ENO’s production of Berg’s Lulu, first mounted three years ago, is one of its outstanding successes. Richard Jones, the director, seems to feel a special affinity with Berg, to judge from his recent and wonderful Wozzeck for WNO. Yet Berg’s two operas couldn’t be more different. Stravinsky complained, as many people have, about the big
It’s quite hard to enjoy Shakespeare’s history plays these days if you have any sympathy for Blair’s decision to throw in Britain’s lot with America in the Iraq war. First, Nicholas Hytner gave us a revisionist version of Henry V in which the young king was portrayed as a shallow glory-seeker willing to embark on
When I started visiting Barcelona in 1961, its museums were both thin on the ground and impoverished, and the lingua franca between the Catalans and the British was French, without which it was, if one had neither Spanish nor Catalan, hard to survive. Today the city is awash with fine, well-funded museums and, for anyone
Peter Coker died in December last year after a long illness. He had been involved in the initial choice of material for this small but representative memorial exhibition, and would I think have approved of the final result, which succeeds in bringing together work from the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. It’s a commercial show
Genghis Khan (BBC1, Monday) was a remarkable 60-minute documentary. Normally, something filmed on such a massive scale would be stretched to last several hours over many weeks. I can only assume that the Mongolian extras work for much less than their British counterparts. Mongolians playing Mongolians, eh? In television terms that’s the equivalent of people
