Opera
The Met Live Rigoletto was wonderful, though two long intervals did mar the dramatic flow somewhat. The staging in 60’s Las Vegas (brilliant design) worked as well as the ENO’s gangster Chicago one many years ago and the lead performances were simply stunning – Zeljko Lucic as Rigoletto, Diane Damrau as Gilda and Piotr Beczala (who I saw there in Manon on my US trip in 2012) as The Duke and there was brilliant support from Stefan Kocan as assassin Sparafucile. The production team were new to opera; in fact they were responsible for Spring Awakening, one of my favourite musicals of recent years (and one of my biggest theatre investment losses!).
My latest visit to WNO showed them off at their best and gave us a flavour of new Director David Poultney’s vision, with a pairing of his new production of Lulu and a revival of his 32-year-old production of The Cunning Little Vixen. They are far from my favourite operas, but I doubt either could get better productions. Lulu was a terrific visual spectacle on Johan Engels giant double-circle steel frame (with wings!), and the orchestra and singers, led by Marie Arnet’s wonderful Lulu, were sensational. Sadly, I find it hard to enjoy Berg’s music and the absurdist surrealist story doesn’t really engage me! Vixen fared better as the music is more accessible and the story, though somewhat slight, is more understandable. The late Maria Bjornson’s superb design, with people and animals popping up all over the place, doesn’t look in the slightest bit dated. Again the standard of singing and playing was exceptional (MD Lothar Koenigs again with the baton – boy, was he a good find for WNO!) with Sophie Bevan a delightful Vixen.
Classical Music
One would never have expected a free lunchtime concert at a music conservatoire to produce anything as beautiful and thrilling as Elgar’s 1st Symphony by the Academy Concert Orchestra at the Royal Academy of Music; it was as good as I’ve ever heard it. I’m sure having the great Edward Gardner to conduct helped, but nevertheless the musicianship seemed extraordinary.
Joyce DiDonato’s ‘Drama Queens’ concert (accompanied by the brilliant Il Complesso Barocco) had a slow start but when it got going, boy did it get going. In a stunning flame red Vivienne Westwood gown which transformed as the evening progressed, she sang eleven baroque arias, some by well-known composers like Handel and Monteverdi but a significant number of rarities. The fillers (breathers) by the ensemble were much more than that, most notably Vivaldi’s Concerto for Violin & Strings with a stunning solo from Dmitry Sinkovsky. Her personality always shines through and it felt like an evening with a very talented friend (and the best thing ever to come out of Kansas!).
Well the Britten centenary got off to a good start with a rare opportunity to hear all three string quartets in chronological order at the Royal Academy of Music. Three young quartets formed within the last six years – Leporello, Wilhelm & Jubilee! – did a great job. Two of them were all-girl quartets and the third had one girl; I’m not sure what to read into that! 17+ more centenary events to come!
Art
The NPG’s Man Ray exhibition only includes his photographic portraits but it’s terrific. Most of them are 20th century artists and other members of the avant-garde. Even though they are between 40 and 80 years old, they seem astonishingly contemporary; that’s style for you.
I had to abandon a visit to the cinema because they’d sold out a Saturday afternoon performance of a film that had been running for three weeks! Can’t we be impulsive any more? Well, we can because this gave me the impulse for a Mayfair gallery wander. Bruce Nauman’s neon works at Hauser & Wirth were great, though the narrow entrance to one (of only four) excluded the larger of us! I was impressed by the use of colour in Fiona Rae’s new paintings at Timothy Taylor, but couldn’t fathom why she’d spoilt them by including little Teddy’s peeping out all over the place. Fred Sandback has become a favourite and his works at David Zwimer were brilliant. It’s amazing what you can do with a bit of string, some white space and an imagination! Their other (group) exhibition would have been better if you’d known which artist was which. The final visit was entirely on spec (Time Out pointed out the others); an Azeri artist called Niyaz Najafov who’s red and black grotesques at Gazelli Art House were interesting but not particularly nice to look at. That’s art for you…..
The Wellcome Collection’s exhibition Death: A Self Portrait was recommended but the prospect of seeing it didn’t exactly capture my imagination. Finding myself nearby with spare time, I ventured forth to find it quite fascinating. It’s the personal collection of one man and the range – of sources, periods and themes – is extraordinary. More skeletons than you’ll see in a normal lifetime!
A trio of Royal Academy exhibitions in one day delivered fascinating and unexpected results. The Manet exhibition focuses just on portraits, so it does become a bit monotonous. There are some terrific pictures and I liked the way photos of the subjects were also displayed, but it’s patchy. It’s also padded out as four rooms are closed, two have no pictures and one has just one! In the member’s rooms, it was hard to get close enough to the many engravings that made up most of the British Landscapes show so it proved a bit frustrating. I liked the Turner and Sandby contributions a lot more than the Constable and Reynolds ones, but that’s the same as I feel about their paintings generally. The really pleasant surprise was the Mariko Mori exhibition in the new galleries. Her sculptures and installations feature light, stones and even water. It’s very different, all very cosmic and new age, and I loved it – a more soothing and relaxing experience than the other two.
Film
Hyde Park on Hudson was an enjoyable if slight insight into the relationship between King George VI and President Roosevelt (and Rooseveldt and his mistress) just before the Second World War. Bill Murray is very good as FDR as is Laura Linney as his mistress, but in all the publicity, the superb performances of Samuel West and Olivia Coleman as the King and Queen seem to have been ignored!
Beasts of the Southern Wild was another of my catch-ups and the third to reap big rewards. Sometimes the hand-held camera’s shakiness irritates, but the overall effect is extraordinary. This is a slice of poor America you rarely see, as shocking as much of what you see in the third world and the central performance by young Quvenzhane Wallis is simply extraordinary.
Despite a stunning performance from Daniel Day-Lewis, I’m afraid I found Lincoln pompous, overlong and rather dull. It focuses on only one aspect of the period – the vote to abolish slavery – but took forever to cover it. As always with Spielberg, he overdoes the sentimentality and loses cynical me by doing so.
Hitchcock is so much better than the critics would have you believe. It focuses just on the making of Psycho and both Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren are superb. It’s very funny and it seemed to me to be a particularly British humour, which may be why it hasn’t gone down so well in the US.
Zero Dark Thirty would be a much better film if they cut the first 90 minutes, before they establish the target, in half. The final hour as they mount the raid and assassinate Bin Laden, is terrific.
I’m puzzled again by the mediocrity of the reviews of I’ll Give it a Year, which I thought was a complete hoot. Rafe Spall and Stephen Marchant are the masters of foot-in-mouth clumsy behaviour, so this is a double whammy. A RomCom that’s as rom but a whole lot more com than the norm, populated with a fine cast of the best of British. Listen to me, not them!
Other
I’d been to Vintners Hall for a wine tasting (somewhat appropriately) but my second visit was a more thorough tour of the public areas. It’s one of the best livery halls in London and, with entertaining anecdotes from their GM, was a fascinating visit. It’s great that an ancient tradition like Swan Upping, part of this company’s heritage, continues today.
A sneaky afternoon off found us at the London Studios watching the recording of new sitcom Vicious with Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi as a pair of old queens and Frances de la Tour and Iwan Rheon as their neighbours. It’s by a Will & Grace writer and it was great fun watching it being made (3 hours to make 25 minutes!). It’s on ITV in April (you’ll hear me laughing in Episode Three!). There was a lovely aside from Jacobi as he showed us the photo that was part of the set – a real one of him & McKellen at university in 1958!
Gareth's Culture and Travel Blog 