The directors of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra have a gift for talent spotting. When they appointed the 25-year-old Simon Rattle as principal conductor in 1980 they proved their prescience. With their current music director Andris Nelsons they did it again; the young Latvian strengthened the CBSO’s claim to being the finest orchestra in Britain. Nelsons will depart next year for his new role at the head of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and audiences should seize any opportunity during this final season to see this thrilling musician in action. The year 2014 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Richard Strauss, and this concert starts the celebrations off in style. Sixty years separate the youthful exuberance of the composer’s tone-poem
. The technical demands of
are enormous, and it takes a group like the CBSO to find the character of the piece. The erotic charge of the work pulses over layers of moral and psychological ambiguity—both an invitation to hedonistic pleasure, and a warning against it. At the other extreme we have the
, the work of a composer who would be dead within a year. These radiant, ecstatic songs face death with rare calm, finding beauty and even joy in acceptance. Sung by the star Canadian soprano Erin Wall, they promise to offer a tender counterbalance to so much primal urgency.
Theatre
Ellen Terry with Eileen Atkins
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, 12th January to 23rd February When a male actor turns 60, some of the great Shakespearean roles—Prospero or Lear—still lie ahead. In 1909, Ellen Terry was 62, and had long been famous for her performances as Juliet, Viola and Lady Macbeth. Her longest collaborator, the actor and impresario Henry Irving, was dead. What next? That year she wrote the lectures on Shakespeare that Eileen Atkins will perform in January and February at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a new indoor theatre at the Globe in London. Terry’s lectures began as assemblages of her favourite passages from Shakespeare, interwoven with anecdotes from her career. Two of them became huge successes, on the subject of “The Triumphant Women” in Shakespeare and “The Pathetic Women,” and took her on tours across America and Australia. Terry described herself as a suff- ragette and the spirit of feminism lives in Atkins’s adaptation of her work. The venue for these performances is fitting: on the site where, 400 years ago, Shakespeare’s women were played by boys.
Laura Marsh
Film
Her
On release from 10th January Some time in the near future, as envisaged by director Spike Jonze, a guy (Joaquin Phoenix) makes a comfortable living writing personal notes—proposals, anniversaries, bereavements—for those not confident of their own articulacy. Yet after his own painful divorce, he’s uncertain in his own way, searching online for a soul-mate… until a voice in his ear offers support. His new Operating System (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) knows all—what’s more, she understands.
Her is both love story and commentary on what is almost upon us: intimate relationships with increasingly empathetic technology. Los Angeles here resembles Shanghai but drenched in the soft organic hues of mid-20th century “antiques” and tweed rather than the gleaming steel and luminous blue of more conventional futurology. Relationships—whether friendships or sex—seem gentler, too, as if what everyone really wants is not passion but for someone to listen. That said,
Her delivers a heartbreak moment that remains true whatever system—virtual or otherwise—you operate.
Francine Stock
Opera
Manon
Royal Opera House, 14th January to 7th February Although categorised as an
opéra comique, Jules Massenet’s
Manon is very far from funny. The term simply means opera with dialogue and arias rather than sung through with recitative. One of the mainstays of opera house repertoires, it requires singers of extraordinary stamina as the titular role is physically and psychologically demanding. Based on Abbé Prévost’s 1731 novel,
L’Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, the opera tells of a poor country girl who chooses the security of wealth over romantic love, with fatal results. Laurent Pelly’s production quivers with thwarted romance, brilliant period detail and a hurtling sense of tragedy. Updating the setting from the 18th century of Louis XV to the Belle Époque of Émile Zola, it suggests a darkly glittering world teetering on the brink of collapse. The production, which premiered in 2010, returns to Covent Garden with Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho, a natural heir to Pelly’s original Manon, Anna Netrebko. Jaho confounded the critics when she stepped in at the last minute to take the lead female role in
La Traviata in 2005 at Covent Garden and subsequently blew the roof off the Royal Opera House. In the role of Manon, the quintessential material girl, Jaho is head, shoulders and lungs above the rest. Prepare to be shredded.
Neil Norman
