatre Royal by Scottish Opera, its single Read more ...

Diethelm: Symphonic Works Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Rainer Held (Guild)Swiss composers? There's Honegger, and Frank Martin… add to that list one Caspar Diethelm (1926-1997), a prolific musical polymath and teacher who also dabbled in politics, botany and mineralogy. Somehow he found the time to compose, and this three-disc set collects four of his eight symphonies alongside other orchestral works. Encountering unfamiliar composers can be a fraught business: there's the worry that their neglect might be deserved. The Lucerne-born Diethelm doesn't fall into this category; the opening Read more ...

Shostakovich: Symphony No 6, Sinfonietta (Quartet No 8, arr. Abram Stasevich) Estonian Festival Orchestra/Paavo Järvi (Alpha Classics)The one false note here comes in the form of Paavo Järvi’s description of Shostakovich's Symphony No 6, referring to its “air of peculiar lightness.” Hmm, hardly. He certainly doesn't conduct it as if that's what he believes. The lower strings of the Estonian Festival Orchestra lend the downbeat opening astonishing depth of tone, though you might feel that something's being held back. Rightly, Järvi keeps things on a tight leash until the eruption five or so Read more ...

This was an evening of Iberian highways re-travelled, but with a difference. At the beginning of 2016, the centenary of Spanish master Enrique Granados's untimely death, two young pianists at the National Gallery shared the two piano suites that make up the original Goyescas; finally last night at the Barbican we got the opera partly modelled on their deepest movements. And back in 2008 Josep Pons and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brandished the revised, full-orchestral 1925 ballet score of Manuel de Falla's El amor brujo rather than the intriguing chamber orchestra original, making a virtue out Read more ...

David McVicar may seem too gentle a soul for the lurid drama of Strauss's Salome, but his production, here returning to Covent Garden for a third revival, packs a punch. He gives us plenty of sex and violence – or at least nudity and blood – but finds the real drama in the personal interactions, the increasingly dysfunctional relationships that eventually doom all involved. That drama is well served by this revival cast, making for some engaging stagecraft. The musical standards are more mixed, however, with only one truly world-class performance, and from a character who loses his head far Read more ...

Twelfth Night, Epiphany, call it what you will, is one reminder that there's continuity after the turn of the year. Another was Sakari Oramo's final Sibelius-plus concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra - a predictable triumph given that the previous four were all highlights of 2017, capping, at least for me, the "Rattle Returns" experience. Though an "in the beginning" myth was part of the programme, it seemed odd to start with the end, the miraculous one-movement Seventh Symphony. Still, C major marks a good way to kick off at the Barbican in January.That said, the symphony is rare, if not Read more ...

Seventy years old and still imbued with youthful flair and enthusiasm – that’s the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, which pioneered new territory in its first concert of 2018 last night. The flair and enthusiasm also apply to Sir Mark Elder, who conducted the event. He and the NYO, with help from Chris Riddell (former Children’s Laureate, creator of Goth Girl) and director Daisy Evans and her team, gave the first complete opera performance of the organisation’s history with Bartók's Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.It was the second part of their programme, and a concert performance, to be Read more ...

"From drawing, via the theatre, to the cinema". Naum Kleiman's  introductory qualification of Sergey Eisenstein's own self-perceived line in his Film Form is one that he follows in a necessarily selective and well-organised biography of the director as graphic artist, acompanied by over 500 previously unpublished illustrations.We follow the phenomenon from the young fantasist of Riga, anthropomorphising creatures as society eccentrics, though stage designs indebted to Meyerhold's example - what one wouldn't give to see realisations of his sets and costumes for Shaw's Heartbreak House and Read more ...

What was it about the privileged male Victorian/Edwardian British writer that led to such a fantastical outpouring of books for children that were to embed themselves so thoroughly that they have stayed with their readers into adulthood? All when published were further immortalised by collaborative illustrators: Lewis Carroll and the Alices, illustrated by Tenniel; JM Barrie and Peter Pan; Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (illustrated by EH Shepard), and AA Milne’s four short books of poems and stories (also by Shephard). In their own time these writers were also variously polymaths Read more ...