Peterj Hall News Today

Soprano Stacey Alleaume is almost ethereal in a scintillating performance as Violetta Valery in Giuseppe Verdi’s fraught, emotion-charged, love story La Traviata (which translates to The Fallen Woman). Her pure voice reaches remarkable highs as she dominates the stage in a bravura showing. Violetta is a Parisian courtesan and the life of every party. Recently…

Rococo furniture didn’t just inspire the look of Disney’s best-loved films – it came out of a studio system that also required a good deal of collaboration

An exhibition paying homage to Walt Disney’s love of French art is playful and spellbinding, revealing how rococo clocks, paintings and tea sets were drawn into his most famous films

BEWARE THE DECORATIVE EXCESS that leads to violent revolution. At once aesthetic and political, this cautionary tale provides the standard explanation for the relationship between the exuberant usable arts of the Rococo and the stern history paintings of classicism, as well as between monarchy and modern democracy. It is now on persuasive display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, in two exhibitions: “Inspiring Walt Disney: the Animation of French Decorative Arts,” and “Jacques L...

Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast take centre stage.

With refreshingly blunt honesty, one of the earliest walls of text in the exhibition asks the very important question, ‘It’s Disney, but is it art?’

‘Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of the French Decorative Arts,’ a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, traces Disney’s movies back to influences from Rococo.