La Bayadère, Mariinsky Ballet review - a parade of delights

LA BAYADERE, MARIINSKY BALLET Russians save the best till last in parade of delights

Russians save the best till last in lavish display of showmanship and art

There are half as many performances of La Bayadère in this Mariinsky tour as performances of Swan Lake (four vs eight). The preponderance of Swan Lake is driven by audience demand, but if audiences knew what was good for them, they'd demand more Bayadère: this lavish, thrilling production catches the spirit of the Mariinsky far better than their rather pallid Swan Lake.

Prom 31 review: La Damnation de Faust, Gardiner - Berlioz tumbles out in rainbow colours

★★★★ PROM 31: LA DAMNATION DE FAUST, GARDINER Youth in the choir and a youthful 74-year-old conductor spark a supernatural masterpiece

Youth in the choir and a youthful 74-year-old conductor spark a supernatural masterpiece

The road to hell is paved with brilliant ideas in Berlioz's idiosyncratic take on the Faust legend.

DVD/Blu-ray: The Tree of Wooden Clogs

★★★★★ DVD/BLU-RAY: THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS Overwhelming humanism in Ermanno Olmi's neo-realist masterpiece

Overwhelming humanism in Ermanno Olmi's neo-realist masterpiece

Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1978, Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (L’albero deli zoccoli) is a glorious fresco that reveals, over the course of an unhurried three hours and with a pronounced documentary element that virtually eschews narrative development, 19th century Lombardy l

Swan Lake, Mariinsky Ballet review - Xander Parish lacks the spark of wildfire

★★★ SWAN LAKE, MARIINSKY BALLET Heritage company fail to set stage alight in good, but not great, performance at the Royal Opera House

Heritage company fail to set stage alight in good, but not great, performance at the Royal Opera House

It's a Cinderella story: Xander Parish was plucked from obscurity in the Royal Ballet corps and trained by the Mariinsky to dance the greatest roles in the repertoire. Now, not only is he the first Briton to join the historic Russian company, he has also just been promoted to Principal after last night's performance of Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House.

Don Quixote, Mariinsky Ballet review - gentle charm, impressive principals

★★★★ DON QUIXOTE, MARIINSKY BALLET Tasteful design and perfectly poised dancers in classy first outing for Russians visiting the Royal Opera House

Tasteful design and perfectly poised dancers in classy first outing for Russians visiting the Royal Opera House

One of the most Russian things you can do in ballet is dance Don Quixote, which is 100 percent set in Spain. Don't think too hard about it, and definitely don't think too hard about the plot (which is barely there).

Prom 10 review: Aurora Orchestra, Collon – a revolution taken to heart

PROM 10: AURORA ORCHESTRA, COLLON Eroica swings and dances – all from memory

Beethoven's breakthrough 'Eroica' Symphony swings and dances – all from memory

When a trail-blazing orchestra takes on a world-transforming work, it would be pointless to leave the staid old rules of concert etiquette intact. Not only did the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon stretch their repertoire of symphonies performed from memory to cover the epic expansiveness and ear-bending innovations of Beethoven’s Third, the Eroica.

Prom 9 review: Fidelio, BBCPO, Mena - classy prison drama rarely blazes

★★★ PROM 9: FIDELIO, BBCPO, MENA Classy prison drama rarely blazes

Lively conducting and difficult roles well taken, but the supporting cast shines brightest

What a pity Beethoven never composed an appendage to Fidelio called The Sorrows of Young Marzelline. One crucial moment apart, the music he gives to his second soprano in his only opera isn't his best, but Louise Alder so lived the role of the gaoler's daughter in love with a woman disguised as a man that everything else felt rather less intense. It's only fair to say that there were other singers facing bigger challenges very stylishly, for the most part, but neither they nor the BBC Philharmonic under its chief conductor Juanjo Menja made us feel as though their lives depended on the outcome. And that ultimate lack of blazing commitment, in what should be the most incandescent of prison dramas, sold it all a bit short.

True, this was an unashamed concert-performance Prom with no directorial supervision, principals delivering score-free – with one exception, James Creswell, a more than adequate late replacement for Brindley Sherratt as gaoler Rocco – in front of the orchestra, with co-ordination not always the tightest. This, Beethoven's much more celebrated revision of the original Leonore swapping drama for a pageant-finale, worked best in that oratorio-like final scene – though like much else it was bright and pleasant rather than shattering or deeply moving. It was hard to come from the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Haitink, projecting every phrase of Mozart and Schumann into the Albert Hall space, and be brought back down to earth with the more usual situation of fuzzy strings lacking ideal bite. No doubt the answer would be to stand in the Arena, an occasional option, but no way was this playing on the same level. And the horns were having a bad night.

Ricard Merbeth and Stuart Skelton in Prom FidelioNor was focus always there in Ricarda Merbeth's Leonore (pictured above with Stuart Skelton – nice dress, but a trouser suit would have been more appropriate for the heroine's male disguise). Her lower middle-range tended to disappear in these acoustics, though it was obvious why she's a fit for the part: no soprano I've heard live has essayed the testing top so fully or flawlessly. None, either, has made clearer work of what can be a treacherous bark of a duet when the wife who's risked her life for her political-prisoner husband is finally reunited with him. Stuart Skelton could manage it, too, though even he was tested by the ludicrous high vision of "an angel, Leonore" at the end of his aria: perhaps it can only work as part of a stage performance delivered in extremis. Skelton was otherwise palpably in control, phrasing stylishly and weighting the big entry on the word "Gott", swelling it as only a heroic tenor can.

Villainous prison governor Pizarro can only work at a level of testosterone-driven edginess; Detlef Roth conveyed nothing more than a petulant bank-manager, despite a couple of energetic footstamps. Creswell's subordinate could have eaten him for breakfast; as they sang alongside each other, one got the feeling of the same mésalliance as when King Philip in Verdi's Don Carlos has more vocal power than the only one supposedly lording it over him, the Grand Inquisitor. We could have done with more colours and force from the Orfeón Donostiarra, Spain's finest choral society, playing their compatriots albeit singing in German, but emphatically not the essential professional opera chorus. Better, perhaps, to have assembled voices from the London music colleges.

Louise Alder and Juanjo Mena in Proms FidelioOnly the three not-so-long graduated young Brits in the cast offered perfection. Alder (pictured above with Mena), having made her surprise Proms debut three years ago stepping in as the Glyndebourne cover Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier, has deservedly shot to fame since then, winning the Dame Joan Sutherland Audience Prize at the BBC 2017 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, and she owns the stage. Her launch of the great canon-quartet "Mir ist so wunderbar" provided the one truly moving moment of the evening. Tenor Benjamin Hulett was a fine match as the lad her Marzelline treats so badly, and David Soar declaimed to perfection as deus ex machina Don Fernando. But inevitably their subordinate roles were limited.

Amplifying the (minimal) spoken dialogue meant a plunge in levels for the music. Cultivated, mostly lively orchestral playing just needed more heft, despite excellent work from timpanist Paul Turner. It didn't tell the story by itself, and given that the Proms organisers still won't provide supertitle screens around the hall – it can be done – more of the performers needed to work harder to carry the narrative and compel focus from those in the audience with their heads in the programme.

Next page: watch Louise Alder sing 'No word from Tom' from Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition

El-Khoury, Spyres, Hallé, Rizzi, Cadogan Hall review - bel canto lives again

A fine soprano, tenor and conductor serve up true style in early 19th-century rarities

Unless you're an undiscriminating fan of bel canto, the lesser Italian and French operas of the 1830s and '40s - that's to say, not Verdi's Nabucco and Macbeth or Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini - need to be approached with caution. Once you've lowered expectations to a simpler level of compositional style, you then have to hope for stylists of the first order to make it work. That doesn't happen too often these days, but the inspirational company Opera Rara, responsible for this often spectacular programme of operatic excerpts, knows where to find them. In soprano Joyce El-Khoury, tenor Michael Spyres and, an equal partner in the pleasures of the evening, conductor Carlo Rizzi conducting an amazingly idiomatic Hallé, it found the magic recipe for showcase success.

It was as well to have it announced that the Lebanese-Canadian soprano was recovering from a cold; catarrh stops the flow in lyric lines, and that was occasionally apparent. But what a spectacular voice this is, allied - as with Spyres - to supreme musicianship. The top makes the ears ring, but can also be reduced to a sliver of sound in true bel canto style; the stage presence is perfect, dramatic evocation economical but crystal-clear. El-Khoury, Spyres and Rizzi (pictured below by Neil Bennett) between them managed to rebirth the excerpts from the one opera I thought I knew well, Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, culminating in a shared ability to sing the eight-bar melodic phrases of the Act 1 duet in a single breath. Sheer artistry.Carlo RizziBut what of the unfamiliar, its presence linked by repertoire for two apparently great singers of the 19th century, Julie Doras-Grace and Gilbert Duprez? The best cases were made for an aria and duet from Halévy's Guido et Ginevra - interestingly orchestrated in what, we were told, are reminiscences of the hero's early Romance, and with a high quotient of melodic originality - and the Act 1 air from Auber's Le lac des fées. Spyres always makes a good case for an unorthodox turn of phrase. His beaten-bronze sound in the French repertoire is ideal; even if the high notes are never actually thrilling - he got there without the bottling which troubled me in the Royal Opera's Mitridate - the middle range is perfectly valorous, and he always projects the meaning of the text.

More stock-in-trade were the numbers from Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable - lovely phrasing of the crucial word "grâce" from El-Khoury, though - Rossini's Otello (the hero's entrance cavatina) and Hérold's Le Pré aux clercs, bland material despite the violin solo beautifully taken by Hallé leader Simon Blendis. The Hallé's first trumpet, Gareth Small, also gilded his bel canto spotlight with handsomely applied vibrato to the Halévy aria and the Pas de Six from Donizetti's La Favorite, much more original as ballet music than Verdi's Paris divertissement for the recast I Lombardi, Jerusalem. Verdi's glory days as a dance master were yet to come, while Donizetti surprises us with orchestral sophistication, especially in a delicious duet for the two oboes.

It was hard not to feel a sudden affection for this pisseur of 70-odd operas at his best; time to go and listen to the Opera Rara recording of Les Martyrs featuring the evening's two stars - appropriately they served up a powerhouse duet from that rediscovered grand opera as their encore - plus their two discs, soon to be released but available last night, including the concert's plums. Not, perhaps, since Nelly Miricioiu revived the bel canto art towards the end of her career have its possibilities seemed so exciting.

Next page: watch a short excerpt of El-Khoury, Spyres and Rizzi recording the Act 1 Duet from Lucia di Lammermoor

The Beguiled review - silly but seriously well-made

★★★ THE BEGUILED Sofia Coppola's Cannes winner with Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell

Colin Farrell puts the, um, cat amongst the pigeons in Sofia Coppola's Cannes prize-winner

An isolated girls' school finds its hermetic routine shattered by the arrival of Colin Farrell, who wreaks sexual and emotional havoc as only this actor can. Playing a Civil War deserter with a gammy leg, Farrell's Corporal McBurney is at first rendered exotic, not to mention eroticised, by the distaff community into which he has stumbled in 1864 Virginia only in time to be eviscerated by them.

DVD: Cézanne et moi

From Provence to Paris, a lavish double biopic about a cultural friendship

For viewers not familiar with the background story of Cézanne et moi – which surely includes most of us without specialist knowledge of late 19th century French artistic and literary culture – the moi of this lavish yet curiously uninvolving double biopic is Emile Zola. Danièle Thompson’s film tells the story of the friendship between the eminent realist writer and the genius of Post-Impressionism – to whom acclaim came only late in life – that lasted, despite their differences, for almost half a century.

They first encountered one another as schoolboys in Aix-en-Provence in the early 1850s, when their circumstances could hardly have been more different: Zola was the son of an Italian engineer whose early death left his family impoverished, Cézanne the rebellious scion of an affluent banking family. The early scenes of their childhood friendship are some of the best in the film, nicely spontaneous and natural. They certainly glory in their exploration of the Provence landscapes to which Thompson returns repeatedly, not least when we witness Cézanne creating his Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings in situ.

Thompson’s film is a medium-level entry to the tradition of French cinema about artistic heritage 

But this script dives around across the decades, often rather confusingly. It opens in 1888, with Cézanne, after a period of separation, visiting the now acclaimed and prosperous Zola at his home north of Paris. They certainly had grounds for difference: Zola had married Cézanne’s erstwhile model and mistress, Alexandrine (a nicely understated performance from Alice Pol). But their immediate bone of contention was Zola’s 1886 novel L’Oeuvre (often translated as His Masterpiece), with its main character, a promising but frustrated painter, in whom Cézanne saw a painfully recognisable portrayal of himself.  

The accusations fly freely. “You don’t read my books any more, you judge them,” Zola tells Cézanne, to which the artist snaps back, “You’ve befriended the bourgeoisie you hated.” Between this beginning and end, there are some persuasive (and certainly culturally name-dropping) scenes of artistic fraternité. Cézanne’s first visit to Zola in Paris involves a prolonged encounter that assembles most of the great Impressionists – Manet, Renoir and Camille Pissaro, just for starters – around the same bistro table.

We see the controversies around the Academy salons that sometimes ended in fights, though appreciating some century and a half later quite what such differences meant is sometimes challenging. More beguiling are visual recreations of some of the great works of Impressionism, notably Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, even if it can feel like an art-historical roll-call: you hear someone hailed as “Berthe”, you know it must be Morrisot. The travails of Cézanne’s creation, including his propensity to destroy his canvases, is there too, in as much as any film can convincingly convey the process of painting. There’s a painful moment when Cézanne, funded in his Paris atelier by Zola, learns that one of his works has actually sold – but only its central detail, an apple, cut out of the canvas on the whim of a client.

Thompson’s film is a medium-level entry to the tradition of French cinema about artistic heritage. Guillaume Canet plays Zola rather drily, with Guillaume Gallienne, billed as a member of the Comédie-Française – as if the augustness of this project culturel was not otherwise guaranteed – as Cézanne. Full plaudits to the film’s make-up artists, who endow both with impressive varieties and combinations of facial hair. Jean-Marie Dreujou’s cinematography is much more satisfying than an overwrought score from Eric Neveux. Like that apple excised from its pictorial context, Cézanne et moi is more satisfying in its parts than in its entirety.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Cézanne et moi

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