Richard III by William Shakespeare, directed by Miles Potter – until September 25, Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Ontario, by Daniel B. Gallagher


Seana McKenna as King Richard III at Stratford, Ontario. Photo Stratford Shakespeare Festivall/Daivd Hou.

Richard III
by William Shakespeare

Director – Miles Potter
Designer – Peter Hartwell
Lighting Designer – Kevin Fraser
Composer – Marc Desormeaux

Cast:
King Edward IV – David Ferry
Queen Elizabeth – Yanna McIntosh
Prince Edward, later King Edward V – Teddy Gough
George, Duke of Clarence – Michael Spencer-Davis
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later King Richard III – Seana McKenna
Duchess of York – Roberta Maxwell
Lady Anne – Bethany Jillard
Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers – David Collins
Marquess of Dorset – E. B. Smith
Lord Grey – Dion Johnstone
William, Lord Hastings – Nigel Bennett
Lord Stanley – Andrew Gillies
Duke of Buckingham – Wayne Best
Sir William Catesby – Sean Arbuckle
Sir Richard Ratcliffe – Oliver Becker
Duke of Norfolk – Skye Brandon
Sir James Tyrrel – Paul Fauteux
Thomas, Earl of Surrey – Paul Fauteux
Murderer – Shane Carty
Henry, Earl of Richmond – Gareth Potter
Earl of Oxford – David Ferry
Sir James Blunt – David Collins
Sir Walter Herbert – Shane Carty
Cardinal Bourchier – Cyrus Lane
Archbishop – Brendan Murray
Sir Robert Brakenbury – Brude Godfree
Lord Mayor of London – Shane Carty
Scrivener – Cyrus Lane
Citizens – Laura Condlln, Carmen Grant, and Claire Lautier

In 1953, the town of Stratford, Ontario inaugurated its annual Shakespeare Festival with this very play directed by Tyrone Guthrie and starring Alec Guinness. This year Seana McKenna takes on the title role, adding—as husband and director Miles Potter explains—“one more layer of artifice on Richard.” With over twenty years of experience at Stratford, McKenna hardly needs an excuse to play the part. Yet I understand the public’s demand for an explanation.

In this case, explanations are legion. Artistic Director Des McAnuff notes that men routinely played female roles in Elizabethan times and that gender confusion is a common Shakespearean device (Stratford’s 2011 playbill also features Twelfth Night). General Director Antoni Cimolino adds a political slant by suggesting that McKenna is the Richard whom Shakespeare could never have cast but would have liked to, seeing as Queen Elizabeth had set up a police state not dissimilar to the one King Richard III employed. McKenna herself points out that we need look no further than Karla Homolka to see that women are just as capable of committing unspeakable evils as men.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International journal for the Arts!







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Russell Sherman Plays Liszt and Schumann at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Reviewed by Charles Warren

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Rockport Chamber Music Festival
Sunday, July 17
Russell Sherman, piano

The Rockport Chamber Music Festival concluded its official season with a piano recital by Russell Sherman, consisting of music by Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt. Of course, things go on year round now in the Festival's wonderful new hall, the Shalin Liu Performance Center—it is intimate, beautiful, sounds great, looks out onto the harbor and the open sea—not enough admiring can be said about it. So there will continue to be good reasons for music lovers to visit Rockport.

Russell Sherman is one  Boston's great treasures, and most of the music audience hereabout have heard him play over the years in a wide range of repertoire. He is a great musician, a great teacher, and generally speaking, a great friend to music and the enterprise of music. Everyone should read his thoughtful, highly readable book, Piano Pieces—it brings one closer to music. Sherman has now passed his eightieth year. He is a spare man who looks a bit pale and frail.  But he walks and moves well, and is still accurate and fleet of finger and well able to fashion color and control voicing and rise to sonorous climaxes in the music he plays. No diminishment apparent in energy and physical abilities as he played through Sunday's challenging program. And emotional and intellectual interest seemed greater than ever—the interest he took in the music and the focus he brought to it, and the interest he gave the listener.

Read more at the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts.

John Storgårds and Nikolaj Znaider triumph in an All-Sibelius Program at Tanglewood, by Michael Miller


John Storgaards-leading the BSO in an-all Sibelius-program. Photo Hilary-Scott.

Tanglewood, Koussevitzky Music Shed
Saturday, July 16, 8:30 p.m. Shed
John Storgårds, conductor
Nikolaj Znaider, violin

All-Sibelius Program
Finlandia
Valse triste
Violin Concerto
Symphony No. 5

We critics, as we go about our dismal business, seldom get to enjoy concerts and festivals in the same way as our readers. A memorable concert is its own reward, of course, and that is why the critics and the public are there in the first place—in most cases, let’s say. Saturday evening, however, as I anticipated Nikolaj Znaider, whose work I know, and John Storgårds, who was entirely new to me, I was able to enjoy a classic Tanglewood picnic with some delightful new friends. We arrived early, set ourselves down by Seiji Ozawa Hall, as the music of Ravel very quietly filtered out of the hall. (The rear doors were closed because of a fund-raising event nearby on the grounds.) We spoke very quietly, because a few people were actually trying to listen to the music from out there. We had no such seriousness of purpose. Neither did the courtesies of the moment impinge on our fun. There is a lot to be said for the traditional Tanglewood picnic.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International journal for the Arts!







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The French Orchestra at the Proms: Myung-Whun Chung Conducts the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France

Chung

Whee! Paree. A general moaning arose from music reviewers, starting around forty years ago, about French orchestras. They no longer sounded French. No more pinched oboes being played through the nose. No more horns sounding as if they were warbling underwater or inbred with the saxophone clan. No more lean, on-the-dot precision in the strings. As they lamented this loss, the same bemoaners forgot that they once carped about the very sound that was fading away. Uncharacteristically, the French were listening.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!

Andrew Miller

Prom 4: Havergal Brian’s Symphony No 1 “The Gothic” by Huntley Dent

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OMG! The appearance of Havergal Brian's "Gothic" Symphony is like the biblical Leviathan surfacing in Hyde Park. It's epochal. The buses lined up behind the monster aren't full of gawkers but the assembled forces needed to perform the work, not counting trucks loaded with 32 timpani, eight brass choirs, a horde of extra offstage trumpets, and more — much, much more. Choruses throng from all points of the compass. Somewhere at the musicians' union a shop foreman is screaming into the phone, "Don't tell me we've run out of ophicleides and sarrusophones! This is apocalypse!" Oh wait, it was Berlioz who calls for ophicleides and sarrusophones. But some wisp of his spirit hovered over Stoke-on-Trent when the very, very dotty composer, Havergal Brian, was born in 1876.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Review for the Arts!

Andrew Miller

andrew.miller@berkshirereview.net

East and West: 1 Bligh Joins Sydney’s Big End of Town by Alan Miller

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No matter how many corners they cut, cities find it hard to outrun their pasts. Early decisions, however casual, however pragmatic, have a way of getting written in stone so that even long after these stones have tumbled, their consequences remain in the correspondence between certain cardinal directions and certain values. However subtle the reality on the ground, north, south east and west take on indelible local meanings. If you stand on George Street and look east down Bridge Street in downtown Sydney, it is easy to perceive the original topography of Sydney Cove, or Warrane as it was known to the Gadigal people. Bridge Street dips down toward Pitt Street and then rises up more steeply toward the Botanical Gardens at the top of the ridge. Along the low point ran the Tank Stream, now covered over, Sydney Colony’s first supply of fresh water and the reason why the city is where it is.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

Alan Miller

The Cherry Orchard at The National Theatre by Huntley Dent

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Old shoes re-souled. There's a silent background to The Cherry Orchard for anyone born during the Cold War. The theme of social change, ambiguously written by Chekhov, took on a ferocious literalness after 1917. The niceties of the play are overshadowed by our knowledge of show trials, pogroms, and Soviet monsters to come. With all of that gone up in smoke, we find ourselves starting over. Now the opposite dilemma has appeared: what to do with a Russia sliding into irrelevancy? Putin is barely a mini-me compared to Stalin. The whole society, soaked in vodka and oil revenues, has been drained of significance: terror, class war, an ancien regime, elegiac memories, idealism, and even apparatchiks — all those soulful overtones gone flat-line.

Read the full reviewon the Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

Alan Miller

Proms 2011 – a personal preview by Gabriel Kellett: Royal Albert Hall et. al., 15 July – 10 September, 2011


Percy Grainger (1882-1961), 1922

Proms 2011 – a personal preview
Royal Albert Hall et. al.
15 July - 10 September, 2011

I'm in two minds about the Proms tradition of always allotting significant programming space to composers with major anniversaries. It's transparently a fairly arbitrary device to make the programmers' jobs much easier and minimise the thorny problem of personal taste entering the decision-making process; on the other hand, without it we would never get three concerts this year featuring one of my favourites, Percy Grainger (died 50 years ago). In particular, the late night Prom on 2 August including Kathryn Tickell and June Tabor, celebrating the folk music Grainger was inspired by, is to me one of the most interesting this year.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International journal for the Arts!







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Bard Summerscape 2011 to Present R. Strauss' Die Liebe der Danae, the Greatest Opera You’ve (Probably) Never Heard, by Seth Lachterman

Gustav Klimt, Danae. oil on canvas, 1907, Galerie Wöhrle, Vienna

Die Liebe der Danaë

Libretto by Joseph Gregor
Based on a scenario by Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Music by Richard Strauss

First N.Y. Fully Staged production
July 29 – August 7, 2011

The Richard B. Fisher Center f or the Performing Arts at Bard College

The American Symphony Orchestra
Leon Botstein, Conductor

It’s a bit of an exaggeration to imply that Strauss’s penultimate opera, Die Liebe der Danaë, is really so obscure. However, the bizarre history of its belated première in 1952, three years after the composer’s death, and the opera’s extraordinary performance demands, have kept this work tucked away, overshadowed by the well-loved and more frequently performed Capriccio, Strauss’s very last opera.

Read the full review in New York Arts

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BBC Prom 1, 2011

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Check the odometer. The Proms deserve a jolly rev up when they start, and after 117 summer seasons, it was a fresh young pianist, Benjamin Grosvenor, who provided it. At nineteen, he came out in a casual shirt looking like a college freshman who might be spending his vacation as a pizza delivery boy or valet parking attendant. Those attendants are notorious for taking Porsches and Jags for a quick spin, returning them with hot wheels. Grosvenor had his chances with Liszt's Piano Concerto no. 2, but he returned it respectfully to its owner. He displayed glittering fingers and a beguiling soft touch at the beginning, but this work is faux art, setting a mood simply to tease the audience before the fireworks display.

What's needed is a fiery soloist who takes command, but Grosvenor decided instead to be an equal partner with the orchestra, dutifully led by Jiri Belohlavek, now finishing his last season as conductor of the BBC Symphony. He had little to work with in Liszt's rum-tum orchestral part, and therefore the performance, while not fizzling, wasn't sizzling, either. That the tousle-headed Grosvenor is Britain's next bright hope for a flashy virtuoso was justified by his encore, Gyorgy Cziffra's wild arrangement of Brahms's hoary Hungarian Dance no. 5. Grosvenor took this one for a joy ride, and the audience erupted. More power to him.

Read the full review by Huntley Dent on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts.