The Flying Dutchman

February 16, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Opera, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS, WAGNER |

Charles Temple

(Wagner) (1843) Not the Master’s best, by any means, but still streets ahead of most: strong, muscular, melodious, dramatic, Wagnerian, and able to be staged in most civilizations (Bass x 2, Soprano, Contralto, a couple of tenors).  A Mary Celeste story with some soft porn thrown in, it was apparently inspired by both a stormy sea-crossing and Richard’s contempt for Parisians. (TVC team are francophiles but still: Yay!). Add to the inspiration the ghost ship source material that abounded in Wagner’s youth, such as by Marryat and Heine and you can enjoy an immature piece that is still tempestuous, eerie…

Continue Reading →

Valentine’s Day

February 15, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classical Music, MUSIC, Ulalume, WAGNER |

St. Valentine (from 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'

(2015 – ASO) After champagne and real Turkish delight, and the annual re-run of Picnic at Hanging Rock, it was time to head through Adelaide’s February furnace to the Festival Theatre, where Arvo Volmer conducted the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s version of a concert, curiously and incongruously entitled “Passionate Tchaikovsky”.  We had the Russian composer’s Violin Concerto, with Ilya Gringolts sublime on lead violin, wearing a frock coat straight from Fiddler on the Roof.  Written in 1878 to console its creator for the unfortunate and instantly-regretted decision to marry the loopy and self-centred Antonina Milyukova, the piece was not played till…

Continue Reading →

No Man’s Land

February 13, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Plays, THEATRE, Ulalume, WRITING & LITERATURE |

(Harold Pinter) Adelaide University Theatre Guild, 2014 Clive James described this piece as akin to “a chess game being played out long after a draw should have been declared, since there are only two knights and two pawns left on the board.”  Whilst this could not describe a real game, you get his point. It’s another psychodrama but with enough keen sense of modern discourse to give us (pardon us for this) pause… Pinter’s stronger characters can never resist the chance to crush their weak or shifty (usually self-delusional) adversaries.  Here, two men with literary pretensions, watched and ‘waitered’ by…

Continue Reading →

Peter Lorre Takes to Santa with a Bat

February 12, 2015 | Posted by Lesley Jakobsen | Annabel Lee, Comedy Film, FILM |

Hollywood Canteen (1944)

We at TVC have not seen this 1944 film, Hollywood Canteen, but we want to.   See TVC’s review of The Lost One here. And then Peter inveigles Mickey Rooney to take a loan for a date (in Quicksand)…is there no end to his perfidy?

Continue Reading →

A House and its Head

(by I Compton-Burnett) Ivy Compton-Burnett* must have had a strange family life (just look at her hair).  She was the seventh of her father’s  children and the first of her (less than affectionate) mother’s five.  A brother died of pneumonia, another on the Somme. Two of her sisters (“Baby” and “Topsy”) committed suicide together one Christmas Day. None of the twelve had children.  None of the girls married. Certainly her books are about strange families.  The Edgeworth family of A House and its Head is unhappy, decidedly in its own way.  The solipsistic father Duncan is oblivious to his (first) wife’s misery and to…

Continue Reading →

© Copyright 2014 The Varnished Culture All Rights Reserved. TVC Disclaimer. Site by KWD&D.