19th century
Otello, English National OperaSunday, 14 September 2014
From one great operatic storm to another. 2014 opened at English National Opera with David Alden’s Peter Grimes, gale-tossed and wet with sea-spray, and now the director turns his attention to Verdi’s Otello. Restlessly urgent, Edward Gardner’s... Read more... |
Prom 75: Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, GilbertSaturday, 13 September 2014
The silliness of the Last Night is really just a postscript to the penultimate night of the Proms, traditionally given over to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was a tradition restored yesterday evening when Alan Gilbert and the... Read more... |
The Hundred-Foot JourneyFriday, 05 September 2014
Imagine The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel crossed with Chocolat. That’s The Hundred-Foot Journey in one, meshing a previous success of director Lasse Hallström with the previously neglected but growing genre of 'the mature person's movie'. After all,... Read more... |
Prom 53: Brahms Symphonies, Budapest Festival Orchestra, FischerWednesday, 27 August 2014
About 10 minutes into the Brahms Third Symphony I wanted to check a name in the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s programme. I dared to turn a page. Bad idea. Such preternatural stillness had settled over the sold-out Royal Albert Hall that the gesture... Read more... |
Prom 52: Budapest Festival Orchestra, FischerTuesday, 26 August 2014
The first of this year's two Proms by the Budapest Festival Orchestra had looked like a rather strange confection, on paper at least. With eleven scheduled contributions, and only two of them destined to make it into double figures, its timings had... Read more... |
Lady Windermere's Fan, King's Head TheatreMonday, 11 August 2014
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” declares Lord Darlington in Act II of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. He’s the classic Wildean cad - unprincipled, facetiously witty and in this production, possessed of the... Read more... |
Swan Lake, Mariinsky Ballet, Royal Opera HouseSunday, 03 August 2014
For a dance company, the always delicate balance between preserving your heritage and creating an exciting future becomes especially hard to negotiate when you are the most venerable institution in your field. The Mariinsky Ballet, now on tour in... Read more... |
Coppélia, English National Ballet, London ColiseumThursday, 24 July 2014
For all it’s a balmy July here, the litany of appalling news from the world’s conflict zones will have left many of us feeling less than summery at heart. In that frame of mind, you might wonder whether Coppélia, English National Ballet’s latest... Read more... |
The Mill, Series 2, Channel 4 / The Lancaster: Britain's Flying Past, BBC TwoMonday, 21 July 2014
Supposedly, The Mill [*] was Channel 4's highest-rating drama of 2013, and the viewers' reward is this second series. However, the secret of the success of this dour, dimly lit series is hard to fathom. Its attempt to convert the history of working-... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the East Neuk Festival: Littoral SchubertiadSunday, 20 July 2014
Schubert played and sung through a long summer day by the water: what could be more enchanting? The prospect did not take into account the pain in that all too short-lived genius’s late work: when interpreted by a world-class trio, quartet and... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Buxton: Dvořák rarity, Gluck tercentenaryMonday, 14 July 2014
Buxton has gone Bohemian, digging into Dvořák’s treasure trove and celebrating Gluck’s tercentenary. The choice of Dvořák’s The Jacobin fits the Buxton Festival tradition of rooting out neglected works, since this has been unjustly overlooked since... Read more... |
The Queen of Spades, Grange Park OperaFriday, 11 July 2014
For my money, The Queen of Spades is one of the great nineteenth-century operas, a masterpiece of dramma per musica. There will always be pure spirits who cry “vulgar” at late Tchaikovsky. But the charge is absurd. Anyone with ears can hear the... Read more... |
