Colette’s sharply fantastical libretto for Ravel’s second one-act opera imagines wrongs exercised upon objects and animals by a naughty child revisited by the victims upon the perpetrator.
“This year was supposed to be so very different” said Stephen Maddock, Chief Executive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra when he spoke to theartsdesk earlier this year. Talk about an understatement. The CBSO has hardly been alone in having cherished plans wrecked.
We don’t often see sultry come-to-bed moves in the Wigmore Hall, that chaste Parthenon of refined musical taste. But when Jess Dandy stretched out languidly on stage while offering to show Nicky Spence “how the gypsies sleep”, the temperature shot up even in an empty auditorium. In Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared, wildness and passion war with inhibition and conformity. The piece channels the mingled fascination for, and fear of, an untamed Roma culture that runs through so much Central European art, its music not least.
The Prohibition-era setting of The Great Gatsby brings an appropriately illicit feel to this bold decision to stage an immersive theatre event in the age of Covid.
Those Wainwrights, they never cease to surprise. Get out your soft shoes and prepare to shuffle, for the “six-string diarist” has set his guitar aside and put on his metaphorical tux to croon with a band on more than a dozen timeless classics. Songs (to coin a phrase) that your mother would know.
Viennese operetta is like that other great Central European treat, goulash. It comes in many forms. In Vienna it’s coffeehouse comfort food; in Slovenia they add bacon for a smoky tang. And in the marketplaces of Transylvania it comes in bubbling iron cauldrons, practically fluorescent with paprika. But it’s all goulash. You know it when you taste it, and all that matters is that it tastes good. And when it’s really good, it tastes even better when warmed through and dished up second time around.
Tut in colour, and he is!
Coming in at around four hours, in two parts, this 2015 documentary is ostensibly about Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, but really, via the prism of his existence, it’s as much about America’s journey through the first two thirds of the 20th century.