This has not been an appalling year for pop music — it was better than 1984, for example, and 1961. Simply put, it was a year in search of a direction, one foot planted in 1980s cheese or bombast, the other still dipping its toe into the now mind-sapping boredom of EDM, with the occasional
Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits — nervous, intense and enigmatic — are among the most memorable to be painted in 16th-century Italy, but his fellow Venetians didn’t see it that way. In a letter to Lotto of 1548, the poet and satirist Pietro Aretino wrote that he was ‘outclassed in the profession of painting’ by Titian. Now,
Grade: A- Berlioz’s Les Troyens, one of the greatest operatic masterpieces, manages to be neglected even if it is quite often performed. The vast reputations of the most popular operatic composers seem to grow ever larger with the years, but Berlioz somehow always needs defending. Listening to this latest CD set, ‘live’ from Strasbourg,
It was in his organ loft at Arnstadt that I began my acquaintance with Johann Sebastian Bach — with JSB, with the young man, with the writer, the fighter, the lover. After the great walk of his in 1705 that we would follow, and after his return trek in February 1706, he would be caught
You can pay homage to a ballet classic or you can tear it up and reinvent it. Both approaches were on offer in London a fortnight ago: a revival of Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia, set to Léo Delibes’s 1876 score, and a Swan Lake from Michael Keegan-Dolan that ditches Tchaikovsky, tutus and toe shoes and relocates
One of the members of the government’s HS2 Growth Taskforce is remembering the first time he went to a gay club. ‘There was a club in Coventry that was only open on a Sunday night, at the Quadrant, and a mate of mine said, “There’s a DJ there who plays some fantastic music that I
‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ That was the P.T. Barnum battle cry. It has come to have a ring of contempt, but no one loved a sucker more than Barnum. Entertain them, he said. Thrill them, shock them. Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry. Give ’em the old razzle-dazzle. And if, in the course
Here we go again. Partridges in pear trees. Lovely big Christmas turkey. The Queen’s speech. And then, at some point during the Yuletide season, some version or other of Dickens’s ghost story A Christmas Carol. This year’s glut of Scrooge stories includes the Old Vic’s major production starring Rhys Ifans (reviewed by Lloyd Evans in
A new play at the Bush with a catchy political title. Parliament Square introduces us to Kat, a young Scots mum, who abandons her baby girl and her devoted husband and commutes to London to kill herself. She doesn’t want to die but shrill voices in her head are urging her to turn her body
BBC1’s The Miniaturist (26/7 December) is a lavish two-part adaptation of Jessie Burton’s bestseller. It’s also further proof that almost any geographical and historical setting can be conscripted to tell us what’s apparently the only story we’re interested in these days: an alliance of plucky and unfailingly virtuous black people, gay people and women taking
Molly’s Game marks the directorial debut of Hollywood’s most celebrated screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, and is based on his adaptation of the memoir by Molly Bloom. Nope, me neither, but she’s the one-time Olympic skier who, at the age of 26, started a high-stakes poker game for ‘the richest, the most powerful men in the world’
The season of Advent, for most children, means anticipation, gleeful waiting, the counting down of days. But after a certain age the build-up to Christmas changes its nature, becomes more like anxious preparation. It can, though, be thought of as a time of reflection. Radio 3’s Christmas Around Europe has for years nourished that feeling
