Paris
Classical CDs: Hens, Hamburg and handmaidsSaturday, 26 July 2025
Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht: The Complete Erato Recordings (Erato)We’re fortunate that Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht (1880-1965) actually got as far as making a career in music. The aspiring violinist and composer was expelled from the Paris... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Rebel / The Punch and Judy ManTuesday, 22 July 2025
Comedian Tony Hancock’s vertiginous rise and fall is neatly traced in the two films he completed in the early 1960s. The warning signs were already present when 1961’s The Rebel (★★★★) was released. Hancock’s BBC career had been enormously... Read more... |
Edward Burra, Tate Britain review - watercolour made mainstreamWednesday, 18 June 2025
It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour... Read more... |
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life review - persuading us that the French can do you-know-whoFriday, 13 June 2025
Do the French do irony? Well, was Astérix a Gaul? Obviously they do, and do it pretty well to judge by many of their movies down the decades. As we brave the salutes on this side of the Channel to arch irony-spinner Jane Austen’s 250th birth-year –... Read more... |
Il Trittico, Opéra de Paris review - reordered Puccini works for a phenomenal singing actorTuesday, 27 May 2025
So here in Paris, as at Salzburg in 2022, it’s no longer “Puccini’s Trittico” but “the Asmik Grigorian Trittico 3-1-2”. Which would be a very bad idea if she were a lazy diva like Anna Netrebko. But Grigorian works selflessly within wonderfully... Read more... |
Farewell Mister Haffmann, Park Theatre review - French hit of confusing genre, with a real historical villainWednesday, 12 March 2025
When Yasmina Reza’s cerebral play Art arrived in London in 1996, we applauded it as a comedy. Now another French hit, Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s Adieu Monsieur Haffmann, has landed, and the genre confusions could start all over again.This is a story... Read more... |
Jacqueline Feldman: Precarious Lease review - living on the edgeSaturday, 08 February 2025
Taking on some of the contingent, nebulous quality of its subject, Jacqueline Feldman’s Precarious Lease examines the beginning and the end – in 2013 – of the famous Parisian squat, Le Bloc, thinking through the triumphs and consequences of the... Read more... |
BBC Singers, Aurora Orchestra, Collon, Kings Place review - on the way to heaven via King's CrossSaturday, 01 February 2025
Just now, music about survival, transcendence and the afterlife may have a special resonance for the BBC Singers. After all, the supremely versatile century-old chamber choir has endured its own near-death experience – at the hands of the BBC top... Read more... |
The Maids, Jermyn Street Theatre review - new broom sweeps clean in fierce revivalMonday, 13 January 2025
There are two main reasons to revive classics. The first is that they are really good; the second is that they have something to say about how the world is changing, perhaps more accurately, how our perception of it is changing. Both are true of... Read more... |
Maria review - Pablo Larraín's haunting portrait of an opera legendFriday, 10 January 2025
As Bono once commented about Luciano Pavarotti, “the opera follows him off stage”. Legendary soprano Maria Callas would have known exactly what he meant, and she herself said “an opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it... Read more... |
The English Concert, Bicket, Wigmore Hall review - a Baroque banquet for ChristmasMonday, 23 December 2024
Enough is as good as a feast, they say. But sometimes, especially at Christmas, you crave a properly groaning table. At the Wigmore Hall, The English Concert, directed by Harry Bicket, concluded their festive Baroque banquet with Bach’s Magnificat... Read more... |
Paris Has Fallen, Prime Video review - Afghan war veteran wreaks a terrible vengeanceThursday, 14 November 2024
You might assume that the “Has Fallen” in the title of this Anglo-French thriller connotes the presence of Scottish lunk Gerard Butler (as in Angel Has Fallen, London Has Fallen and Olympus Has Fallen), but there’s no Gerard in sight. Instead, in... Read more... |
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