|
| A Shropshire Lad: English Songs Orchestrated by Roderick Williams | classical album of the week | by Andrew Clements Dec 1, 2022 | Williams/Hallé/Elder (Hallé) Baritone Williams has orchestrated this wide selection of songs by British and Irish composers and illuminates each one with moving personal touches As well as being one of Britain’s leading baritones, Roderick Williams is also a composer, mainly of much admired choral music. The twin tracks of his career come together in this collection, in which Williams is the soloist in 21 songs by British composers that, at the suggestion of the conductor Mark Elder, he has orchestrated for the Hallé himself. At the heart of the disc are two song cycles, George Butterworth’s six Songs from AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The House of Life. But otherwise Williams’s selection ranges widely. There are a couple of songs by John Ireland (one of them his well known Masefield setting, Sea Fever), and single settings from seven other composers, ranging from Rebecca Clarke, Ernest Farrar, William Denis Browne and Ina Boyle (who was emphatically Irish, despite the title of this collection) to Ruth Gipps, Madeleine Dring and James Burton. Continue reading... | | | Beef broth and body shaming: the punk drama about why Empress Elisabeth was the Meghan Markle of her time | by Cath Clarke Dec 1, 2022 | Director Marie Kreutzer talks about her latest film, which aims to portray a complex female character – whose story resonates with modern pressures on royal women under the glare of media scrutiny Marie Kreutzer grew up in Vienna, where the 19th-century empress Elisabeth of Austria is a tourist-shop darling. She smiles from tea towels, chocolate boxes and all manner of tat. “Her face is on every other souvenir. She is not someone who is cool or interesting here,” the director shrugs over Zoom from her apartment in the city. So, when the Phantom Thread actor Vicky Krieps suggested they make a biopic about Elisabeth (or “Sisi”, as she is affectionately known), Kreutzer laughed it off. “I didn’t think she was serious.” The pair had worked together on 2016’s We Used to Be Cool. Continue reading... | | | | | |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment