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Telegraph
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
L'elisir d'amore, Garsington, review: a delightful picture-perfect fantasy
Donizetti's ever-green comedy The Elixir of Love is one of those operas that resists heavy-handed directorial intervention. Sure, you could choose to highlight the grinding poverty of the Italian village where the action takes place, and emphasise the vast social gulf between Adina, the flighty landowner who rejects the hopeless passion of the peasant Nemorino, and the girls who develop a crush on Nemorino once they learn he's inherited a fortune. In this new production, director Christopher Luscombe wisely goes the other way, offering a realisation of such perfect picture-postcard fantasy you can only sigh with pleasure. Designer Simon Higlett evokes an Italian village square in the late 1940s in painstaking detail, complete with potted flowers, an old-fashioned petrol pump and fading marriage-and-funeral stickers on the ancient hotel walls. The Yanks are still in the vicinity, as we learn when Sergeant Belcore, the rival to the hapless Nemorino, turns up in one of those army motorcycle-plus-sidecars we remember from old war films. The quack doctor Dulcamara arrives in a Fiat of bright red vulgarity, and Adina herself has a spotless white Vespa—which perfectly captures the 'real but not real' feeling of the evening. The production could have coasted along on the beauty of the set, the beautiful playing from the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted with pert stylishness by Chloe Rooke—and Donizetti's immortal melodies. But there's a core of tender feeling at the heart of the comic froth, and the performers draw it out with some subtle acting. Adina's rejection of Nemorino in the famous aria where she compares her freedom to the winds can seem like 'Look, I'm a b----, just get over it,' but American soprano Madison Leonard lets Nemorino down with affecting gentleness. We know from the beginning she'll come round, which isn't the case in every production. Ukrainian tenor Oleksiy Palchykov is a Nemorino of affecting ardour, whose naïve passion for Adina inspires feats of bodily as well as vocal agility. The moment when he leapt several feet to embrace her brought an audible gasp of astonishment. Nemorino's rival Belcore can sometimes come over as harsh in his temporary triumph over Nemorino, but in Spanish baritone Carles Pachon's winning performance he seems good-natured under his vanity. Richard Burkhard's Dulcamara is less strong vocally, but he has a winning sly roguishness. Sharing the honours are the excellent chorus. Their naïve enthusiasm for Dulcamara's magic potions and lusty celebration of the eventually aborted wedding of Adina and Belcore are all enacted with choreographed precision, nicely directed by Rebecca Howell. In all, the evening offers a charming fantasy, leavened with moments of emotional truth. If I have one complaint it's that the singing, though athletically impressive, is not as refined as the acting. The principals tended to sing with huge force, as if they were trying to fill the Met Opera in New York. It compromised their sound, and it's hardly necessary in Garsington's modest dimensions. Only in Nemorino's famous Furtive Tear aria are we treated to some vocal delicacy on a par with the production's other delights.
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Anna Lapwood review – charismatic organist has a packed Royal Albert Hall eating out of her hand
The Henry Willis organ – 70ft high, 65ft wide, with 9,999 pipes – has long been the criminally underused centrepiece of the Royal Albert Hall, but it has finally found someone big enough to bring it to life. Anna Lapwood, the venue's first ever official organist, might be a slight 5ft 3in but the so-called 'TikTok organist' – with more than 2m social media followers – is charismatic enough to sell out a midweek gig and have a packed hall eating out of her hand. Tonight she and her organ battle with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, under the baton of the ever adventurous German conductor André de Ridder. Lapwood's obsession with film soundtracks could suggest a rather glib populism – she even apologises for starting with a Hans Zimmer theme from The Da Vinci Code ('I don't know why it made me cry, it's not even a very good film') and encores with a solo arrangement of a throwaway theme from How to Train Your Dragon. But the rest of the show has heft. Saint Saëns' third symphony, probably the most famous piece for organ and orchestra, takes up most of the second half, while a suite from Zimmer's Interstellar soundtrack shifts the organ-heavy themes into hypnotic, Philip Glass-like territory. Better still are the two pieces specially written for tonight. A toccata by young composer Kristina Arakelyan is a wonderful mix of whimsy and horror, filled with slippery harmonies, gurgling sci-fi passages and studied discordancy. Max Richter's 33-minute Cosmology conducts a circular voyage through space – from the tentative, irregular, arpeggios of the intro, to the heart-tugging, funereal organ drones of the second movement, the glistening modulations and irregular time signatures of the third, while the final movement mixes Lapwood's dreamy, synth-like chord washes with the female voices of the choir she leads at Pembroke College, Cambridge. What's especially welcome is Lapwood's efforts to talk to the audience and put the music into context. As well as being an evangelist for the pipe organ, and a champion of female musicians (her #PlayLikeAGirl T-shirts are all over the hall), she's also becoming one of the most effective ambassadors for classical music since Leonard Bernstein – a musically omnivorous enthusiast who knows how to communicate with a wider audience.
Times
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Bach Choir/Hill review — Walton's wild feast and a striking new symphony
The Babylonian king Belshazzar, the Old Testament tells us, threw a pretty wild party: a thousand at least quaffing from sacred vessels, plenty of wives and concubines, heady music from cornets, sackbuts, even a 'pleasant harp'. But David Hill, the Bach Choir and the Philharmonia Orchestra went wilder still in the Royal Festival Hall in London during their thunderous account of Walton's irresistible cantata Belshazzar's Feast. The venerable choir, nearing its 150th birthday, numbered nearly 200, so no problem hearing them sing even when the organ roared, ancillary brass rang out from the sides, and the percussionists let loose their gongs, whip or anvil. Hill, the choir's music director for 27 years, grew more impassioned as the minutes passed, rocking and swivelling at speed
The Guardian
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Oh to Believe in Another World review – Gripping Kentridge and Shostakovich bring Stalin's age of betrayal to life
The 20th century is a cruel farce performed by puppets in a cardboard museum in South African artist William Kentridge's grotesquely funny, constantly disconcerting film interpretation of Shostakovich's 10th Symphony. Lenin and Stalin, their faces' photographs fixed on jerky figures made from scraps, transforming sporadically into living dancers hidden under collaged costumes, monstrously dominate a puppet cast that also includes the bullish-looking but revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky along with Trotsky and Shostakovich himself. It would be stirring in an art gallery with recorded music, but on a big screen in the Royal Festival Hall above Marin Alsop conducting a gripping performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra as part of the Southbank's Centre's multidisciplinary Multitudes festival, it became a magic key to both the music and the age of betrayal and mass murder it witnesses. Shostakovich said of his 10th Symphony, 'It's about Stalin and the Stalin years' – as blunt an explanation of a work you're ever likely to hear from a composer. It was premiered in December 1953 following Stalin's death in March that year, freeing Shostakovich and other musicians from the dictator's unbearably attentive grip – except poor Prokofiev, who died the same day as Stalin. So many had died, including Kentridge's artistic hero Mayakovsky, who shot himself in 1930 as illusions collapsed about Stalin's meat-factory regime. Biographers and musicologists argue over Shostakovich's apparently political symphony – did he write it all after Stalin died? The brilliance of Kentridge's film, perfectly in sync with each unnerving crescendo and melancholy trough, is that it makes you see through such quibbles and feel the majesty and pathos of this music from the darkest times of the 20th century. The crux of discomfort came in the painfully fast second movement alongside rapidly edited, montage-manic images and proclamations such as 'Comrade life, march faster!' and 'We'll chase humanity into happiness with an iron fist!' These futuristic lines by Mayakovsky became all too bloodily real when Stalin started the Five-Year Plans in 1928, to speed up economic history by enforced collectivisation and slave labour, along with purges that killed millions. Kentridge's film opens with lyrical photographs of revolutionary crowds in 1917, but more and more faces are then ringed with pen as if marked by Stalin for death. As the title implies, his film sees the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917 as the birth of a failed utopia, but a failed utopia is still a glimpse of hope. Archival discoveries after the fall of the USSR have revealed a bleaker picture of Lenin and his party. But the artists inspired by 1917 certainly did think they were building utopia and it is their aesthetic disruptions, from Mayakovsky's futurist lines to the art of Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich and the radical film editing of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov that give Kentridge's film its energy. But it's all ironised. A hand reaches into the Museum of Stalinism to reveal this immersive, labyrinthine space is actually just a small model made from cardboard. All the brave pronouncements are the jerky bombast of tiny puppets. And it ends in a graveyard. In the same way, echoes of modernist music in Shostakovich's 10th Symphony are framed by quotation marks. You are left with an infinitely sad and traumatised lyricism as Shostakovich and Kentridge remember the millions of Russians, Ukrainians and other nationalities slaughtered by the world's first Communist state between 1917 and 1953. The multitudes. Southbank Centre's Multitudes festival continues until 3 May.
