Christmas
CD: Pentatonix - A Pentatonix ChristmasThursday, 08 December 2016
If Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” makes you want to burn the nearest decorated pine tree and Michael Buble’s Christmas croons give you the urge to shove brussel sprouts in your ears, Pentatonix’s new festive album could be the perfect... Read more... |
El Niño, LSO, Adams, BarbicanMonday, 05 December 2016
Second and third times lucky: after the migraine-inducing multimedia overload of Peter Sellars's premiere production of El Niño, first seen in London in 2003 and subsequently excoriated in eloquent prose by the composer himself, John Adams's layered... Read more... |
The Nutcracker, Royal BalletThursday, 24 November 2016
Christmas - in the shape of Peter Wright's Nutcracker - has arrived earlier than usual at the Royal Opera House. This is to make space for a 70th anniversary run of The Sleeping Beauty that starts on 21 December: the two will run in tandem through... Read more... |
Dickensian, BBC OneSunday, 27 December 2015
There are around 800 pages in a Dickensian doorstopper and it has been said around 800 times that if Dickens were working today he would be a show runner on a soap. Finally it has come to pass. Andrew Davies attempted something similar with his... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes: Giotto's NativityThursday, 24 December 2015
Some time in the late 1280s, the artist Cimabue was wandering in the Tuscan countryside when he chanced upon a boy shepherd. According to Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists is the source for most such stories, the boy was “portraying a sheep from... Read more... |
Christmas Oratorio, AAM, Egarr, BarbicanWednesday, 23 December 2015
Relatively recent tweaks to the abundant London concert scene have resulted in top-end events right up to Christmas. We have in part to thank the seasonal festival at St John’s Smith Square, postponing the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes: Ben Nicholson's Christmas Night, 1930Wednesday, 23 December 2015
On this dark, silent night as the world holds its breath in anticipation, everything is still but for the occasional whisper of a breeze ruffling the curtains. It is so quiet that a deer, that most nervous of creatures, has tiptoed all the way up to... Read more... |
Ex Cathedra, St Paul's Church BirminghamMonday, 21 December 2015
Is it possible for a carol concert to have a cult following? Ex Cathedra's annual Christmas Music by Candlelight performances in St Paul’s Church have quietly grown into a Birmingham institution. The audience has evolved its own rituals: camping out... Read more... |
The Insatiable, Inflatable Candylion, National Theatre WalesSunday, 20 December 2015
While Christmas is the season when traditional theatres trot out the tired clichés of panto, the ever-innovative National Theatre Wales have decided, in their wisdom, to stage a surreal, psychedelic theatre-gig at the Sophia Gardens cricket ground... Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 19 December 2015
Dickens’s public readings from his novels were almost as famous and popular as the novels themselves. He would write special scripts that gave prominence to particular characters and that dramatized the salient events of each story; and of all these... Read more... |
Nutcracker, English National Ballet, London ColiseumFriday, 18 December 2015
Christmas legends are not born; they are made. In the case of the Nutcracker, its Christmas indispensability in Britain and America stems not from the original 1892 St Petersburg production, but from 1950s reinterpretations by emigré Russians (... Read more... |
The Little Match Girl, Lilian Baylis Studio TheatreThursday, 17 December 2015
I habitually skipped over Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Girl in my childhood fairy tale compendium because I couldn't bear the sadness (see also: The Happy Prince *sob*). Parents of sensitive children will therefore be relieved to know that... Read more... |
