Buzz
Ismene Brown
Melvyn Bragg last night won this year’s Bafta TV fellowship for his long championing of ITV’s arts with the now mothballed flagship The South Bank Show, which itself has been nominated for more than 30 Baftas and won nine. Ironically Simon Cowell was another winner at the London Palladium, with a special award for an outstanding contribution to entertainment and for furthering new talent in reality talent shows such as The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. The political satire The Thick of It won three awards, Julie Walters's win for Best Actress as Mo Mowlam beat herself in the euthanasia Read more ...
David Nice
Angela Lansbury is the wittiest, least self-regarding and most articulate octogenarian actress I've ever come across. That much seems clear from her half-hour interview with Mark Coles on the estimable, if sometimes rather narrow-agenda-ed BBC World Service arts programme The Strand. At 84, Lansbury has been having a whale of a time venting the laid-back disapproval of old Madame Armfeldt in Sondheim's A Little Night Music. The run at Broadway's Walter Kerr Theatre with this cast, which of course also features Catherine Zeta-Jones as her actress daughter, comes to an end on 20 June and Read more ...
David Nice
When Billy Budd, too-innocent hero of Britten's opera by way of Melville's trouble-at-sea novella, bids farewell to the Rights o'Man, his superior officers prick up their ears at the implications of mutiny. It's a ship he hymns, but the connection is first and foremost with Thomas Paine's revolutionary tract.Paine spent several years in Lewes, the Catholic-hating community and near-perfect town just over the chalk cliffs from Glyndebourne, where Michael Grandage's production of the opera is playing to thunderous acclaim (and just a few reservations from a handful of us). Opposite the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
I’m just back – goodie bag gripped greedily in paw – from this morning’s launch of the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival, which runs in the Scottish capital from 16-27 June. Since breaking away from the over-crowded August festival calendar and establishing itself in an early summer slot, the EIFF has become a much more robust stand-alone event, and 2010 looks like throwing up another fine mix of international premieres, new works by established US directors, superior art-house flicks from renowned auteurs and several interesting-looking debuts from talented young British movie- Read more ...
fisun.guner
Artist Richard Wilson says it's the best space in which he’s ever exhibited. And having ensured its long term future with a £870,000 renovation, Dilston Grove will undoubtedly prove a rewarding site for other contemporary artists to realise their large-scale projects. The Grade II listed Dilston Grove is the former Clare College Mission Church on the south-west corner of Southwark Park. Built by the original Wembley Stadium architects Sir John Simpson and Maxwell Ayrton in 1911, it’s the earliest example in England of a poured concrete construction. It was described as the finest modern Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The arrival on the scene of The Klaxons a few years back gave indie, pop and rock a much-needed kick in the pants. Sure, they were a band born of self-consciously over-trendy east London, causing the NME to froth about "nu rave" for ten minutes, but they were also a sudden flash of raucous beatnik psych-pop in a landscape dominated by mundane Luddites such as The Fratellis, The Kooks, et al. The Klaxons harked back to rave culture's utopian bluster but littered their music with knowing nods to Ballard, Burroughs and The Beach Boys. How could anyone not be smitten? And when they won the 2007 Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
In what sounds like a hoax, but sources claim is really true, it seems that Tom Waits will be editing the 200th edition of that magazine for old rockers Mojo. While we don't usually publish Press Releases, we will make an exception. You can judge the authenticity for yourself.
It’s MOJO’s 200th birthday! And who better to celebrate this most auspicious occasion with than Mr Tom Waits? So, from the mind of one of the planet’s true originals comes this special issue anniversary issue…FREE CD! STEP RIGHT UP!: A 15-track musical journey compiled and sequenced exclusively for MOJO by Tom Read more ...
sheila.johnston
At last, some good news for this beleaguered country: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, took the Palme D'Or in Cannes tonight. Hailed as one of the most striking and unusual films in competition - and also the entry most in tune with the maverick spirit of the Jury President, Tim Burton - Uncle Boonmee is the story of a dying man who revisits scenes from his previous lives, as, inter alia, a buffalo and a princess and sets the seal on what was widely perceived to be a lacklustre year. Weerasethakul may not be a household name Read more ...
fisun.guner
From his tall column in Trafalgar Square, Admiral Lord Nelson won’t be able to glimpse the new work on the Fourth Plinth, since he faces the other way. But of all the works that have occupied this space – from Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, to Antony Gormley’s One & Other – the latest must surely be the one that would please him most: a model of his own ship, HMS Victory, displayed in a huge bottle.From his tall column in Trafalgar Square, Admiral Lord Nelson won’t be able to glimpse the new work on the Fourth Plinth, since he faces the other way. But of all the works that have Read more ...
peter.quinn
An unprecedented second consecutive year for saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins, celebrating his 80th birthday, is one of the many highlights of the 2010 London Jazz Festival announced yesterday. One question immediately springs to mind: which Noël Coward classic will he dust down this year?Other mouth-watering treats include the European premiere of Brad Mehldau and Joshua Redman’s new project Highway Rider with Britten Sinfonia, the remarkable bassist-vocalist Esperanza Spalding, and the nimble-fingered octogenarian French pianist Martial Solal (composer of the film score for Godard’s À Read more ...
josh.spero
While wandering back from a meeting with a hedgie on Haymarket, I noticed a banner emblazoned with the logo of Browns, clothes shop to the well heeled (to mix metaphors), above the entrance to what appeared to be a building site. It was indeed a building site, off Marshall St, near Carnaby St, but two floors of the new apartment block there have been taken over by a pop-up exhibition to celebrate 40 years of Browns. Browns, ever since it was taken over by Joan Burstein in 1970, has always been one seam ahead of the pinking shears, which is why a pop-up museum makes perfect sense, although the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's amazing to think that Marcel Proust first heard Wagner's four-and-a-half-hour opera Die Meistersinger down his telephone. That same day, in 1911, he also ingested three hours of Debussy's Pélleas et Mélisande. We learn all this from Edward Seckerson's brilliant new Radio Three documentary about the remarkable world of the Théâtrophone, a device that used telephone transmitters to relay operas - and later news and sermons - live from wherever (the Opéra Comique to begin with) to hotels and houses around Paris. By 1893, this prototype radio had 1,300 subscribers; takers included the King Read more ...