The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, Tate Britain
A tantalising survey exploring Britain's first 20th-century avant-garde movement
Classical CDs Weekly: Mahler, Schubert, Stravinsky
With Gál and Poulenc thrown in: this week it's all about kindred spirits
A 20th-century Austrian symphony receives a memorable first recording, coupled with a witty, rarely played slice of Schubert. Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is heard in a powerful reading recorded in the Royal Festival Hall. And we’ve an intelligent, logical coupling of two ballets commissioned by Diaghilev.
Classical CDs Weekly: Mahler, Widmann, Berio
Heart-attack music, a wordless elegy and some beguiling noise
This week we’ve some pioneering, trailblazing Mahler with a dramatic twist, courtesy of a conductor who mentored Leonard Bernstein. Elsewhere, there are some disconcerting, dark sounds from a youthful German composer, and a supremely entertaining disc of highly theatrical vocal works courtesy of Paul Hillier’s immaculately drilled Theatre of Voices. Turn on, tune in and drop out while listening to Cathy Berberian’s cartoon-inspired Stripsody, and consider the very question of what constitutes music.
Turandot, Welsh National Opera, Cardiff
Beijing spaghetti-style. Politically doubtful but powerful music drama
No point in going to WNO’s Turandot expecting to see images of old Beijing, for all the charming lady in a Chinese floral hat on the programme cover. The curtain goes up on the inside of an enormous galvanised dustbin festooned with photos of what might be lads from the football team but are actually Turandot’s victims to date. Calaf is a vagrant, Turandot a blue-suited Rosa Klebb, Ping, Pang and Pong fascisti bureaucrats in coloured suits, the “Popolo di Pekino” (both sexes) shirted and tied office workers, and so forth. Perfumes of the East? Forget it.
Classical CDs Weekly: Boyle, Martin, Rachmaninov
Featuring a rare Shakespearian opera and a Scottish composer celebrating his 60th
This Saturday we’ve a new recording of a famous Russian symphony played by an Italian orchestra under their London-based principal conductor. There’s a rare Shakespearean opera written in the 1950s by a Swiss master using a German text. And a Scottish composer celebrates his 60th birthday with an invigorating collection of piano and chamber works.
Egon Schiele, Richard Nagy Gallery
Women made of bones and bruises and heart in this superior show
Richard Nagy's gallery has said that they don't want millions of people rushing to see their show of Egon Schiele's drawings of women - it's only a small second-floor space on New Bond Street after all, and 50 fragile pictures crowd the walls. But don't let that dissuade you from seeing one of the shows of the year.
Max Bill, Annely Juda Fine Art
The missing link, and a vision from the past: a peach of a show
Max Bill might be the missing link in modern art. He died only in 1994, yet he studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s, taught by Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Kandinsky. It is hard to imagine that someone who was working at full strength less than 20 years ago could have a past that is so strongly entwined with these legendary names – hard to imagine, that is, until one looks at the work displayed in this fine retrospective, which even so manages to encompass only five decades of a nearly seven-decade-long career.
BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff
Noisy Vaughan Williams symphony is a Royal College of Music period piece
Perspectives: Robson Green and the Pitmen Painters, ITV1
Miner's son revisits Ashington's colliery artists
The story of the Pitmen Painters, a group of Northumbrian miners who decided to study art appreciation in their spare time and developed into a group of untrained but powerfully expressive artists, has been documented in a book by William Feaver and a play by Lee Hall. Robson Green's particular interest in the story stems from the fact that he's a miner's son, brought up in Dudley, a few miles south of the pitmen's hometown of Ashington.