With her latest disc Sarah Beth Briggs pays tribute to her beloved teacher through the music that was central to her studies with Matthews and their joint musical passions: two sets of late Brahms piano pieces (opp 117 and 118), and Schumann’s Papillons and his popular Kinderszenen
Category: review
A sonic sculptural wrapping: Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet at Tate Modern
Everything about this experience was right. The venue, which broke with the austere standards of classical concerts venues, and allowed everyone to come, and go. The spontaneous audience: musicians, curious wanderers or simple art and music lovers. The performers: amateurs and professionals gathered around a communal sense of honesty and authenticity. And of course, the music.
Munch’s Scream Revisited at the British Museum
The Sick Child by Edvard Munch 1885 You wouldn’t wish Edvard Munch’s childhood on your worst enemy. Munch was brought up in Kristiania (as Oslo then was) in a strict Lutheran family in the second half of the 19th century. Aged five, Munch lost his mother to TB and nearly succumbed to the same…
A Riveting Ripper at the Coliseum
Jack the Ripper’s frenzied killing spree in Victorian London has never ceased to fascinate and appall. Iain Bell, composer of the ambitious new opera of the same name, and his librettist Emma Jenkins, decided, when creating their new work, to rid the stage of his presence altogether and to focus instead on the Ripper’s…
Stop Press – Tate Britain nails it at last!
Here at ArtMuseLondon we’ve been less than enthusiastic, to say the least, about some of the temporary exhibitions Tate Britain has put on of late. Mayhap some imp of perversity has been loose around Millbank these past few years. How else to explain the questionable curatorial decisions, the squandered opportunities, the telltale signs of hobby-horses…
Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light
The Spanish impressionist artist, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923), is little known outside of Spain. Half a million flocked to his retrospective at the Prado Museum in 2009. Meanwhile his house in Madrid, now the Sorolla Museum, has become a tourist destination and is best visited, I imagine, out of season. And yet how…
McBurney’s Magic Flute Enchants Again.
Mozart’s Magic Flute is an unusual opera, full of Viennese slapstick, magic and strange journeys through a fairy-tale landscape. Emanuel Schikaneder, who wrote the libretto, was a theatre-manager, actor and most importantly, Mozart’s friend. The two relished working together and being both a little strapped for cash in 1791, they strove to create an opera…
Parr Displaying His Humanity at National Portrait Gallery
Porthcurno, Cornwall, England, 2017. Martin Parr/Magnum Photos/Rocket Gallery In the same week I watched Don McCullin, photographer extraordinaire, take pictures of fox hunts and Eastbourne in the rain, in the BBC’s Looking for Britain, I find myself at Martin Parr’s Only Human show at the National Portrait Gallery. In it, Parr also explores identity and what…
PRIVATES ON PARADE: The Renaissance Nude at the Royal Academy
You can’t put on a show like this without provoking the odd giggle, but The Renaissance Nude will also have you pondering, especially in today’s context, what our attitudes toward sex and nudity and gender were in the past, and hit they might become.
‘The Merry Widow’ Comes of Age
‘Can you hold my drink so that I can leap over you,’ bellows a middle-aged woman in front of me to perfect strangers. Friday night at the Coliseum and some of the punters in the dress circle have been overdoing the Sauvignon. It’s also the opening night of The Merry Widow and all this boisterous…
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