Posts

Showing posts with the label Hugh Beattie

Featured Post

A night at the opera: That Bastard Puccini! (Park Theatre)

Image
It’s hard to imagine that it’s only been 130 years since Puccini first premiered La Boheme. Nowadays, it’s a revered classic, and guaranteed to be on any opera company's annual programme if it needs to stay afloat. It’s a crowd pleaser with its melodrama of poor, impoverished artists loving, starving and dying in Paris. But Puccini’s La Boheme had a less auspicious beginning, with one of his contemporaries accusing him of stealing his idea and being poorly received on its first outing. And that’s at the heart of That Bastard Puccini! Currently playing at Park Theatre , writer James Inverne uses the friendship and rivalry between the two composers, Puccini and Ruggero Leoncavallo, to weave a comic tale of creative frustration with an awful lot of facts and tidbits about the opera scene at the time. It’s part comedy, part music appreciation.  It opens with Leoncavallo (Alasdair Buchan) at home with his wife Berthe (Lisa-Anne Wood), cursing about Puccini’s latest work, which is drawn ...

Art Previews: Hugh Beattie's London Ancient and Modern @jhlbeattie @lagalleria

Image
Opening this week at the Royal Opera Arcade off Pall mall is Hugh Beattie's exhibition called London: Ancient and Modern. The exhibition brings together 30 new paintings by artist Hugh Beattie depicting views of London’s skyline which we do not normally see.  The works contrast the heritage of London and the new architecture of glass. Over 70% of the City of London’s buildings have been erected since the millennium. In Beattie’s canvases, Early Medieval buildings share the cityscape with towering Modernist flats.