British opera was born with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and then vanished for two-and-a-half centuries, apparently. Between the first performance of Dido in 1689 and the première of Britten’s Peter Grimes in 1945, serious British operas effectively didn’t exist – or so we’re told in textbooks and biographies. But what if there was a different
Grade: A It’s clearance-sale time for the great classical labels of the 20th century. As streaming platforms drain the remaining value out of once-prestigious recorded catalogues, even B-listers are being pulled up from the vaults and remastered for one last re-release. Eleven-disc Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos edition? Walter Weller’s complete Decca recordings? Now’s your chance:
Richard Bean appears to be Hampstead Theatre’s in-house dramatist, and his new effort, House of Games, is based on a 1987 movie directed by David Mamet. The script sets up a rather laborious collision between two vastly different cultures. A gang of small-time crooks in Chicago are visited by a beautiful, high-flying, Harvard-educated academic who
The Four Seasons is one of those shows you notice in the ‘Top TV Programmes on Netflix’ section, see it’s some kind of glossy romantic comedy starring American actors you’ve vaguely heard of, and skip past quickly in search of something with zombies or subtitles. This would be a mistake though because, at least if
Much of Venice’s Giardini this year was as boarded up as a British high street. The Israeli pavilion was empty, apparently awaiting refurbishment. (At the 2024 art biennale, the curators had closed it in the face of pro-Palestinian protests, prompting the latter to demand it should be opened, presumably so they could protest its closure.)
You have to time your arrival at cinemas carefully if you want to avoid the high-volume, rapid-fire edits of trailers for upcoming mind-rot. That’s conceptually impossible with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The first half an hour is a debrief in the form of an extended trailer of highlights from previous missions. At one
AI is coming for everyone’s jobs, but especially mine. There is absolutely no good reason for The Spectator to keep sending me to watch films with my wobbly biological eyes, not when they could just feed the latest releases into a computer, set the parameters to ‘contemptuous’, and watch a perfectly serviceable review assemble itself,
Christopher Wheeldon must be one of the most steadily productive and widely popular figures in today’s dance world, but I’m yet to be persuaded that he has much gift for narrative. His adaptation of the novel Like Water for Chocolate was a hopeless muddle; his response to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is mere vaudeville; and
I have a friend who insists that had Status Quo hailed from Düsseldorf rather than Catford, they would nowadays be as critically revered as Can, Faust, Neu! and those other hallowed Teutonic pioneers of unyielding rhythm from the 1970s. Maybe so. Very probably not. Canned Heat and ZZ Top seem more reachable comparisons. But it’s
