Perhaps it’s appropriate that the first opera I’ve seen at Covent Garden since lockdown is this unflinching depiction of confinement and familial dysfunction, Claus Guth’s new staging of Janáček’s masterpiece, ‘Jenůfa’. (Please beware spoilers in this piece – I’ll be roaming around the entirety of the plot, the better to discuss the production.) The drama…
Category: review
Summer Exhibition 2021 at the Royal Academy of Arts
Summer Exhibitions at the RA are often organised around a single unifying idea – ‘From Life’, say, or ‘Man Made’ – although most years you wonder why they bother, for all the difference it makes to the range (or quality) of submissions. The theme this year, though, ‘Reclaiming Magic’, is apt, because for once the…
Barbican Show of Sculptor and Lighting Designer Isamu Noguchi 1904-1988
In 1988, in the last year of his life, Japanese American artist, Isamu Noguchi, remarked “Art for me is something which teaches human beings how to become more human”. Having just visited the Barbican Centre’s Noguchi show, I can see to what extent art was therapeutic for him. In his sculptures he seems to have…
The American Art Tapes. Voices of Twentieth-Century Art
In 1965 English artist John Jones set off to the US, his objective, to spend a year interviewing America’s greatest artists. The resulting taped interviews provide the material for The American Art Tapes. It’s been a while since I’ve been so gripped by an art book. All of America’s key artists feature, and through them it…
Vital organ: Anna Lapwood, ‘Images’
No matter how long I’ve listened seriously to classical music – and with a mere decade of doing so behind me, I’m still one of the beginners – it’s always a good thing to be reminded that I’ll remain a learner for the duration, until my senses fail. There are always new sounds and new…
Solem Quartet plays Thomas Ades
For their debut album the Solem Quartet embrace the theme of night and day. Heading up the line-up of contemporary composers on this concept album, we have Thomas Adès, with Solem Quartet’s new commission of Four Quarters. Commencing with Nightfall, febrile violins denote ancient stars in distant galaxies with groaning cello and viola signifying earth. In Morning Dew, plucked violin strings…
Memorials in music on the twentieth anniversary of September 11th
9/11 : 20 Memorials on the twentieth anniversary of September 11th Adam Swayne, piano British pianist Adam Swayne’s latest disc marks the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 – a date which is deeply, painfully etched on our collective modern memory – and seeks to demonstrate ways in which composers memorialise or commemorate disaster through works by…
Rock opera: ENO’s ‘Tosca’ at South Facing Festival
Once there was a time when I would have been fully on top of such exciting news: a rock festival just down the road at Crystal Palace Bowl. Only a few stops on the train, or a mere jaunt on the bus, without any need to negotiate the seething metropolis. In fact, the news reached…
Olena Tokar – the soprano with soul
With her album Charmes, Ukranian soprano Olena Tokar shows her love of female song repertoire from the 19thand 20th century. Women composers have historically been thin on the ground, but the ones who received public attention, either in their time or more recently, were, and remain, utterly fascinating. On the album, we have the feisty Alma Mahler, who threatened…
‘Historical Fiction’ Forshaw brings sax to the baroque.
Karine Hetherington from ArtMuseLondon caught up with composer and saxophonist, Christian Forshaw, and soprano Grace Davidson, shortly before the release of their latest album, Historical Fiction. Christian’s arrangement of Handel’s ‘Eternal Source of Light Divine’ has already attracted 36,000 views on YouTube and was featured on Classic FM. Christian and Grace, what are your earliest musical memories? C: Beatles and choral…
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