Nick Hammond
Premier Sang
Diplomatic Training
Even though Amélie Nothomb’s new book, Premier Sang, is not the first openly autobiographical novel she has written – Le Sabotage Amoureux (1993), Stupeur et Tremblement (1999), Métaphysique des Tubes (2000) and Biographie de la Faim (2004) all draw inspiration … Read More
Une Femme du Monde
She Works Hard for the Money
Those of you who know Laure Calamy from her role as Noémie, Mathias’s assistant in Call My Agent, will be delighted to see her movie acting career going from strength to strength. She won the 2021 César for Best Actress … Read More
Lost Illusions
The Corruptions of Paris
Adapting the sprawling novels of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) for the screen is never a simple process, and from all accounts director Xavier Giannoli has been working on the screenplay for Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions) for a number of years. … Read More
Œdipe
Live Opera Returns with the Myth of Oedipus
It is always exhilarating to herald the beginning of the operatic season with a new production of a rarely performed work, but when it is the first to be performed at the Opéra National de Paris after a two-year shut-down … Read More
Paris Opera’s Inaugural Concert
Debut of Opera's New Conductor Bodes Well
Gala concerts rarely give a complete sense of how a new conductor is going to fare in the long term, but the early signs of the Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel’s tenure as music director of the Opéra National de Paris … Read More
Pelléas et Mélisande
Darkness and Light in Music
Recently, in an article on Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, I suggested that the only other 20th-century French opera that will stand the test of time is Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), inspired by Maurice Maeterlink’s symbolist play from … Read More
Le Daim
French Davy Crockett Goes Berserk
When a French movie is described as a “comedy” and has a July release date in Paris, it almost invariably means that (1) it’s a generic film about a chaotic summer holiday with families/groups of mature male friends/bands of teens … Read More
French Music for the Stage
Theatrical Froth
After the flood of new releases of French chamber music recordings over the last couple of months, it comes as a refreshing change to have a new album of French orchestral music to review. The veteran Estonian conductor Neeme Järvi … Read More
Happy Days
Intuition of the Absurd
Note to readers: You may choose to read this analysis of Happy Days here or listen to it on the audio file at the end of the article. This week, I am going to discuss a play created by one of … Read More
Dialogues des Carmélites
An Unlikely Masterpiece
It is always an intriguing exercise to try to guess which operatic works written in this or the last century will stand the test of time. In the French repertoire, an opera like Olivier Messiaen’s sprawling Saint François d’Assise (1983), … Read More