The 2005 Dance Umbrella season kicked off last week with the London debut of the Forsythe Company, created after William Forsythe’s longstanding and successful collaboration with Frankfurt Ballet ended for debatable administrative and artistic reasons. The event attracted an audience of electrified Forsythe diehards, but was not memorable. The oddly mixed programme started with two
The production of Carl Nielsen’s comic opera Maskarade at the Royal Opera is the most brilliant we have seen there for a long time, spectacularly so. It’s a pity that the opera itself doesn’t live up to the treatment it receives, but it’s just about good enough not to let the production down badly. Maskarade
Mike Leigh’s new play, Two Thousand Years, isn’t quite up to his usual standard. It’s not terrible, but it feels as though it was yanked from the director’s improvisatory workshop when it was still in the development stage. It’s about a family of secular north London Jews, and, from the first, everything about them is
The Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is best known for ‘The Scream’, that unforgettable image of the tortured self in the grip of alienation, loss and fear. Munch is the great Symbolist and precursor of Expressionism, the artist as poetic visionary who valued imagination over knowledge, and the urge to self-expression beyond the need to enlighten
America, more than any other country I can think of, encourages such extreme opinions that it’s sometimes difficult to analyse why such views are held. There are rigid anti-Americans, of course, who variously dislike its capitalist and free-market system, its silent majority’s lack of sophistication, or its military and technological might. Much of this is
I tried hard to love Elizabeth I (Channel 4, Thursday) because such work and effort had gone into it, but it was an uphill job. The opening scene, of a doctor examining our heroine’s vagina, was no doubt meant to be challenging and attention-grabbing, but it felt unnecessarily gynaecological. As Barry Humphries would have said,
Wild Wales; Land of Song; Green Valleys: the clichés cluster. The Vale of Glamorgan Festival fulfils most if not all, in a wholly uncliché’d way. Subtitled ‘a celebration of living composers’, it could be forbiddingly severe, courting box-office disaster. But its chosen living composers are far removed from the erstwhile compulsory rebarberation, wilfully inaccessible to
‘If anybody had made a film of my year,’ says John Tomlinson, our latest musical knight, as he lolls on a sofa on the top floor of the Royal Opera House and enjoys a gentle chuckle, ‘I suppose it would have been called My Left Knee!’ It has been a memorable year for the world’s
