Much has been made of this adaptation of TheWoman in White having an especial relevance for our times. Its concern with the power dynamics of gender relations was certainly hammered home right from the beginning, as Jessie Buckley uttered its loaded opening question, “How is it men crush women time and time again and go unpunished?”, effectively delivered to us, the audience, to boot.
First the good news: Cédric Tiberghien, master of tone colour, lucidity and expressive intent, playing the 24 Chopin Preludes plus the Bach C major and the C minor Nocturne in the red-gold dragons' den of the Royal Pavilion's Music Room.
Singing satirist Anna Russell placed the French chanson in her category of songs for singers "with no voice but tremendous artistry". Mezzo Karen Cargill has tremendous artistry but also a very great voice indeed, a mysterious gift which makes her one in a thousand, and also rather good French (put that down to Scotland's "Auld Alliance, perhaps).
Questions of interpretation apart, Simon Rattle has yet again proved the great connecter, this time in concerts separated by just over a month.
How to judge a genius who died at 25? Gerald Larner, in his programme note for this concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, suggests that Lili Boulanger’s tragically early death was actually central to her achievement. She knew she probably wouldn’t see 30, and directed her energies accordingly.
It's awfully long for a fairytale in which a mystery prince helps a damsel in distress, and she asks him the question she shouldn't. Myth tends to go deeper, as Wagner did in The Ringof the Nibelung after Lohengrin. Here he captures the magic of transformation and transcendence, but in between there's too much hard-to-stage pomp.
Stumble across Grange Park Opera’s new brick-clad “Theatre in the Woods”, nestled amid a labyrinth of gardens and orchards next to the rambling Tudor pile of West Horsley Place in Surrey, and on a mild June evening you may feel as if you have fallen into some Home Counties version of a magic-realist novel.
All those pranks, set-ups, fake letters and disguises, they just keep coming thick and fast in Verdi’s Falstaff. The score has irresistible energy and momentum.
Have you ever wondered why the Steinway grand piano is invariably the instrument of choice in every hall you visit, great or small? How is it that the hand-crafted pianos pioneered by Julius Blüthner in Leipzig from 1853 onwards, and still being made to the highest specifications on a different site just outside the city, don't usually get a look-in?
It’s a truism that history is written by the victors, but nowhere in classical music is the argument made more persuasively than in the legacy and reputation of Charles Gounod. In a year in which you can hardly move for Bernstein and Debussy-related events, a year in which even Couperin and Parry are getting a good showing, as well as the too-often-neglected Lili Boulanger, the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth is passing all but uncelebrated in the UK.
One wearies of quarrelling with opera directors’ concepts. But what’s the alternative? To ignore or acquiesce in crude, approximate reimaginings that, like Daisy Evans's new La Traviata at Longborough, stuff a work any old how into some snappy, after-dinner parody that says nothing useful about the piece, vulgarises the situations and confuses or misrepresents the text.
Manchester Collective is a new and enterprising group of musicians determined not just to create performances of high quality but to offer a new way in which the performances themselves are done. They started from scratch at the end of 2016, and I saw one of the first of their efforts, given at Islington Mill – a laid-back space in the basement of an old industrial building in Salford – in March last year.
The first words we hear in The Piano are the thoughts of Holly Hunter’s Ada, and they set up the film’s premise perfectly: “I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows why… not even me. My father says it is a dark talent …Today he married me to a man I have not yet met.” Ada and her young daughter (a deservedly award-winning turn from a young Anna Paquin) pitch up on a bleak New Zealand beach. With them is Ada’s beloved Broadwood piano, transported from Scotland and left abandoned on the sand when her colonist husband claims he has no room for it in his house. Ada’s keyboard is her main means of communication, so what ensues is bleak indeed.
Writer/director Jane Campion’s screenplay is an enthralling Victorian gothic melodrama, its sharp edges softened by Stuart Dryburgh's exquisite cinematography and a mellifluous Michael Nyman soundtrack. Sam Neill plays Alisdair Stewart, Ada’s emotionally stunted partner. Neill’s is a career-defining performance, his haunted features conveying a world of pain and frustration behind a stiff upper lip. There’s a shocking moment near the end when Alisdair’s self-control deserts him, Neill making the scene alarmingly credible. Alisdair’s rival for Ada’s affection is Harvey Keitel’s Baines, an illiterate settler with Maori tattoos who buys the titular piano and offers to sell it back to Ada in return for lessons. Despite an erratic Scottish accent, you can understand his appeal to Ada, Baines’s plain-spoken earthiness a stark contrast to the prissy Stewart.
But the film is stolen by Hunter and Paquin, the former’s mesmeric, mute performance overwhelming. As with Neill, it’s all in the eyes and the posture, Ada’s feistiness, anger and sorrow expressed with the tiniest gesture or glance. Paquin’s outspoken Flora unwittingly initiates The Piano’s violent climax, Hunter collapsing in the mud like a punctured balloon. Though Campion originally intended The Piano to have a tragic ending, the coda is unexpectedly upbeat, Dryburgh’s autumnal colours finally giving way to something warmer and brighter. I won’t say any more in case there are still readers who haven’t seen this, surely one of the truly great films of the past few decades.
Studio Canal’s two-disc set looks and sounds marvellous. The commentary by Campion and her producer Jan Chapman is illuminating, the pair revealing that they initially rejected Hunter as too short for the role of Ada, and that Neill’s eruption of anger terrified them. There’s also The Piano at 25, an interview with Campion and Chapman filmed at Karekare beach. Hunter appears in a brief "Making Of" extra, her gregariousness and actual speaking voice a delicious surprise.
Overleaf: watch the new trailer for The Piano
Two rules should help the non-Donizettian: avoid all stagings of the prolific Bergamasco's nearly 70 operas other than the comedies; and seek the guarantee of top bel canto stylists. Conductor Mark Elder and soprano Joyce El-Khoury certainly fit that bill, and a straight concert performance of L'Ange de Nisida, given at the Royal Opera in association with Opera Rara, got it exactly right.
"They incessantly break down, destroy and fragment the mistrust that exists among people," wrote a Latvian journalist of a folklore group during the start of the Baltic countries'"singing revolution" against Soviet rule in 1988. This is the recent reality, a nonviolent uprising unique in history, behind the daunting facts and figures of Latvia's latest "Song and Dance Celebration".
Any actor playing Lady Bracknell must dread the moment when she (or, indeed, he) has to deliver that unforgettable line about a significant piece of hand luggage. Since Edith Evans's wavering, vibrato, multi-syllable version of "a handbag?", audiences have waited to see how it will be dealt with this time. Sophie Thompson's solution is to pause knowingly then say the word quickly, almost dismissively, and regard her own modestly-sized reticule.
Emcee Michael Palin, as William Makepeace Thackeray himself, introduces us to the show: “Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.” All his major characters – or “puppets” – are riding a fairground carousel. They – and very soon, we – are having a great time.
This should have been the perfect match. Saudi-born director Haifaa al-Mansour earned real acclaim for her 2012 debut filmWadjda, whose 12-year-oldcentral character had to break the conventions of a restrictive society to realise her dream – owning her own bicycle. The challenges facing the eponymous heroine of al-Mansour’s new film may have been of a somewhat different order – to live as an independent woman in her early 19th century literary world, along with the right to publish her masterpiece, Frankenstein, written when she was just 18, under her own name. But the two stories share a sense of characters struggling towards self-assertion, against an environment that would much rather they stuck to their allotted positions.
Which makes it all the more disappointing that Mary Shelley has lost the sheer freshness that made Wadjda so memorable, and that this move into the English language is so distinctly formulaic. It isn’t really a variant on that old chestnut, foreign-language filmmaker seduced by the new perspectives of Hollywood, either: al-Mansour was educated in the US and her linguistic fluency seems perfect, while this production originated from Dublin rather than Los Angeles. But the sense of moving from a world known and conveyed in the tiniest detail into one in which the finished work is almost an agglomerate that could have been crafted by practically anyone is palpable.
Which audience is it aiming for – square-and-solid BBC Sunday nights, or the wilder shores of teenage hipsterdom?
In this case, initial resemblances are closest to period drama of the sort that the BBC does so well, but Mary Shelley doesn’t even reach the higher echelons of that esteemed form. That covers roughly the opening half of the film, in which al-Mansour shows her protagonist’s early London world, from growing up in the household of her father, the radical William Godwin (and daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, deceased), her first encounters with partner-to-be Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the ménage à trois – uneasily shared with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont – in which Mary lived after eloping with the revolutionary poet.
That world shifts with the appearance of a virtually Blackadderish Lord Byron in their midst (Clairmont throws herself at him, along with the challenge: “Do you think you are the only one who can attract a poet?”). From there it’s a short hop and skip to Byron’s Geneva residence, where the disintegrating quartet spends tumultuous days, complete with Byron’s physician Polydory and the celebrated ghost-story competition that gave rise to Mary’s novel.
It’s remarkable that this is the first biopic of Mary Shelley, given the determination with which she obviously lived her life. The famous Geneva sojourn has received rather more attention, not least in Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry (would Brenton recognise any of thge posturings here?), and the tone there moves relentlessly into crazy society life that, in their extras on this release, practically everyone involved compares (repeatedly) to the rock-star glamour of the Swinging Sixties. (Pictured below, from left, Bel Powley, Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth, Tom Sturridge)
The best that can be said about Mary Shelley is that its youthful cast has a certain chemistry, and that Elle Fanning in the title role grows as the film goes on. Until then it’s Mary being pouty and Shelley (Douglas Booth) being swanky – which works quite well as characterisation actually, in a short-attention-span sort of way, though both are upstaged shamelessly by Tom Sturridge’s Byron – caught up in a script that's consistently lunky and a score unrelentingly soupy (its ever-advancing piano-string combos practically constitute a threat to life).
In a production that sets its sights so low, we get that consistent bane of the most slip-shod films about writers – quill pens and poetry in relentless voice-over. You remain uncertain whether to blame al-Mansour or her producers for a piece that never seems to know which audience it’s aiming for – square-and-solid BBC Sunday nights, or the wilder shores of teenage hipsterdom. “Find your own voice,” is the advice that Godwin (a weary Stephen Dillane) gives his daughter as she sets out to write: it should be addressed, rather more urgently, to al-Mansour herself.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Mary Shelley
