1920s
Oedipe, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review - Enescu's masterpiece glorious and completeMonday, 25 September 2017
It’s official: Romanian master George Enescu’s four-act Greek epic lives and breathes as a work of transcendent genius. It took last year’s Royal Opera production to lead us further along the path established by the magnificent EMI studio recording... Read more... |
Pagliacci/L’enfant et les sortilèges, Opera North review - off and on with the motleyMonday, 18 September 2017
The first two one-acters in Opera North’s season called The Little Greats were unveiled on Saturday. There are six in all, scheduled on a mix-and-match basis so Leeds opera-goers can choose their own tapas menu: grab one show, choose from various... Read more... |
'Making it new' - Blake Morrison on adaptation, and how his new play came to lifeWednesday, 13 September 2017
Is there anything more terrifying for a playwright than the first day of rehearsals? For months, even years, you’ve been working and reworking the text, saying the words aloud to yourself in an empty room and imagining the actors saying them to a... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Der müde TodFriday, 28 July 2017
"Weary Death" – "Destiny", the English-language title, is weak by comparison – settles in a small German town, an impressive simulation constructed on a back lot of the Babelsberg Studio outside Berlin. He buys a plot in the churchyard, builds... Read more... |
Portraying a Nation, Tate Liverpool review – an inspired juxtapositionMonday, 26 June 2017
Portraying a Nation juxtaposes photographs by August Sander with paintings by Otto Dix. It's an inspired idea as both artists wanted to hold up a mirror to German society during a time of extreme change. Dix described his lucid form of critical... Read more... |
The Discovery of Mondrian review - the most comprehensive survey everMonday, 05 June 2017
Standing inside the Gemeentemuseum’s life-size reconstruction of Mondrian’s Paris studio, the painter’s reputation as an austere recluse seems well-deserved. Returning from Holland to France after the First World War, he lived and worked in what... Read more... |
Turandot, Opera NorthMonday, 15 May 2017
I’ve seen the future, and it’s semi-staged. The gains here are far more significant than the losses. And where Opera North’s minimalist Leeds Town Hall Ring let Peter Mumford’s video projections fill in the gaps, this new production of Turandot... Read more... |
Three Comrades, Sovremennik review - well-oiled Russian take on 1920s BerlinFriday, 05 May 2017
Time runs on different lines in Russian theatre to our own. The 83-year-old Galina Volchek co-founded Moscow's Sovremennik Theatre in 1956, and has been its artistic director for the past 45 years; Three Comrades has held its place in the... Read more... |
Decline and Fall review - 'a riotously successful adaptation'Saturday, 01 April 2017
Like many first novels, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall has a strong whiff of autobiography. It is a revenge comedy in which Waugh – like Kingsley Amis after him in Lucky Jim – transmutes his miserable experiences of teaching in Wales into savage... Read more... |
CD: Jarvis Cocker & Chilly Gonzales - Room 29Saturday, 11 March 2017
Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales’ first collaborative album is a song-cycle centred around the piano in the titular room of the Château Marmont in West Hollywood – a hotel with a reputation as something of a den of iniquity during the Roaring... Read more... |
The Wild Party, The Other PalaceTuesday, 21 February 2017
The Other Palace’s housewarming party certainly lives up to its billing as a wild one – wet and wild, in fact, as the first three rows are sporadically doused with bathtub gin. The theatre formerly known as St James, revamped by purchaser Andrew... Read more... |
Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov, Wigmore HallMonday, 20 February 2017
Polish composer Szymanowski's Ovid triptych Mythes achieved something like cult status thanks to an iridescent recording. Everyone knew the pianist, the great Krystian Zimerman; the violinist, Kaja Danczowska, less so (where is she now?). A better-... Read more... |
