‘The Tramp’ is punted as a pocket musical; it contains an immense ambit which peers into the complex life of a man who skirted controversy wherever he went. It holds you with beautiful performances and a set that strips the Chaplin name of cliche and gives analogue the upper hand.
It is soprano Lise Davidsen in the double-sided role of Fidelio and Leonore, that holds the moment with such acuity, you cannot take your eyes off her. Her presence raises this opera to a paean of hope in the face of injustice, and absolute excellence in the face of mediocrity.
SOMETIMES, IT TAKES a little more than the humdrum ebb and flow of domestic life that allows for spite and malice to manifest on every corner. Sometimes one needs to wake up, listen to the music and show a bit of empathy. This is the primary message in […]
FILM REVIEW: AMADEUS AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE. THE CURIOUS FLAW in this almost mythic tale of maverick talent, jealousy and the celebration of mediocrity, is how it is hinged on ostensible fact. Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus took some fuzzy hearsay around the life and death of 18th […]
MUSIC WASN’T THE first life choice of this year’s Composer in Residence for the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival. It was physics. Indeed, Neo Muyanga (b. 1974), calls music the mistress he serves under duress. He told My View about music’s grammar, 14th century madrigals and what ‘folk’ means, as […]
Have you ever looked at an orchestra and pondered the back story behind the more monstrous and dramatic of its components? Or even the not-so-monstrous, but instruments which might be completely bizarre to the average Joe. And I’m not talking about the ordinary violin or sedate flute. What […]
Witnessing concert pianist Melvyn Tan perform — either with the Buskaid Soweto String orchestra or alone on stage for the Johannesburg Musical Society — as he did on the weekend, is the kind of experience that will makesyou believe there is a God, after all. Tan has a magical […]
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