YAZMINA Reza has written seven plays, and I am a huge, huge fan of her third, Art, having seen 20 of the 26 casts when it played to packed houses at Wyndhams and the Whitehall Theatres in London’s West End for the last few years of the 1900s. She has a real talent for documenting…
SHERBORNE Chamber Choir joined forces with the Sherborne Young Singers, the Sherborne Baroque Players and six fine soloists to perform what is undoubtedly one of J.S. Bach’s greatest works, the St. Matthew Passion. First performed in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig almost three hundred years ago, its portrayal of Christ’s betrayal, trial and crucifixion contains some…
OSCAR Wilde’s satire Lady Windermere’s Fan had a sumptuous staging at Strode Theatre in Street, by courtesy of Street Theatre. Set firmly in the Victorian moral climate, the play not only contains some of the most biting of the writer’s bon mots, but underlines the lasting imbalance of the way society views the behaviour of…
IT was a bad week to be a toff in the theatre with Oh What A Lovely War satirising the Col Blimps and high society buffoons at Bath Theatre Royal and Laura Wade’s coruscating black comedy about an exclusive all-male Oxbridge dining club in Posh at Salisbury Playhouse. Of course, both plays draw their characters…
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Nicholas McGegan: Conductor Veronika Eberle: Violin Antoine Tamestit: Viola BRAHMS: Liebeslieder Walzer MOZART: Sinfonia Concertante, K364 BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 7 in A major English-born conductor Nicholas McGegan was awarded an OBE in 2010 for “services to music overseas”, and a glance at his biography shows what a globe-trotting career…
THE horrors and tragedy of war are never far away but for the quiet towns of rural France in 1940 they roared right into the peaceful squares and battered down the doors of farms and townhouses, as the Nazi invasion extended its iron grip over every aspect of life. Suite Francaise, which had a charity…
HELEN Edmundson’s play The Heresy of Love is set in a convent in Mexico City in the late 17th century, and based on a true story. The Spanish were by that time well established in a New World they sought to conquer and to proselytise. Juana de Asbaje y Ramirez was born to unmarried Spanish…
JOAN Littlewood was born in 1914, right at the start of the Great War. Fifty years later, established as a writer, activist and director, she and her team at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, created a satirical musical play about the war, performed by a Pierrot troupe. The power of its impact was immediate, and…
ARTS University Bournemouth’s latest production, the 1930s comedy classic Once in a Lifetime, was the first of eight collaborations by Moss Hart and George Kaufman. Three less-than-successful vaudeville actors decide to leave New York and head for Hollywood to try their luck as voice coaches to the vocally challenged stars of Tinseltown; it is the…
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra leader Amyn Merchant Ion Marin: Conductor Gerhard Oppitz: Piano MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K491 MAHLER: Symphony No. 9 in D major ION Marin was a new name to me, but it is one that I will not forget. Stepping in at very short notice to replace the indisposed…