mythology
theartsdesk at Budapest Wagner Days: Bayreuth on the DanubeSaturday, 01 July 2017
While Merkel's Germany has won back world leadership, Wagner's festival shrine at Bayreuth lost its post-war pre-eminence years ago. There hasn't been a strong Ring there since Kupfer's, which I was lucky enough to see in 1991, and things will only... Read more... |
John Man: Amazons review - the real warrior women of the ancient worldSunday, 25 June 2017
As Wonder Woman hits screens worldwide, the publication of a book that explores the myth and reality of the Amazon seems timely. The latest of John Man’s works of popular history is opportunistic enough to end with a fascinating account of the... Read more... |
L'Orfeo, EBS, Gardiner, Colston Hall, BristolMonday, 29 May 2017
This last of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s semi-staged Monteverdi series took us back practically to the very start of the whole genre. L’Orfeo was presented in Mantua in 1607 as a court opera, and will have been seen and heard by a fraction of the... Read more... |
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword review - Guy Ritchie's deadly weaponThursday, 18 May 2017
Guy Ritchie is back birthing turkeys. Who can remember/forget that triptych of stiffs Swept Away, Revolver and RocknRolla? Now, having redemptively bashed his CV back into shape with the assistance of Sherlock Holmes, the mockney rebel turns to... Read more... |
Picasso: Minotaurs and Matadors, GagosianThursday, 11 May 2017
At 93, Picasso’s revered biographer, Sir John Richardson, has curated a vital new celebration of the artist’s life and work, focusing on one of his most enduring and delightful subjects, the Minotaur. The exhibition at the Gagosian in fact charts... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Neil Gaiman - Norse MythologySunday, 05 February 2017
Odin the All-Father, “lord of the slain, the gallows god”, has two ravens that “perch on his shoulders and whisper into his ears” as he wanders in disguise around the world. They are Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory. Over many centuries, the... Read more... |
Das Rheingold, Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, ManchesterThursday, 01 December 2016
With two of the biggest parts of the tetralogy already behind them, it might have seemed that Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé would aim simply at as near a perfect recording-cum-concert of Das Rheingold as possible, to get one more in the can and head... Read more... |
Stravinsky: Myths and Rituals 4, Philharmonia, Salonen, RFHMonday, 26 September 2016
Stravinsky's music, chameleonic yet always itself, offers so many lines of thought. One struck me immediately with the descending, even harp notes and tender, veiled strings at the start of his 1947 ballet Orpheus last night: the inexorable beat of... Read more... |
The Exterminating Angel, Die Liebe der Danae, Salzburg FestivalWednesday, 03 August 2016
"Because the world has outlived its own downfall, it nevertheless needs art." Paul Celan's words stand alongside Anselm Kiefer's Jacob's Dream, part of a stunning Surrealism-centric exhibition in the foyer of Salzburg's second and more amenable... Read more... |
Die Walküre, Opera North, Southbank CentreThursday, 30 June 2016
Enter the human - and superhuman demands for at least four of the singers - in the second, towering instalment of Wagner's Ring cycle. It says so much for Opera North's achievement so far that no one fell in any way short of the sometimes insane... Read more... |
Das Rheingold, Opera North, Southbank CentreWednesday, 29 June 2016
They promised Wagner for everybody at the Southbank Centre, and so far they're delivering. Community events cluster around a livescreening of each Ring instalment in the Clore Ballroom. We privileged few in the Festival Hall wondered how newcomers... Read more... |
Ariane/Alexandre Bis, Guildhall SchoolWednesday, 01 June 2016
Common wisdom has it that the prolific output of 20th century Czech genius Bohuslav Martinů is very uneven, a judgment surely made without a complete hearing. Some listeners shrink from his fidgety polystylism. Many of us on the fringes of the... Read more... |
