Culture

Views of Venice and Rome, stories of Constable and Turner, and a lighter side of Goya linger after an exhibition from the Toledo Museum of Art.

Rembrandt to Goya: Masterpieces from the Toledo Museum of Art brings works from the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio to ALT.1, the exhibition space on Level 6 of The Hyundai Seoul department store. I have been following the recent run of exhibitions in Seoul drawn from overseas museum collections. With European paintings from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, this one takes me a little further back in time.

Fifty-two paintings from the Detroit Institute of Arts have arrived in Seoul after their showing at Rome's Museo dell'Ara Pacis.

Beyond Impressionism, at the Sejong Museum of Art in central Seoul, brings together European modern paintings from the late nineteenth to the early and mid-twentieth centuries, collected by the Detroit Institute of Arts. The exhibition moves from Impressionism through Symbolism, Fauvism, Expressionism and Cubism to the School of Paris artists working in the city in the early twentieth century.

A visit to Centre Pompidou Hanwha in Seoul, as the Paris museum's renovation sends its collection abroad through the Constellation programme.

The Centre Pompidou lingers in my memory from a backpacking trip when I was twenty. The Paris museum began preparing for renovation in 2025. During this period, its collection continues to be exhibited across France and abroad through the Constellation programme. The Seoul venue is operated under a four-year partnership between the Hanwha Foundation of Culture and the Centre Pompidou.

A special exhibition centred on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Robert Lehman Collection, with particularly memorable lighting.

Collectors of Light is a special exhibition from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Met, at the National Museum of Korea in Seoul. Centred on the Robert Lehman Collection, it follows French painting and drawing from late nineteenth-century Impressionism to early twentieth-century Modernism. I had been looking through a good deal of Met material for work recently, so I was pleased to hear that the exhibition was coming to Seoul.

An evening at the Tonhalle Zürich, where the orchestra joined past and present prizewinners to celebrate fifty years of the Swiss Youth Music Competition.

The Tonhalle Zürich, home to the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, stands just across the road from the Park Hyatt Zurich, where I like to stay when visiting the city. I had hoped to go during our earlier Christmas market trip, but the concert dates did not fit. This time, I was able to visit.

On a trip to Europe's Christmas markets with my parents, a Christmas concert at the Wiener Konzerthaus left a particular impression.

Photographs of this annual Christmas concert persuaded me to add Christmas in Vienna 2023 - Vorpremiere, the preview performance, to our Vienna itinerary. The sight of Christmas decorations, a choir and an orchestra in the Großer Saal, the main hall of the Wiener Konzerthaus, had stayed with me well before the trip.

After seeing The Phantom of the Opera on its 25th anniversary tour in Seoul, I went to see the original production in the London theatre where it began.

Her Majesty's Theatre is where Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera opened, and the same musical continues its resident run here. The theatre dates back to the early eighteenth century, when it opened with Queen Anne's permission. It has suffered several fires, and the present building was constructed at the end of the nineteenth century. As the name suggests, it has changed its title to reflect the reigning monarch. A place with some history, then.