France
stephen.walsh
What a fabulous score Pelléas et Mélisande is, and what a joy to be able to hear it in a concert performance without the distraction of some over-sophisticated director’s self-communings. Well, if only. What last night’s Prom in fact served up was a kind of abstract of Stefan Herheim’s Glyndebourne production, semi-staged by Sinéad O’Neill without its organ-room setting and all that that entailed, but with a great deal of its dramaturgical clutter still intact. This was emphatically a performance for the radio. I was in the Albert Hall, but I suspect the orchestral playing will have Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Georges Simenon began to write his Inspector Maigret mysteries in the early 1930s. Not long after after, the famously productive Belgian-born novelist – who could polish off a Maigret inside a fortnight – branched out into more ambitious, less formulaic but equally addictive stories of guilt, obsession, murder and the treacherous ambiguities of justice. These romans durs, “tough novels”, were painted in the deepest shades of noir. Fierce, bleak and written with a propulsive sense of pace and focus, they unfold against an austere and pitiless moral landscape of greed, lust, pride and deceit, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At its most impactful, Époques is an aural analogue to the occasions in Tarkovsky’s Stalker when the explorers of “The Zone” find their perceptions of what might be reality warped, and when there’s a growing realisation that this may be a place with a consciousness. Rather than being blurred, boundaries have become meaningless. With the album’s “The Only Water”, creaking, sawing strings and whooshing sounds give way to a structured composition where forward steps are impeded by a heavy yet impalpable object. The even-more brooding “Ultramarine” meshes rasping cello with ominous booming and Read more ...
Katherine Waters
"I am dead," declares Okot before recounting the horrors he survived to reach Calais. Each time, he says, "I died." How many times can you die before you are truly dead? What is it that finally kills you? These are the questions at the heart of Good Chance’s dramatisation of the lives of the inhabitants of Calais’s Jungle which has transferred to the Playhouse Theatre following its critically acclaimed sell-out run at the Young Vic over the winter.It’s a feat of a transfer which has transformed West End plush and gilt into chipboard and oilcloth. Proscenium and stage have been swallowed Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
The daily car ferry from Newhaven in Sussex to Dieppe in Normandy is an unlikely phenomenon. Neither port is very large; neither region very populous, and the journey sways you along for four contemplative hours. It enjoys the custom of truckers, school parties, and retired caravan-owners. But it also caters for art lovers with time on their hands.Since 2014, the maritime link has been celebrated by a festival of "contemporary creation". It’s not all about the boat, but in peak summer this year, there will be a group show on the waves. The full collection of exhibitions and events are within Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s a truism that history is written by the victors, but nowhere in classical music is the argument made more persuasively than in the legacy and reputation of Charles Gounod. In a year in which you can hardly move for Bernstein and Debussy-related events, a year in which even Couperin and Parry are getting a good showing, as well as the too-often-neglected Lili Boulanger, the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth is passing all but uncelebrated in the UK.It’s a sign of just how far out of fashion Gounod has fallen that none of the major British houses is taking the opportunity to stage Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In an era marked by virtue-signalling, it's perhaps no surprise that Isabelle Huppert – a woman who has always gone against the grain – has opted for a little vice-signalling. Unlike other French screen icons, she is not part of the female cohort that railed against the #MeToo movement, yet she has defined herself through roles mired in moral ambiguity, not least as the video games executive who seeks revenge on her rapist in Elle (pictured below). To therefore pair Huppert with her infamously lubricious countryman, the Marquis de Sade, seems like a marriage happily forged in the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Not far into Aftermath, Tate Britain’s new exhibition looking at how the experience of World War One shaped artists working in its wake, hangs a group of photographs by Pierre Anthony-Thouret depicting the damage inflicted on Reims. Heavy censorship during the war combined with the traumatic human toll meant that lone helmets and ravaged trees came to stand easily for the dead, while wrecked landscapes and crumbling buildings questioned the senselessness of such utter destruction.In one photograph the cathedral crouches like an abject creature, low and painful behind a foreground strafed with Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The literary allusions and aspirations come thick and fast in this roomy, novelistic, most French of films from Arnaud Desplechin. Naming its characters after Joyce and Melville, interpolating passages from Philip Roth and Bernard Hermann’s score for Hitchcock’s Marnie, it’s a fictional film à clef within a partially real one about a neurotic director from Roubaix (which is also Desplechin’s hometown).Its opening scenes grip and intrigue, as middle-aged spies in Paris contemplate the misadventures of their strangest recruit, Ivan Dedalus (Louis Garrel), with his “unlikely face” and enigmatic Read more ...
Richard Bratby
How to judge a genius who died at 25? Gerald Larner, in his programme note for this concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, suggests that Lili Boulanger’s tragically early death was actually central to her achievement. She knew she probably wouldn’t see 30, and directed her energies accordingly. The result is unlike anything else that was being written during the First World War: music with all the invention, fire and vaulting ambition of youth, underpinned by an awareness of mortality that’s less like a creeping terror than some mighty, towering presence on the horizon – Read more ...
Katherine Waters
I’ve forgotten my wallet. This is both embarrassing (where did the fun lush part between callow youth and irrefutable senility disappear?) and upsetting because by the interval of the Finborough Theatre’s revival of French symbolist writer Paul Claudel’s immensely prolix, indulgently semi-autobiographical, astonishingly declamatory and undeniably self-flagellatory play Break of Noon, I'm in need of a drink as stiff as the acting.How many adjectives can fit into a sentence? How many words can be used when one will suffice? Why say “fearful” when being “scared” and harrowed to the “pith” of Read more ...
David Nice
Singing satirist Anna Russell placed the French chanson in her category of songs for singers "with no voice but tremendous artistry". Mezzo Karen Cargill has tremendous artistry but also a very great voice indeed, a mysterious gift which makes her one in a thousand, and also rather good French (put that down to Scotland's "Auld Alliance, perhaps). Whether her particular choice of the Gallic repertoire was ideal to sustain three-quarters of a Wigmore song recital which fell a bit short of the greatness she undoubtedly owns is another matter.You spend all your life not hearing a gem, Hahn’s Read more ...