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…
Umpteenth revival of Jonathan Miller’s Mikado at ENO
1986 wasn’t a particularly memorable year in the grand scheme of things. In January Spain and Portugal joined the European Community (as it then was), in July Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson at Westminster Abbey and in October Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher officially opened the M25 motorway. I seem to remember spending most of…
An Electrifying ‘Mask of Orpheus’ at ENO
Aerialists, Matthew Smith (Orpheus Hero) and Alfa Marks (Eurydice Hero) Commissioned by ENO, The Mask of Orpheus, caused quite a stir, when it premiered at the Coliseum in 1986. Some heralded it as a genius work. Others found it difficult, which probably explains why it has not been fully staged again until now….
Inspired by the East at the British Museum
Young Woman Reading 1880 by Osman Hamdi Bey Reading the British Museum press release of Inspired by the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art, I was preparing myself for a big show. The exhibition was promoted as “Covering five centuries of artistic interaction”, and since it was a paying show for the…
Bridget Riley retrospective mesmerises and excites at Hayward Gallery
I still remember the first time I saw Bridget Riley’s vivid, abstract paintings. It was at a provincial gallery, Wolverhampton or somewhere similar, in the mid-1970s. Coloured stripes and shapes shimmered and bounced, their contrasting yet consonant colours jostling and vibrating on the large canvasses. I was fascinated by the rhythm and energy of these…
Pietà Power at the Cadogan Hall
Saturday night, late October, and there’s a chill in the air, and it’s not all down to weather! Brexit dramas, political deadlock, dire economic and climatic warnings have filled the day. I’m relieved to put those eerily dark streets off Sloane street behind me, and to step into the warmly lit Cadogan Hall….
Intimate, personal and autobiographical: new releases of piano music by Schumann and Schubert
R. Schumann – Works for Piano / Joseph Tong This new release by British pianist Joseph Tong on the Quartz label contains some of Schumann’s most intimate and autobiographical music, notably the Fantasie in C, Op 17. Never one for disguising his emotions, Schumann described it as “perhaps the most impassioned music I have ever…
Trouble in Rice’s Underworld
Emma Rice’s ENO staging of Orpheus in the Underworld has been much maligned in the traditional press recently, much to my dismay. Her efforts to update this nineteenth century operetta to suit the modern zeitgeist and ‘me too’ sensibility have been frowned upon by those supposedly in the know, who see her efforts to…
Gauguin Portraits at the National Gallery
Would you have left your teenage daughter alone with Paul Gauguin? If her expression in Gauguin’s portrait (above) is anything to go by, Thérèse-Josephine de Nimal was none too happy at the prospect. Actually, I presume she was chaperoned but even so, the studio must have been positively crackling with electricity that day. Gauguin…
Into the Night at the Barbican
Shadow Theatre at Le Chat Noir, Paris. I always look forward to the Barbican Gallery’s exhibitions. Theme-based with enticing titles, they always capture my imagination. The last show I covered there, entitled Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde (see here LOVE IN A CREATIVE CLIMATE) in January of this year, was riveting. With the theme of power…
