Cecilia Bartoli Barbican Turandot Royal Opera House For this year’s appearance at the Barbican, Cecilia Bartoli, ever exploratory in her repertoire, chose an evening of canzone, songs by composers and a few by singers of the bel canto repertoire. She was accompanied by the hyper-reticent Sergio Ciomei at the piano. Admittedly, the accompaniments to these
And so to the records of the year. I usually do this piece in December, but as all sensible shoppers know that’s the worst month in the year to buy anything for yourself — particularly music, in what is very much a buyer’s market. Amazon’s prices, normally comfortingly low, lurch up into realms of profitability
Phew! Normal service has been resumed. No more panto; no more guest editors forcing Evan, Jim, Ed and Sarah into embarrassingly coy interviews with Karl Lagerfeld et al.; no more year-end reviews of the year behind and portentous glimpses of the year ahead. I don’t know why every year we have to go through this
If you don’t mind — yeah, like you’ve any choice in the matter — what I thought I’d do for this New Year column is to do just enough TV for the editor not to want to sack me, then move swiftly on to the stuff my hardcore fans prefer, namely the rambling and shameless
Twelfth Night Wyndhams Loot Tricycle Another stunna from Michael Grandage. His production of Twelfth Night is an excellent and often beautiful frivolity and if you’re a fan of the play it’s a must-see event. I can’t stand the thing, I’m afraid, and even this fine production doesn’t mask the script’s shortcomings. The ploy involving Olivia’s
Tristan und Isolde Royal Festival Hall Hänsel und Gretel second cast Royal Opera House There have been few treats for lovers of Wagner in London in the past few years, but handsome amends were made in a concert at the Royal Festival Hall, with Vladimir Jurowski conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra and adequate soloists in
By the time you read these words, Elliott Carter — save for a wry ‘act of God’ — will have passed his 100th birthday, in full productive spate as he enters a second century. As Stephen Pettitt remarked (Arts, 29 November), every new Carter work appeared to be summatory; but there’s always been more. And
While Ian Hislop went in search of the Three Kings for Radio Four, and surprise, surprise, came up with an English solution to the enigma of the merchants of gold, frankincense and myrrh, World Routes on Radio Three took us to Nazareth to experience the music that might have been heard by Mary and Joseph
It has been a good motoring year, save in two respects, and even if this proves to have been the last such on earth and next year we’re back to 1209 and riding Shanks’s pony, memory will sweeten privation. First among the highlights was driving a Routemaster bus (Spectator, 24 May). What a creation they
The Sleeping Beauty English National Ballet, Coliseum Forgive me the lame pun, but although The Sleeping Beauty is performed worldwide, there are not that many great Beauties around. One exception is, arguably, the one staged under Kenneth MacMillan’s supervision, first seen in Berlin in the Sixties, then reworked for American Ballet Theatre in 1986 and
We have a super-efficient friend who has all her Christmas shopping both purchased and wrapped by the end of the summer holidays. It drives Mrs Spencer — who regards the approach of Christmas with the panic-stricken horror of a hedgehog who spots an oncoming truck — almost mad with jealous rage. In an attempt to
It’s not a job I could do now that I’m supposedly mature, let alone when I was in my twenties. To take charge of a prison full of angry young men plus a team of disgruntled, de-motivated staff officers. But on Radio Four this week and next we heard from four prison governors, most of
Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte opens with the hero, Tamino, being pursued by a terrible monster. It’s always a challenge to depict such a creature on stage but for the first performances of Nicholas Hytner’s now much revived production at English National Opera, a startling image was conceived. The tenor Tom Randle (then, as now, unaverse to
The Reader 15, Nationwide (2 January) The Reader is based on the novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink which, in turn, is one of those books that’s been read by about a zillion people in a billion countries proving that, sometimes, a great many people can be entirely wrong in all the languages
A major new exhibiting space is always welcome in London, and the multi-purpose venue at Kings Place, 90 York Way, N1, comes with the added attractions of restaurants and concert halls. It’s a conference centre as well as the home of the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the new
Hänsel und Gretel Royal Opera House Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen Ardente Opera The Royal Opera’s new production of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, has two completely different casts and two conductors. For that matter, it has two producers, too, but they are both involved in the same production: Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser, with their usual
Mother Goose Hackney Empire Hamlet Novello God, I hate the panto season. Especially the reviews. You get some cynical, steely-hearted, acid-flinging critic who takes his two-year-old kid to a Christmas show for the first time and the old bruiser’s heart melts, his brain mushes up and his review reads like the last paragraph of a
So what were we watching in 2008? The multiplication of television continues at speed. If you have cable TV you might have, say, 80 channels to choose from, most of them having nothing to offer you whatsoever. Some have almost no viewers. You could afford to advertise a missing cat on some of them, except
Hooray for anthocyanin. Where would we be without it? It has long been my favourite water-soluble, vacuolar, glucosidic pigment, and I feel that this autumn has justified my preference. True, chlorophyll is more important until then, being essential for photosynthesis, so we should all be in dead trouble without it; and the carotenoids, carotene and
A Countryman in Town: Robert Bevan and the Cumberland Market Group Southampton City Art Gallery, until 14 December The Women’s Land Army — A Portrait St Barbe Museum, New Street, Lymington, until 10 January The recent Camden Town exhibition at the Tate was a useful reminder of the originality of one of the few significant