Claudia Pritchard

London, Monterchi

Arts Journalist at Freelance

Classical Music and Opera Editor at Culture Whisper

Arts journalist, Classical Music and Opera Editor at Culture Whisper and proud European

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Articles

The flowering of Anselm Kiefer

1 week ago | theneweuropean.co.uk | Claudia Pritchard

At 18, a serious-minded young German from Donaueschingen, a town in the Black Forest near the Swiss border, set out across France, Belgium and the Netherlands. He had been born in 1945, the year those lands were beginning to emerge from the nightmare of Nazi occupation. The first recipient of a new travel scholarship for young artists, the young Anselm Kiefer may have travelled light, but he carried with him what he would often refer to in later life as the weight of history.
Brazilian blend: The birth of modernism

1 month ago | theneweuropean.co.uk | Claudia Pritchard

They studied or lived in Berlin, Dresden, and Paris, travelled through Italy and Spain, and rubbed shoulders with European artists visiting New York. Almost without exception, the artists who have come to represent modernism in Brazil, however immersed they were in their own culture, were profoundly influenced too by what was happening on this continent.
Siena, the shining city

2 months ago | theneweuropean.co.uk | Claudia Pritchard

Fruitful work, music and dancing, nourishing food, justice and peace. The benefits and responsibilities of good leadership loomed large above the heads of decision-makers in 14th-century Siena. Do it like this, and get it right, the exquisitely beautiful and idealistic imagery of Ambrogio Lorenzetti signalled in his 1338 cycle of frescos, Allegories of Good and Bad Government.
How 'the best picture in the world' was saved from destruction by a British army officer refused to follow his orders

Dec 13, 2024 | countrylife.co.uk | Claudia Pritchard

Claudia Pritchard on the extraordinary tale of how Piero della Francesca’s 1460s fresco 'The Resurrection' was saved.
Eyes wide shut: The art of sleeping

Dec 8, 2024 | countrylife.co.uk | Claudia Pritchard

Sleep takes many shapes in art, whether sensual or drunken, deathly or full of nightmares, but it is rarely peaceful. Even slumbering babies can convey anxiety, discovers Claudia Pritchard.
The Elixir of Love, English National Opera review

Nov 16, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

Donizetti's summer romance The Elixir of Love blossoms in the wartime England of Dad's Army (that is, a place where no one dies) in a gorgeous new production by Harry Fehr, making his English National Opera directing debut. Audiences and performers at Blackheath Halls Opera have already cottoned on to Fehr's cheerful and inventive talent, through his productions there, and indeed this Elixir is partly born out of one he did with Blackheath.
London's best Christmas music 2024 | Culture Whisper

Nov 12, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

Carols and seasonal favourites, Handel's Messiah and operas to raise the spirits
The Turn of the Screw, English National Opera review

Oct 12, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

The title says it all: the action of The Turn of the Screw, first a ghost story by Henry James, then an opera by Benjamin Britten, is a small, tightening twist. A new production of the opera by Isabella Bywater is more like a replacement machine than the adjustment of a small working part, but it comes with some gloriously persuasive singing.
The Tales of Hoffmann, Royal Opera House review

Oct 10, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

Bad luck runs in threes, and a poet's trio of disastrous love affairs is at the (broken) heart of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann. The poet Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann pops up in the history of dance as the author of stories on which The Nutcracker and Coppelia are based. But it is his own, highly embellished, romances, one of which overlaps with the idea of Coppelia, that are set to music by the French composer who hoped for success beyond musical comedy.
Fidelio, Royal Opera House, review

Oct 9, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

When a new production of Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio, opened in 2020, Russia had not invaded Ukraine and Israel had not experienced the assaults of 7 October 2023 or retaliated. With the production's revival, the silent and detached observers in Act Two of war and political persecution take on a new significance. We are all guilty of standing by and doing nothing, in the face of suffering, suggests this unusual interpretation.