“The Fish” by Marta Klonowska, from the Glasstress exhibition
Classical
Wigmore Hall, 23rd November to 21st December
Last season the Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff took his audience on a tour through the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, proving himself an enquiring and occasionally iconoclastic guide. Now Schiff turns his attention to Bach, with a sequence of five recitals encompassing everything from the Well-Tempered Clavier to the Goldberg Variations. For many pianists the abstraction of Bach is an opportunity to tell us about themselves—their emotions, their technique. Not Andras Schiff. The mature Schiff is as pure an intellect as he is an artist, and hearing him play is as close as you can get to hearing Bach’s own musical voice, unmediated by ego or affectation.
The culmination of the series will be a concert on 21st December, in which he will set Bach’s mighty Goldberg Variations against Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. It’s a dialogue charged with a whole career’s study and experience, and the product of over a year’s musical immersion. There won’t be any histrionics or high-wire extremes, but there will be wit, virtuosity and, above all, humanity.
Alexandra Coghlan
Art
Glasstress: White Light/White Heat
London College of Fashion and the Wallace Collection, from 27th November
For the last 20 years Adriano Berengo, President of the Berengo Studio, the Venetian glass manufacturer, has collaborated with artists. Convinced by Peggy Guggenheim’s judgement that glass was “too important a material to be left in the hands of glass masters,” artists of the stature of German sculptor Thomas Schütte, or Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, have been invited to make work in glass. For many it is their first encounter with this difficult-to-handle medium.
Berengo was behind one of the hits of this year’s Venice Biennale, “Glasstress: White Light/White Heat.” Now the show is coming to London, in an exhibition split between the College of Fashion and the Wallace Collection. “Glasstress” includes work by the adventurous fashion designers Hussein Chalayan, the Boudicca duo, Zowie Broach and Brian Kirkby, and Helen Storey, a practised experimenter, who has created an extraordinary “Dress of Glass and Flame,” with a flame cradled in pyrex at its heart.
Emma Crichton-Miller
Theatre
Mojo
Harold Pinter Theatre, London, from 26th October
For once the critics were spot on when, in 1995, they hailed 26-year-old Jez Butterworth’s Mojo as a dazzling debut, the best first play since John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. This West End revival by the original production team of director Ian Rickson and designer Ultz (both have worked with Butterworth right through to his mega-hit Jerusalem) casts top names in a mythic power struggle between hoodlums and mobsters in Soho, 1958. A flavour of the dialogue: “Are you sure he’s dead?” “Well, he’s cut in half and in two bins.”
There’s the always intriguing Ben Whishaw, Cockney icon Daniel Mays (train-robber Ronnie Biggs on television last year), Downton Abbey’s favourite valet, Brendan Coyle—and ginger mop Rupert Grint from the Harry Potter movies, setting out to emulate Daniel Radcliffe’s successful transition to the stage.
Harold Pinter admired Butterworth’s play and appeared in the 1997 movie version; oddly, the elements of David Mamet, Quentin Tarantino and indeed Pinter worked much better in the theatre than on screen. So it will be fascinating to see if Mojo can now justify its theatrical cult status. Time to shoot some cuffs and polish up the winkle-pickers.
Michael Coveney
Film
Gravity
On release from 8th November, watch the trailer here
What is the purpose in 2013 of a trip to the cinema? Gravity could be the answer—a 3D experience so immediate and intense it couldn’t be replicated at home. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play scientists coming to the end of a long mission on the Explorer space shuttle. During routine maintenance on the Hubble Telescope, disaster strikes in the form of satellite debris. The first hour of the film is extraordinary, placing the audience right inside the action, so much so that you find yourself controlling your breathing to conserve oxygen. There are echoes of earlier space epics—the melancholy of Solaris, the rush of Alien—but Gravity aims for greater intimacy, even if the later narrative takes a more conventional action-fable route. Director Alfonso Cuarón, who co-wrote with brother Jonás, was determined to kidnap the audience, creating a film so immersive they would believe themselves outside the earth’s atmosphere. With the help of British special effects teams, Shepperton Studios, and the charisma of Bullock and Clooney, his mission succeeds.
Francine Stock
Opera
The Magic Flute
The London Coliseum, 7th November to 7th December
Simon McBurney, the creative powerhouse behind the genre-bending theatre group Complicite, is one of the few who have turned the avant-garde into a commercial proposition. His first operatic venture in 2010—a staging of Bulgakov’s blackly comic novel, A Dog’s Heart—was received with something approaching rapture. He returns to opera this month with his anarchic vision of The Magic Flute. Mozart’s magical, family-friendly opera presents a greater challenge for McBurney than his debut, if only because it is an established favourite and you mess with Mozart at your peril. Like Terry Gilliam—invited back to ENO next year following his outrageously inventive production of The Damnation of Faust—McBurney is a fearless theatrical visionary who relishes a challenge.
Conceived and created in 2012 with De Nederlandse Opera, McBurney’s Magic Flute scrapes away the cuddly surface of the work to reveal a core of sexuality seething beneath. Actors join opera singers on stage, video projections replace sets and even the orchestra is hauled into the action as Prince Tamino and birdcatcher Papageno set off in search of Princess Pamina. Safe and conventional? In your dreams.
Neil Norman
