As I write, there is just under a fortnight left – including two weekends – to see the Royal Academy’s retrospective of South African artist William Kentridge. I urge you to go if you can. Kentridge also directs and stages opera, and it’s thanks to English National Opera (‘ENO’) that I first encountered his work….
Category: review
Paul Newman The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man. A Memoir
Paul Newman – The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man is not a straight memoir as the title suggests, focusing principally on the man rather than the movie actor, whose star shone for many a decade over Hollywood till his death in 2008. Though his career was long, to some, his most enigmatic and most interesting…
Picture This : Mireille Vautier Sewing Stories
The line of a pen or pencil is like a thread that you pull which unravels. With this idea came the desire to embroider. Without really knowing how to embroider, I wanted to simply draw with thread. I’ve chosen to embroider this book and by doing so I preserve its identity. It’s almost as if…
Interview with French Conductor Christophe Rousset, musical director of period ensemble ‘Les Talens Lyriques’.
Armide opens tomorrow at L’Opéra Comique in Paris. The opera house has been restored to its former glory – how does it feel to be performing in such a space? It’s a place which holds many fond memories for me. I have worked here often and I had my first conducting experience at L’Opéra Comique…
An Enlightened Staging of Gluck’s ‘Armide’, a Tale of a Tough Woman Scorned at L’Opéra Comique Paris.
This weekend I travelled to Paris to the newly restored Opéra Comique where a new production of Gluck’s Armide has opened. You could be forgiven for not ever having heard of Armide. It was conceived in the 17th century with a score by Lully before Gluck came up with a new musical setting in the late 18th century. Taken…
Ifs and cuts
It’s not often I start a piece for ArtMuseLondon in a state of anger. Or shock. Or bewilderment. Today it’s all three. I could wait for my ire to subside, but see no reason to. In a situation where it seems impossible to do something, at least I can demonstrate I feel something. Arts Council…
“Inspired programming; exceptional playing” – Shostakovich String Quartet Cycle at Kings Place with the Brodsky Quartet
Guest review by David Lake The Brodsky Quartet – sometimes called ‘the British Kronos’ – have been around for 50 years, but, as Paul Cassidy tells us, “have only played the complete Shostakovich cycle three times”, his soft, lightly-lilting Derry accent lulling us into the belief that we’re in for a relaxed weekend of ever-so-soft…
Organised K-os: ‘Hallyu! – The Korean Wave’, V&A, London
‘Hallyu’ – the eye-catching title of this big-ticket exhibition at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (‘V&A’) – translates as ‘Korean wave’, the phrase used to describe Korean culture’s steady rise to prominence over the last 25 years or so. Informed by a K-pop aesthetic, it’s a heady, day-glo, assault-on-the-senses experience. Throw yourself into it and…
Greatest hits: Joby Burgess, ‘A Percussionist’s Songbook’
A fascinating record with wide-ranging ambition and, surely, mass appeal. Joby Burgess has created a release for classical label Signum that could sit equally comfortably in the rock or ‘world’ genres, such are its broad range of influences and audible sense of adventure. * In his sleeve notes, Burgess mentions his exposure to all kinds…
Debussy’s and Shostakovich’s Preludes performed at King’s Place
For the London Piano Festival at King’s Place, Katya Apekisheva and Noriko Ogawa presented a programme of 20th century preludes. Preludes are mostly associated with J.S. Bach and his masterly eighteenth-century Well Tempered Clavier, where the prelude and the accompanying fugue represented two short movements written in the same key. Chopin rebranded the prelude and made it a…
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