Les Misarables

Hollywood’s take on the long-running Broadway musical Les Miserables opened in U.S. movie theatres in the U.S. on Christmas Day 2012. It stars Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean, Russell Crowe as Inspector Javert, Anne Hathaway as Fantine, and Amanda Seyfried as Cosette.

This opening has us thinking about the history of the production, and about the phenomenally successful collaboration behind it all, that of Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boubil.

Music while reading this article

Les Miserables (Musical London Cast) At the End of the … Continue Reading

Ludwig Minkus (1826 - 1917)

Some beautiful music is composed for ballet. Oddly, as Eliza Gaynor Minden writes in her book The Ballet Companion, “ballet music” was once a pejorative term. The implication, in the minds of some, was that the composer wasn’t good enough to write music that could stand on its own as a work of art, so he had to settle for something that the real artists could choreograph for and dance to!

Yet surely composers such as Léo Délibes, … Continue Reading