wed 06/11/2024

Renaissance

Stile Antico, The Cardinall's Musick, Wigmore Hall online review – lightening our darkness

Suitably enough, this year’s musical Christmas arrived at the Wigmore not in a dazzle of joyful light and bedecked with winter greenery, but with a lonely band of singers facing the gloom of an unlit, empty hall as fear and confusion multiplied...

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How Lonely Sits The City, Dunedin Consort online review - almost as good as being in the concert hall

It’s hard to remember that distant time back in March before we were all digital experts, when the idea of watching a live-streamed performance was still novel and intriguing. Fast-forward eight months and serious screen-based fatigue has set in....

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Britain’s Lost Masterpieces, Episode Three, BBC Four review – more than a bit of Botticelli

Once again the whodunit becomes the whoforgedit in the newest installment of the Britain’s Lost Masterpieces series. Host and art historian Bendor Grosvenor introduces us to what is one of the most beautiful he’s ever seen: a Madonna and Child...

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Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing, The Queen's Gallery review - peerless drawings, rarely seen

It is a commonplace to describe Leonardo as an enigma whose genius, and perhaps even something of his character, is revealed through his works. But as his works survive only in incomplete and fragmented form, it is drawing, the practice common to...

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Los Angeles Master Chorale, Gershon, Sellars, Barbican review – embodiments of remorse

By some strange alignment of the stars, Peter Sellars’s staged version of Orlando di Lasso’s Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of St Peter) arrived at the Barbican Hall just as – next door in the theatre – Pam Tanowitz’s directed her dance interpretation...

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Mantegna and Bellini, National Gallery review - curated for curators

Pitched as “a tale of two artists”, the National Gallery’s big autumn show promises a history woven in shades of friendship and rivalry, marriage and family, privilege and hard graft. Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini were brothers-in-law,...

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Charles I: King and Collector, Royal Academy review - a well executed display of taste

Titian! Mantegna!  Rubens! Dürer! Veronese! Van Dyck! Raphael! Velazquez! About 140 works which were once part of Charles I’s 2,000-strong collection are reunited in a sumptuous collaboration between the Royal Academy and the Royal Collection....

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Breaking the Rules, LSO St Luke's review – music and murder with Gesualdo

The “concert drama” is on the up, offering audiences a mingled-genre means to experience music and its context simultaneously. The author and singer Clare Norburn has an absolute peach of a story to tell in the "imagined testimony of Carlo Gesualdo...

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From Life, Royal Academy review - perplexingly aimless

Dedicated to a foundation stone of western artistic training, this exhibition attempts a celebratory note as the Royal Academy approaches its 250th anniversary. But if the printed guide handed to visitors offers a detailed overview of working from...

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Monochrome, National Gallery review - colourless but not dreary

Might a painting ever achieve the veracity of a sculpture, a "real" object in space that we can walk around and view from every angle? Could the documentary quality of an engraving ever be equalled by a painting? And how could painting respond to...

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The Tallis Scholars, Phillips, Cadogan Hall review - intimacy in late Renaissance music

Peter Phillips and the Tallis Scholars have nothing to prove when it comes to Renaissance choral music – few ensembles can match them for clarity, balance and purity of tone. They are perfect guides, then, for this tour of the late Italian...

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The Encounter, National Portrait Gallery review - dazzlingly evocative drawings

As a line flows or falters, registering each slight change in pressure, pause, or occasional reworking, it seems to offer a glimpse into the mind of the artist at work. The line is the instrument of the artist’s eye, the often unpolished,...

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