The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Maria Miller, the new Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, indicated in her first speech on culture that when she hears that word she reaches for her calculator. ‘When times are tough and money is tight, our focus must be on culture’s economic impact’ is already a candidate for inclusion in a Dictionary of Political
The conducting career of Sir Colin Davis, who died a fortnight ago, more than that of most interpretative artists, had the aspect of a personal pilgrimage. Though I had no personal acquaintance with him, and don’t know much more about his life than can be gleaned from Wikipedia, I did attend his operatic performances from
Scottish Opera’s new production of The Flying Dutchman, performed in German but advertised in English, is almost a triumph, and very well worth going to see. I reflected, as I travelled by train back from Glasgow to Cambridge, changing only at Edinburgh, York, Peterborough and Ely, that this raw and in some ways crude opera,
Yes, well…aphorisms are never easy to deal with, they are a naturally intimidating form of utterance. If you admit that you don’t understand them, you may well be thought thick. If you reject a request for an explanation of one, on the grounds that what it says can’t be put any other way, you may
For its penultimate HD cinema relay this season the New York Met enterprisingly put on a revival of its production of Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini, with enormous solid sets necessitating three intermissions, and clothes that are a cunning blend of 13th century and art nouveau, and quite ravishing. The audience applauded the Act I set;
This year’s London Handel Festival got under way, as usual, with an opera production at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre. Imeneo, a late opera of Handel, is unusual in several respects. While it is concerned with amorous intrigue and frustration, there is no dynastic or other political dimension, a welcome change, and one
George Benjamin’s Written on Skin is a work of compelling fascination, all the more so in that it is elusive and possibly wilfully puzzling. I want to see it again as soon as possible, and of how many new operas can that be said? Actually, of three that have been premièred at the Royal Opera
It was some time since I’d been to a performance of Mozart’s greatest though not his deepest opera, Le Nozze di Figaro, one of the works of which I can’t imagine ever tiring. And it is, despite some heavy vocal demands, an opera which normally suits students at the music colleges well. There weren’t any
I went to two of the most familiar operas in the repertoire this week, one in HD from the New York Met, the other at the Royal Opera. Both were given in decent if not, with some exceptions, outstanding performances. The experiences led me to think again about the differences between seeing an opera onstage
I saw three operas this week, all centrally concerned with spurned women. That’s not surprising, given the general subject matter of the art form, but it sometimes makes me wonder why we prefer to see, and more importantly to hear, love-tormented women more than men. The only major exception to spring to mind is Wagner’s
This week has featured new productions at the Royal Opera and English National Opera of staples of the repertoire, both subjected to drastic rethinking. Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is the first production at the Royal Opera of the new Director of Opera, Kasper Holten, and on this showing I very much hope it will be the
I approach any production of Mozart’s last opera, La clemenza di Tito, in a state of acute trepidation: it’s not pleasant sitting bored through nearly three hours of one of your favourite two or three composers, one whom you regard as perhaps the most astonishing artist who ever lived. But that is how La clemenza
The revival of Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Minotaur is the most significant artistic event at the Royal Opera since its première, almost five years ago. Unlike Thomas Adès’s more immediately accessible The Tempest, The Minotaur has not gone on to have an international career, though it unquestionably deserves one. With its ideal cast and direction,
There is only one test that a performance of Verdi’s Otello has to pass: do you come out of the theatre drained, desperate at the suffering that human beings who love one another can nonetheless inflict, so that they torture or even kill the object of their love? Shakespeare’s play is about other things besides,
There was a time when the major objection to operatic performances, by those who were wondering whether or not to give them a try, was the level of acting in them. That was in the days before ‘elitism’ and other excuses had been invented. I haven’t heard much about that lately, though of course there
Opera has naturally made no start at all in 2013 in the UK, the month surrounding Christmas being a culture-free zone. By contrast the New York Met has entered the new year with a thrilling production, revived from 2003, of Berlioz’s Les Troyens, a resounding success in all major respects except one. Lovers of this
The Flying Dutchman, Wagner’s first masterpiece, has had a rough passage in the UK over the past few decades. I recall a production at the Royal Opera in the mid-1980s which revealed to me for the first time the possibility that an insensitive director can completely destroy a great work, something which is now commonplace.
In one of his finest essays, Gore Vidal recalls that when he worked as a scriptwriter for MGM the Wise Hack always used to advise his toffee-nosed team that ‘shit has its own integrity’. If crap is what you’re producing, make sure there are no signs in it that that’s what you think it is.
2012 has been an undistinguished year in opera, at any rate in the UK. A combination of cutbacks and the promise of stops being pulled out next year for the bicentenaries of Verdi’s and Wagner’s births and the centenary of Britten’s has led to the big companies counting on our anticipation. Except that, in the
The way the director James Conway sees it, Monteverdi’s last opera L’incoronazione di Poppea is about that most delicate of subjects, adult abuse by youngsters. That isn’t what he says in his programme note for his production at the Royal College of Music, where he claims that the opera is about power, ‘love, yes, but
Some operas become, thanks partly to the frequency with which they are produced, victims of their own popularity. The most obvious sufferer is Carmen, which is a no-winner for singers and directors alike. As soon as the curtain rises and you see lemon trees and swaying hips, your heart sinks and you spend the interval
I think I have developed a crush on Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, which is strange, considering that it is so evidently adorable a work that most opera-goers fall for it straight away. I have never been averse to it, in the way that I am to quite a lot of Donizetti’s work, but in the light
As usual on the rare occasions when Vaughan Williams’s last and largest opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, is performed, the new production at English National Opera has been greeted antiphonally, with cries of ecstasy mingled with indignation that it is so little performed from one side, and moans of boredom and weariness from the other. Though
The Guildhall School of Music and Drama is outdoing itself in putting on a triple bill of little-known operas, two by Massenet and one by Martinu. What is still more remarkable is that GSMD has put them all on before, though I think in different productions. This time round the designer Yannis Thavoris has produced
I thought my 27th Wexford Opera Festival since 1972 was going to be one of the best. I had seen and enjoyed the Cilea and Chabrier operas on the bill at Holland Park and Opera North in the 1990s, and I was intrigued whether Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet was viable music theatre. Wexford
The legend of Faust is perhaps the dominant one in post-Renaissance Europe, yet it resists satisfactory artistic realisation. The most celebrated versions of the legend, such as Marlowe’s and Goethe’s, seem to me to be utter messes aesthetically, retaining their status through the great passages they include rather than through any coherence. Thomas Mann’s Dr
About two of the operas I saw in Leeds this week there is a serious question as to whether or not they are comedies. The third, Gounod’s Faust, is clearly not meant to be; I’ll be writing about it next week. The new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni by Alessandro Talevi is jokey and fast
The Met Live in HD series for 2012–13 got off to a brilliant start with a new production of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, the most warm-hearted of comedies — in fact, a work so genial that I’m always surprised it doesn’t lapse into insipidity. This production by Bartlett Sher made that seem less of a danger
What begins with the borrowing of some capital ends 14 hours later with cataclysmic disaster. It is a drama thousands and thousands in the western hemisphere watch these days — from Seattle to New York, from London to Milan, and from Munich to St Petersburg. Ticket prices are high, although sponsorship money flows in luxuriant