medieval
Marina Vaizey
Dan Jones has turned up to narrate the dramatised story of the Plantagenets in history lite mode, perhaps aimed at capturing a young audience. In Plantagenet country, as shown on TV, we witness a medieval version of soap opera family sagas where all hinges on an overbearing father, a conniving queen, murder, and general mayhem. The tale, we were informed, was shocking, brutal, more astonishing than any fiction, and this ruling family, from its inception with Henry II of Anjou, became the greatest English dynasty of all time. (Tell that to the Hanoverians.)Who knows what marketing guru decided Read more ...
David Nice
As a town of 70,000 or so people, Bamberg boxes dazzlingly above its weight in at least two spheres. The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, risen to giddy heights under its chief conductor of the last 14 years Jonathan Nott, is decisively among Germany’s top five, and acknowledged as such in its substantial state funding (to the enviable tune of 80 percent, a figure known elsewhere, I believe, only in Norway). And a galaxy of great buildings has won the place UNESCO World Heritage status. Strange, then, that the British don’t seem to realise, as do the Americans, Chinese, Japanese and Italians – Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What is one to make of Lohengrin, Wagner’s last “opera” (as opposed to music drama), in this day and age? Is it a medieval romance, like Weber’s Freischütz but with a deus ex machina at the beginning rather than the end; or is it a nineteenth-century domestic melodrama in disguise, with the hero revealed in the bedroom scene as a Papal Nuncio travelling incognito. Why mustn’t Elsa ask his name? Is it, as Lothar Koenigs hints in the WNO programme, some echo of Wagner’s doubts about his own (possibly, as he thought, Jewish) parentage? Or is it rather a pre-echo of modern password culture, with Read more ...
Steve Clarkson
Is it the greatest story ever told, or the most indulgent nativity ever staged? The return of the York Mystery Plays – this summer’s blue-ribbon theatrical spectacular in the North – begins by beguiling, ends up bemusing, while in between is a sacred story about the eternal battle of good and evil, from Creation to the Last Judgement. The show’s subject matter is as epic as its telling, which involves more than 1700 volunteers (including 500 cast members) and takes place in the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey. It is the UK’s largest outdoor theatre production this year.The timing of this showpiece Read more ...
judith.flanders
In 1757, what had previously been the royal collection of manuscripts was handed over to the nascent British Museum. Edward IV, who started the collection in the 15th century, had created a collection of books designed to display the greater glory of God and (by extension) his chosen sovereigns and country: the Yorkist leader in the Wars of the Roses used these books, and the images they contained, to create a propaganda machine to suggest that God was on his side. Today the struggles of history are for the most part left to specialists, but the gorgeous propaganda machine is accessible to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although billed as “a fresh look at the Middle Ages through the eyes of children”, presenter Dr Stephen Baxter had to admit the bulk of historic evidence for how medieval children lived their lives was written by adults. Unfiltered accounts from a child’s perspective are rare. Poring over the 1086 Domesday Book, the census of who, what and where, he noted that children aren’t mentioned. Evoking the barely known is a hard log to roll, and this frustrating programme barely nudged it along.Dr Baxter spent most of the programme striding purposefully, following the director’s yen to inject a sense Read more ...
David Nice
From 69 hours of King James Bible reading over Easter Week to this racy evening of adapted medieval pith as we head towards Assumption Day, the word they tell us is God moves in fluid if not necessarily mysterious ways around the Globe. “Mysteries” refers to the guilds that put on these popular street shows in the Middle Ages, real enough for the company of York Pinners, say, to supervise the nailing to the cross. It needs the forthright actors and everyday props of Deborah Bruce's alternately funny and quietly moving production, as well as the blood and sawdust you can taste in Tony Harrison Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Down the stairs the visitor enters a sequence of galleries gleaming with gold, seemingly illuminated by softly filtered evening light and flickering candles: here be a treasure house of stories in paint: saints, sinners and the narrative of the divine made flesh, from the Annunciation to the crucifixion. Some 40 Italian altarpieces, from the 13th through to the 15th centuries – some whole but most just fragments – are theatrically displayed to suggest the atmosphere of late medieval and early Renaissance Italian churches, monasteries and convents.Along the way we are told of patrons and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the end, the media-industrial complex which takes responsibility for entertaining the planet doesn’t put your needs and mine near the top of the pile. But I think we know this already. Why am I even saying it? Saying it again. Bears make their toilet in the woods, pontiffs wave from balconies and highly remunerated people in Hollywood with popcorn for brains chair meetings the usual product of which are brazenly cheap concepts like Your Highness. Then they feed it to post-pubescents with an insatiable hunger for jokes about penises.Your Highness takes the spirit and the ethos of the gross- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tansy Davies’s neon and inside out 2 can’t help but recall Stravinsky’s 1940s commission for Woody Herrmann’s orchestra, the Ebony Concerto. There’s an idiomatic use of rich, low-pitched sounds (plenty of bassoon and bass clarinet), and insidious, catchy dance rhythms bounce away in the bass. There’s a hint of Louis Andriessen-style Euro-Minimalism too; these are pieces which really move. But there’s a satisfying darkness to Davies’s imagination; for all the foot-tapping, this is music with unsettling power and immediacy.The main work on the disc is the recent song cycle Troubairitz - Read more ...
David Nice
Vienna has its New Year's Day concert, conducted this year with some style but not quite enough sensuousness by Franz Welser-Möst. London could do worse for a more modest equivalent than let the Wooden O play host to a well-spiced small package of carols, seasonal songs and readings from Chaucer's times to Thomas Hardy's. But sing and play it lustily, ye Gabrieli ladies and gentlemen, or not at all. And it's sad to report that the proceedings got off to a start as soggy as the winter's afternoon they were supposed to keep at bay.Were those well-muffled chorenes at sixes and sevens really the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s taken 20 years for Ken Follett’s doorstopping saga to storm the little screen in the corner of the room. According to Rufus Sewell, playing a stonemason who knows about these things, it takes only 15 to knock up a spanking new Gothic cathedral complete with the latest in flying buttresses. Not that it would be fair to compare The Pillars of the Earth with the pillars of any of the great churches erected in England in the period under observation here. You don’t get lifeless gargoyles of this quality in the Middle Ages.In the restless pursuit of authenticity, a British cast has been hired Read more ...