Viennese night in Glasgow’s Candleriggs was hardly going to be a simple matter of waltzes and polkas. True, its curtain-raiser was a Blue Danube with red blood in its veins rather than the anodyne river water of this year’s New Year concert from Austria’s capital; one would expect no less from Donald Runnicles after the refined but anaemic Franz Welser-Möst.
Joe Wright’s screen adaptation of Tolstoy’s giant of a masterpiece, scripted by Tom Stoppard, takes a big risk that pays off: the many-layered late 19th-century novel is stripped to its bare bones with astonishing brio. He sets most of the story in a theatre, playing with the illusion created by a proscenium arch and the mirrored worlds of audience and stage.
With its exuberant blood-spray, rambunctious dialogue and generous running time, Django Unchained is writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s first full foray into Westerns. Although it’s not a remake, it pays tribute to Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Spaghetti Western Django, not only in name but in its use of the title song - which opens this movie as it opened that one - and in the fleeting appearance of the original's game star, Franco Nero (pictured below right).
They muck one up, one’s ma and pa. Later this year, all being tickety-boo, a royal uterus will be delivered of the third in line to the throne. The media in all its considerable fatuity will ponder the best way to bring up such an infant in the era of, for instance, Twitter. Full marks go to the BBC’s history department for mischievously lobbing this cautionary little gem into the pot. Queen Victoria’s Children is a three-part manual in how not to raise a future monarch.
Perpetually reborn in movies and TV series, Jack the Ripper rides again in Ripper Street, which is set in Whitechapel in 1889, in the aftermath of the much-mythologised murders. Except this time, the subject isn't the Ripper himself so much as the dread and hysteria he left in his wake, which shrouds the murky streets like poison gas.
It’s hard to work out why the Royal Ballet has not indulged in more Jerome Robbins, so eminently suited does it seem for their taste for emotional understatement. In the Night had a few outings in the 1970s, and has only now been revived, possibly after seeing the audience response to the Mariinsky’s immaculate performance of the same in London a year ago.
Not-long into this farrago, Peter – the former Pete - Doherty opines that “nothing is beyond romance, except for the pain that is killing me every day”. Thankfully, the pain here is limited to the close-to two hours that Confession of a Child of the Century takes to trudge towards its conclusion.
Rolando Villazón at 40 is back on reasonably stylish form, as far as the voice will allow him to go – which is not always up and volume-wise only just as far as the Covent Garden Balcony. John Copley’s Royal Opera Bohème is two years younger than the Mexican tenor. It burns less warmly than the faltering stove in the first act, casts a pall over collective attempts to reanimate the naturalism which is all there in Puccini’s perfect score, and needs a second interval to drag its weary bones back up the stairs to the students’ attic in Act Four.
Much more regularly than the seven years it takes the Flying Dutchman's demon ship to reach dry land, the Zurich Opera steamer moors at the Southbank Centre. None of its more recent concert performances up to now has branded itself on the memory as much as its 2003 visit, when chorus and soloists stunned in Wagner's Tannhäuser.