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Harnoncourt: Mendelssohn, Wagner, Schumann album review – revelatory readings from the late revolutionary

Harnoncourt: Mendelssohn, Wagner, Schumann album review – revelatory readings from the late revolutionary

European Chamber Orchestra/Harnoncourt/Urmana (Sony) This 1999 live recording captures the late conductor’s radical ear in bracing Mendelssohn, gossamer Wagner and a luminous Liebestod – from Violeta Urmana Ten years on from his death, this newly released live recording from the 1999 Styriarte festival in Graz is a welcome reminder of Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s revolutionary approach to music. At its heart is a rare – for him – foray into the world of Richard Wagner, provocatively coupled with Mendelssohn and Schumann, two composers whose attitudes towards the Sorcerer of Bayreuth were equivocal, to say the least. He opens with Mendelssohn’s fairytale overture, Die Schöne Melusine, a bracing ride driven by resolute strings and dramatic interventions from the woodwind. The Tannhäuser Overture is quite a different matter. To a certain extent, Harnoncourt takes a Wagner-lite approach, with gossamer textures rooted in Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, a comparison that the antisemitic Wagner would surely have loathed. Purists might balk, but it’s one of the silkiest and most detailed of readings, for those curious about the actual notes on the page, it’s illuminating. Continue reading...

Fashion’s greatest challenges ‘inequality and AI’, say Prada designers

Fashion’s greatest challenges ‘inequality and AI’, say Prada designers

Speaking at Milan fashion week, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons presented a more concentrated, but relatable, show Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, the co-designers of Prada, said backstage at Milan fashion week that fashion’s greatest challenges were inequality and artificial intelligence. An interesting perspective, since Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire owner of Meta, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, sat next to Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada’s husband, in the front row. Continue reading...

Vladimir and Young Sherlock: the seven best shows to stream this week

Vladimir and Young Sherlock: the seven best shows to stream this week

Rachel Weisz becomes obsessed with a charming Leo Woodall in a dangerously sexy midlife crisis drama, while Guy Ritchie takes on Arthur Conan Doyle Rachel Weisz’s literature professor M is struggling with middle age and worried she may never be “the cause of a spontaneous erection” ever again. Worse still, her academic husband John (John Slattery) is not only still taking advantage of their marriage’s open status but losing his tenure as a result. Into this chaos comes Vladimir (Leo Woodall), a charming, married professor. Through him, M sees her past – sexy, young, sadly irretrievable – and she becomes dangerously obsessed. Vladimir is adapted from a novel by Julia May Jonas and its literary roots are obvious: fourth wall-breaking and fantasy sequences explore M’s internality. But it is a witty deconstruction of a midlife crisis. Netflix, from Thursday 4 March Continue reading...

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán seeking to drum up votes by doing down Ukraine

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán seeking to drum up votes by doing down Ukraine

EU’s longest-serving leader hopes to retain power by telling voters the main threat to country comes from Kyiv Paid for by its rightwing, populist government and generated using AI, the billboards – showing Volodymyr Zelenskyy and EU officials with their hands outstretched – blanket Hungary. “Our message to Brussels: We won’t pay!” the taxpayer-funded advert reads, echoing the messaging woven through spots on radio, television and social media. It’s a nod to the election strategy that Viktor Orbán, the EU’s longest-serving leader, has unleashed as he lags in most polls before upcoming elections: convincing voters that the country’s greatest threat is not fraying social services, the rising cost of living or economic stagnation, but rather the neighbouring country of Ukraine. Continue reading...

Ancient by Luke Barley review – the secret history of Britain’s woodlands

Ancient by Luke Barley review – the secret history of Britain’s woodlands

A former ranger tells the story of how the UK’s forests intimately shaped – and were shaped by – its people It may not sit well with the politicians who now seek to govern it, but Britain has always been a land of immigrants – our “native” fauna and flora among them. More than 10,000 years ago, in the wake of retreating ice sheets, trees from the warmer south began to re-colonise this chilly north-western fringe of Europe: first birch, then hazel, elm, oak and alder. By the time rising sea levels submerged the marshy lowlands connecting it to the rest of the continent, the new British mainland was covered in a luxuriant tangle of forest. In this primeval wildwood, a squirrel could leap tree-to-tree from north coast to south, east coast to west. Or so one story goes. In Ancient, woodland expert Luke Barley sets out to tell a more complex and fascinating tale of our forests and the people that have lived with and made use of them. His title points back to the post-ice age woodland and its forerunners in sweltering or wintry deep prehistory, but it also holds a more specific meaning. Under classifications drawn up in the 1970s, a UK wood is considered “ancient” if it was already in existence by 1600 (in Scotland, by 1750), as shown on the earliest accurate maps. These are our last links to the wildwood, places where the undisturbed soil still supports a rich and intricate ecosystem that no human ingenuity can recreate. Continue reading...