Gareth's Culture and Travel Blog

Opera

It wasn’t long into Semiramide at Covent Garden that I realised that I don’t really like Rossini’s brand of plinky-plonk music with frilly bits! I was lured by favourite mezzo Joyce DiDonato, but even her presence, and other fine singing and playing, couldn’t lure me back after the interval to this misguided production and more plinky-plonk music! 1h50m was enough, another 1h30m was beyond me.

Classical Music

Mezzo Cecilia Bartoli & Cellist Sol Gabetta, accompanied by the latter’s brother’s wonderful 18-piece ensemble, gave a recital at the Barbican Hall to promote their new CD. Though I admired the artistry, and thought the pairing worked well most of the time, I wasn’t that keen on the content or order of the programme, I’m afraid.

Britten Sinfonia put together two excellent but rarely performed choral pieces with a world premiere for orchestra to make a lovely evening at the Barbican Hall. Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms links it to his centenary and it seemed almost new here. Vaughn Williams Dona nobis pacem showed off the talents of the Choir of King’s College even more, with two wonderful soloists, Ailish Tynan and Neal Davies. I like seeing world premieres and Emma-Ruth Richards’ Sciamachy was an interesting new piece that deserves further hearing.

The LSO & LSC let their hair down in style at the Barbican with a concert version of Bernstein’s musical Wonderful Town under Simon Rattle no less. You rarely hear a musical score played and sung so well, but they has fun with it too, taking the Act I conga finale through the audience, and again as an encore, this time collecting people along the way. I don’t always like opera singers doing musicals, but those here largely avoided the operatic frills. It was paired with Bernstein’s very different 2nd symphony, an inspired idea which worked brilliantly.

Film

My initial instinct not to see Murder on the Orient Express was proved correct as I found it slow and rather dull and unengaging, despite the nice tongue-in-cheek style and idiosyncratic camera angles.

The Florida Project was slow to grab me, but grab me it did, with its documentary-like examination of the US underclass, and it has some of the best child acting I’ve ever seen.

I enjoyed Star Wars: The Last Jedi more than the previous instalment, partly because I didn’t see it in 3D and partly because it was more balanced between story and spectacle, working at an emotional level too.

Art

A disappointing afternoon at Tate Britain started with Impressionists in London which should really be titled 19th Century French artists in exile in London, because a lot weren’t impressionists (the term no doubt chosen to sell the show) and a lot weren’t of London. Not very well curated, I forgave it for a room of eight Monet London pictures brought together from eight different collections. Upstairs, Rachel Whiteread proved to be a one trick pony – a giant room of casts in concrete or resin. More is less….a lot less. We went on to the new V&A galleries for Opera: Passion, Power & Politics which redeemed the afternoon, an opera-lovers treat accompanied by gorgeous music which changed as you walked through. Lovely.

A wonderful morning at NPG followed the disappointing afternoon, with the revelatory Cezanne Portraits, from the man who I didn’t know did portraits, and the ever wonderful Taylor Wessing Photography Prize exhibition, better every year. After lunch, on to Every Thing at Once, a big exhibition of modern art installations and sculptures on three floors of an office block they are taking forever to renovate at 180 Strand. There was the usual tosh, but pieces by the likes of Anish Kapoor and Ai Wei Wei and the bonus of four other full room installations, two of which were terrific, made it a worthwhile visit.

Tove Jansson was a Finnish painter-turned-illustrator, most famous for creating the Moomins, and her retrospective exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery was fascinating. I could have done with more paintings, but she didn’t paint many after she turned illustrator!