mythology
Cecilia Bartoli Sings Handel, Barbican HallWednesday, 08 December 2010
Cecilia Bartoli invites you to her party, she stands on stage beaming and welcoming you as her guest, about to serve up a banquet of song. This is what last night’s concert felt like in the glowing warmth of this remarkable Italian mezzo-soprano’s... Read more... |
BBC National Orchestra of Wales, St David's Hall, CardiffFriday, 12 November 2010
How much do you know about centaurs? Probably you know they are horses below the withers, human above. But did you know they were heavy drinkers who once got out of hand at the wedding of the King of the Lapiths, tried to rape the bride and got... Read more... |
Sylvia, Royal BalletWednesday, 03 November 2010
Places, please, deliciousness, please. This is Delibes, a man whose music goes with delectable disbelief, and this is that zany thing, a Fifties nymph ballet, so let us sip hallucinogenic Arcadian cocktails and leave normality at the cloakroom. But... Read more... |
Iphigenie auf Tauris, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Sadler's WellsFriday, 29 October 2010
Iphigenia is an abandoned child, almost murdered by her father, lost in bewilderment, captured and indoctrinated in an artificial existence. It hardly matters that her father was the legendary Greek hero Agamemnon, her mother the notorious... Read more... |
Ariadne auf Naxos, Welsh National OperaFriday, 08 October 2010
Ariadne auf Naxos, according to its librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is all about fidelity: fidelity in love, fidelity in art, fidelity in spirit. Ariadne on her island, abandoned by Theseus, can give herself to Bacchus only by persuading herself... Read more... |
Niobe, Regina di Tebe, Royal OperaFriday, 24 September 2010
One after the other they came. Stunning aria after stunning aria. Affecting in their harmonies, infectious in their rhythms, arresting in their textures, vivid in their melodies. The Royal Opera had taken a mighty gamble with Agostino Steffani's 300... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe: Bo Burnham/ Ovid's Metamorphoses/ Tony Tanner's CharlatanSaturday, 28 August 2010
Bo Burnham says he doesn’t like the terms musical comic, internet sensation or teenage wonder. Well he’s all three, save the last now, as he turned 20 during this year’s Fringe - and anyway he prefers the term prodigy, he tells us in deadpan tones... Read more... |
Semele, Théâtre de Champs-ÉlyséesThursday, 01 July 2010
David McVicar's revival production of Handel's oratorio-cum-opera Semele isn't terribly clever or beautiful or impressive, or fecund with ideas or detail or emotion. But it does work. It does tell the story. And what brings colour to its initially... Read more... |
Salome, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 24 June 2010
The last time I saw Oscar Wilde’s biblical tale it was performed by dancer Lindsay Kemp at the Roundhouse in London, back in the 1970s, in a production that was high on dope, incense, strange vocal drawling - and which transported you very quickly... Read more... |
Atlantis: The Evidence, BBC TwoThursday, 03 June 2010
Here’s a question: what have the eminent Victorian statesman and four-times prime minister William Gladstone and the Nazi Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler have in common? Well, if you didn’t catch last night’s Timewatch Special, you'd probably never... Read more... |
Eurydice, Young Vic TheatreTuesday, 11 May 2010
Since Eurydice was the ill-fated wife of Orpheus, master musician, it’s not inappropriate that this reworking of the classical myth by the award-winning US writer Sarah Ruhl should be so much like a song. Her language has a kind of blunt lyricism,... Read more... |
Gnosis, Akram Khan, Sadler's Wells TheatreTuesday, 27 April 2010
Gnosis means spiritual knowledge, or recognition. Surely Akram Khan has some unusual intuition about what it means to die, since his latest creation is truly a dance of death and the gods certainly seem to have been bent on preventing it.It was... Read more... |
