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Dmitri Hvorostovsky – Moscow Nights Click here to watch My colleague Norman Lebrecht reminds me, on his indispensable classical music website Slippedisc, that it is exactly four years since we lost the peerless baritone, Dmitri Hvorostovsky to a cancer of the brain. In case you have forgotten how wonderful he was, here he is, with Anna Netrebko, singing Moscow Nights. As an added bonus, we get a dazzling glimpse of Red Square in all its improbable glory. I will never get tired of this and I will never stop missing the great Hvorostovsky. Autumn Royal – Irish Rep online Click here for tickets May and Timothy are looking after the father who has long since taken ill to bed. Their own lives are on hold and they’re not getting any younger. Should they stay and help? Or is it time for them to move on? Autumn Royal is a dark comedy by Kevin Barry is set on the northside of Cork city and is about life and death, love and hate, jealousy, rage, horror, and homicidal notions – just a normal play about a family. Directed by Ciaran O’Reilly it stars Maeve Higgins and John Keating. Autumn Royal will be available for streaming for two weeks only Nov 29 to Dec 12 $25 for 48-hour on demand access. Songs from the Kitchen — Chanukah Edition! - National Yiddish Theatre Click here to watch New York’s Folkbiene Yiddish Theatre dishes up an exciting new Chanukah event as part of their 107th season. ESN is a celebration of Jewish food through song and cooking and it comes to the virtual stage from tonight through the last night of Chanukah. The special Chanukah edition of ESN hails from creators Frank London and Lorin Sklamberg of the Grammy Award-winning Klezmatics alongside Yiddish singer Sarah Gordon, whose mother, Yiddish Diva Adrienne Cooper, helped conceive the first performance of ESN. If you’re not familiar with klezmer music, this is a good way to find out about it. If you are, you’ll want to hear it anyway. Nov 28-Dec 6 Old Bridge – Papatango Click here for tickets One day all you care about is music, fashion, and boys. The next day there’s no food. Piece by piece your world starts to change so you change with it. Mostar, Yugoslavia, 1988. Mili, a boy from out of town, dives from the famous Old Bridge. Mina, a local girl, watches. As he falls, she begins falling for him. This play by British Bosnian writer Igor Memic. won the 2020 Papatango New Writing Prize. 29 Nov-4 Dec. £10 to stream for 48 hours after purchase. Le Corsaire – Mariinsky Click here for tickets This is the ballet all young male dancers aspire to perform because their role, unlike most classical ballets, is not limited to proudly displaying the ballerina, lifting her, and not dropping her from a great height but putting her down gently for her next pirouette or balance. In Le Corsaire, (The Pirate) all the fireworks belong to the men, especially in this version from Moscow’s Mariinsky Ballet starring Timor Askerov as Conrad, the pirate. It was based on The Corsair by Lord Byron and choreographed originally by Balletmaster Joseph Mazilier to the music of Adolphe Adam, this production, Pyotr Gusev’s 1955 revival, features a star-studded roster of Mariinsky dancers including Kimin Kim (Ali), Alina Somova (Medora), Timur Askerov (Conrad), Nadezhda Batoeva (Gulnare) with Daria Ionova, Anastasia Nuikina, and Maria Khoreva as the three Odalisques. Grateful – John Bucchino Click here to stream or purchase John Bucchino is a well-known and well-regarded American songwriter who attracts some of the world’s top cabaret and theatre singers to his music. This film, Grateful, timed to coincide with Thanksgiving, features a stellar group of singers performing his songs with Bucchino himself at the piano, including Leslie Odom, Jr., Stephen Schwartz, Toni Tennille, David Campbell, Ann Hampton Callaway, Corey Cott, Amanda McBroom, Mykal Kilgore, Natalie Douglas, Andrea Marcovicci, Lois Sage, Jessica Fishenfeld, Scott Joiner, Anders Paulsson, and Alexander Sage Oyen. It is available to stream $4.99 or purchase $9.99 through Dec. 31st. King John – Royal Shakespeare Company Click here for tickets Ever wonder why the same plays by Shakespeare are produced over and over again – Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and the others you know well? Without thinking about it, name as many Shakespeare plays as you can. The First Folio has 36, and there are a couple of dodgy ones that he may or may not have had a hand in, but how many can you think of off the top of your head? If you can get to 10 without pausing, you’re a real theatregoer. What happened to the others? I can tell you but it will sound like lèse majesté - they’re just not that good. One of these is King John. I waded through the new production by the RSC this week, realising that I’d never seen it before. It turns out that King John never made much sense even in Shakespeare’s time when the source material he used was patchy and suspect. It was probably written in the mid-1590s, although it did not appear in print until the First Folio of 1623. That text is thought to have come from a 1596 manuscript subsequently copied by scribes in 1609 and 1623. This may explain some of the play's textual problems. My own theory, not borne out by scholars who know far more than I, is that it was an early failure that Shakespeare had shoved on a shelf, and then pulled out to be rewritten and hastily knitted together in time for a rehearsal when he was late on a deadline. It makes even less sense when produced, as here, in keeping with current trends, with a female King John, a female Papal Legate, and set in the Swinging Sixties. Lots of bopping and mad dancing and lots of blood, but very little actual dramatic reason. Here are the bare bones: Richard the Lionheart is dead. His brother John is King of England. Threatened from all sides by Europe, the English noblemen and even his own family, King John will stop at nothing to keep hold of his crown. Shakespeare’s rarely performed tale of a nation in turmoil is determinedly modern in both dress and intentional contemporary resonance and stars Rosie Sheehy doing her best as King John, David Birrell as the King of France and Katherine Pearce as Cardinal Pandulph. Ah well, back to Hamlet. At least we know how that one goes. What’s Her Story? – Frick Click here to watch In 2020 my favourite museum, the Frick in New York, produced a series of videos commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of women’s right to vote in the United States. These are all stories of women at the museum who made, appeared in, collected, and took care of art in this collection. Here is Curator Aimee Ng to tell us about Suzanne de Court, a rare female enamellist in the 15th century, from the famous Limoges porcelain pottery. The Halle Brass - Fanfare for Care https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Npq0mOrjyM Click here to watch Here’s a fine new piece of brass and percussion music by Steve Pickett from Sir Mark Elder and the Halle Orchestra, as an appreciation of the work of the care sector during the pandemic. I’d have preferred to hear the music speak for itself without all the introductory and explanatory talk, but Pickett’s music for Fanfare for Care is definitely worth hearing. The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko – Grange Park Opera Click here to watch This is a new opera about the former KGB operative who was poisoned with radioactive polonium by Russian agents in London in 2006. The libretto, by Kit Hesketh Harvey, is based on the book Death of a Dissident, written by Litvinenko's widow, Marina, and the music, a thoroughly creditable effort from a first-time composer, is by Anthony Bolton. Grange Park has spared no expense or imagination and has collected an impressive team. The setting includes both live footage from an onstage camera and newsreel archive projected on large screen. Back projections move the action from Blenheim Palace to Moscow and back to the Litvinenkos’ flat in Muswell Hill. The experienced director, Stephen Medcalf, marshals his forces expertly, and brings to life many of set pieces we have come to recognise from the improbable story of Russian murder in Mayfair, including the terrifying takeover of a Moscow theatre in 2002 when Chechen militants held over 900 hostages for three days. The performances are all intelligent, and Adrian Dwyer in the title role and Rebecca Bottone as Marina are exceptional. The music is pastiche, based on a variety of Russian compositions including even an attempt at an football supporters' chant. It is, of course, sung in English which you may think is a definite plus, except that opera singers always plump for the perfect musical phrase over the intelligible sentence so, without subtitles, some of the lyrics are lost.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
March 2024
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