Carmen at ENO Bizet’s Carmen has probably been the world’s most performed opera since it premiered at the L’Opéra Comique in Paris in 1875. Scroll up to 2020 and opera houses and directors worldwide are still trying to come up with ways of injecting new life into Bizet’s rich score. Carmen’s hits, have been played…
Category: review
Streetdance to Seoul
Inside the heavy oak doors of Shoreditch Town Hall, a disco-funk beat is pulsing as we scale the marble steps to the Assembly Hall. PopcityUk’s 2020 International Hip Hop and Popping competition has already started. In the ring of darkness surrounding the brightly lit dance floor, hundreds of youths have gathered. Some are dancers, stretching…
Picasso and Paper at the Royal Academy of Arts
Picasso had an enduring love affair with paper: ‘it seduced me’, he said of one particularly fine batch. And he spent his life environed by the stuff: when his tables and chairs and mantelpieces were filled to overflowing he would hang it on lengths of string from the ceiling. Paper lay at the heart of…
Rencontre avec France Mitrofanoff
Depuis ses débuts dans les années 70, France Mitrofanoff n’a cessé de peindre. D’abord inspirée par le mouvement Cobra, avec ses créatures étranges, elle s’en dégage pour peindre dès Villes, constructions chaotiques où se cachent les habitants, ombres dissimulées derrière les murs. Plus récemment elle a porté son regard sur la nature, en particulier les arbres….
My Favourite Things : Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’
Battle of Moscow (Borodino) 7th Sept 1812 by Louis-François Lejeune Christmas is nearing and every year I find myself irritable and exhausted and walking over to my bookshelves for literary solace. Dancing over rows of black paperback classics, my fingers slow over my favoured volumes, all epics. Worlds of past existence inhabit my weighty…
Wagner Singing Competition at the Wigmore
Climatic scene from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde 1910 Rogelio de Egusquiz 1979 was my A-level year. Also the year I discovered Richard Wagner. We had one good stereo system in our sitting room which pumped out rock, pop, jazz and classical at all hours, to all corners of our Victorian house in Barnes. One Sunday afternoon, hunched…
In Search of Dora Maar
Model, Assia Granatouroff photographed by Dora Maar As I was about to enter the Tate Modern show on Dora Maar, a question wouldn’t go away. Would Maar’s best work turn out to be what she produced during her years with Picasso? The Barbican show I had attended on artistic couples, in January of this year,…
Orphée – Philip Glass’s mesmerising homage to Jean Cocteau
ENO’s Orphee – exquisitely compelling, it may leave you wondering what really lies on the other side of that mirror in the hallway….
Baroque in our time
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-36) Christmas is nearly upon us and time for the Requiems, the Stabat Maters, to be performed in concert halls and churches up and down the country. Now, more so than ever, audiences, can’t seem to be able to get enough of these religious works. Their familiar musical settings are popular for…
Monumental Messiaen: Steven Osborne at Queen Elizabeth Hall
Olivier Messiaen’s monumental and profound work Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus (Twenty Gazes on the Infant Jesus) is one of the greatest works in the pianist’s repertoire, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with such titans as Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas in terms of its scale. It is one of the most extraordinary and ground-breaking works in…
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