L’Heure Espagnole, Grange Park Opera – an hour of escape into Maurice Ravel’s gloriously light opera bouffe that allows a woman to juggle three lovers with impunity.
Barbara Lewis
St Michael and All Angels Church, Berwick: Should we be in need of a reminder, lockdown has provided it: our appreciation of a work of art can depend on experiencing it in the context for which it was created; the vacuum of an online viewing is no substitute.
The Rome Plague Diaries, Lockdown Life in the Eternal City: In times when many of us have been wondering why we didn’t get ourselves stranded near a Caribbean beach, Matthew Kneale decided there was nowhere on the planet he would rather be locked down than where he was in his adoptive city of Rome.
At the start of 2020, Southwark Playhouse commissioned a group of playwrights to write short plays. The aim was for them to be performed on stage by the Elders Company, the playhouse’s drama group for anyone aged 65 and over, but then lockdown came along.
A fellow pupil of Leipzig master Bernhard Heisig is the artist ANTOINETTE, who uses only her first name written in capitals. In common with Rauch and other Leipzig artists, she combines meticulous representation with the fantastic or surreal.
In a time of bitter, divisive politics, the positive, as well as the negative aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it is truly global: people everywhere feel the same fear, sorrow and frustration at the same time.
Every Christmas, London’s Old Vic delivers a production of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This year is no exception – except that it comes to us via Zoom.
C.J. Cooke, also known as Carolyn Jess-Cooke, is formidable in her achievements. An award-winning poet, novelist, academic and mother of four, her latest work is a text-book example for her creative writing students of how to write a tense page-turner that presses all the right buttons.
Even more than an outpouring of passionate pacifism, Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave is a universal exploration of the heroic strength of character required to reject decades of blind allegiance to an unholy cause.
If you can embrace it, lockdown’s shift from the real to the virtual is a liberation that makes anything possible.
Grange Park Opera Interim Season. Simon Keenlyside: An Autumn Walk in Wales (available online). Review by Barbara Lewis: Context is all, says Simon Keenlyside, as for the second time this year he delivers a musical tour of his own personal context – the woods around his Welsh home.
by Barbara Lewis • art, books, history, society, year 2021 • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, books, history, society •
The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo. By Paul Strathern, Published April 1, Atlantic Books. Review by Barbara Lewis.