I had a slightly surreal experience last night, when an actor playing the butler of a future Cabinet minister in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband announced during the interval that David Cameron had just departed Buckingham Place en route to 10 Downing Street to form the next UK government. It was just one of a few pleasing convergences of art and life of the evening, not least of which was that we were gathered in something called the Churchill Room at the time.The play, which has several political references that could have been written just before curtain-up, was performed by a group of Read more ...

Many of us younger opera-goers have never had a chance until now to see Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers in action. Opinions have been divided on its status as one of the great operas of the last half-century, but it certainly brought out the composers: the night I went, both Thomas Adès and Mark-Anthony Turnage were in the audience, and at Saturday's final performance the 83-year-old composer was there for what must surely be the most perfectly co-ordinated, visually beautiful production he could ever hope to see.After an evening of Birtwistle's The Minotaur, a venerable old friend Read more ...

The recorder is indelibly associated with school and dreaded first music classes, but the association will be on a considerably higher plane on 21 June when the world recorder star Michala Petri combines with the Royal Ballet School for a one-off show on Midsummer’s night.Staged at the school’s White Lodge, Richmond Park, the performance is a fund-raiser to redevelop the grade 1-listed 18th-century former royal hunting lodge, which has taken a battering from centuries of first riding boots, then ballet shoes. The programme, titled A Magical Misummer’s Night, has Petri (pictured right) Read more ...

Performing on the organ is, if you will, a lofty pursuit. Its repertoire calls for devotional focus. And then there’s this bloke.Cameron Carpenter (pictured), who is not yet 30, is unlike other organists. He designs his own clothes, for example, including the flamboyant stack heels that skitter across the pedals. He wears eyeliner. He expands the repertoire as far and wide as transcriptions of Chopin, Mahler and movie music. No wonder his debut release was called Revolutionary. And, in a notable departure from other classical musicians trained at the Juilliard in New York, he does rockstar Read more ...

...So who says classical music is dead, apart from that critic on the grisly Late Review a couple of years ago (re Birtwistle's The Minotaur - to be precise, "If you think classical music is dead, go to Covent Garden and see the corpse")? Of course, it would be even better if the Proms's wow factor could spread to the rest of the season. But let's not complain. Many have, though, about the new online system, which allowed newcomers to book on a blank-cheque basis; and last night I met an outraged old-timer who'd failed on Day One to get a seat for the first night performance of Mahler's Read more ...

This week, after a performance of Enron at the Noel Coward Theatre, I chaired a Q&A session with director Rupert Goold, writer Lucy Prebble, actor Sam West and most of the rest of the cast. What no one in the room knew then, though Goold and Prebble would have, was that at 11pm EST the show’s Broadway closure would be announced for this Sunday, only two weeks after it opened on 27 April. Enron was famously a rare beneficiary of the credit crunch. Now, at least in America, it would appear to have become a victim of it. Why? The play had been sitting on the backburner of the theatre Read more ...

Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman didn't make the cut; Denzel Washington and Broadway neophyte Douglas Hodge did. And so the race is on for the 2010 Tony Awards, heralding the best of the 39 shows that opened on Broadway across the past season. As always, the British presence is formidable, and this year ranges from Catherine Zeta-Jones (A Little Night Music, pictured above) to Alfred Molina (Red) and on to composer and sound designer Adam Cork, who snared an astonishing three nominations, including one for Enron's original score. (Huh?)But while the Donmar is doubtless celebrating its nine Read more ...

Last year critics were pleasantly surprised that the Turner Prize shortlist included works that could actually be admired for traditional notions of beauty. This year they might be surprised at its sheer variety. The four nominees not only include a painter, but an artist who crushes, bends and rips her canvases, a sound artist who sings and places her recorded voice in unusual and tucked-away places, and a duo who make futuristic films in which humans have evolved in “microgravity”. With subjects ranging from the suicide of Kurt Cobain to the death of members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Read more ...

Lift music is given a conceptual twist by former Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed this week. As part of the Southbank’s Chorus! festival, Creed has recreated his Work No. 409 especially for the Royal Festival Hall’s glass lift: as visitors go up and down the six-level lift, their ascent and descent will be charted by the rising or falling pitch of professional choristers Voicelab.Creed’s voice installation is one of a number of free events and performances that are taking place to celebrate two years of choral activity in the RFH’s foyers. The public will be able to join choral clubs Read more ...

The Society for Theatre Research’s book of the year award has been won by ballet critic Jann Parry for Different Drummer, her biography of the Royal Ballet choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. The book was chosen this morning in a tight finish at the post above Susie Gilbert’s Opera for Everybody: the Story of English National Opera, Andrew Stott’s The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography by Thomas Postlewait and The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, edited by Richard Dutton (Oxford University Press). Sheila Hancock presented the accolade Read more ...

Everything happens so quickly in India. It seems like only yesterday that homosexuality was legalised; and now Bombay has just hosted the first Kashish-Mumbai International Queer Film Festival.  As one of its very literary organisers pointed out, his country used to be so open to all forms of worship and sensuality; it's the home of the Kama Sutra, after all. It was time to reclaim gay love, he said, and give Indians of all kinds the chance to learn about it through the farthest-reaching medium. And it worked - even if many younger folk had to tell their parents they were 'just off to Read more ...

Thanks to the wonders of council applications, theartsdesk can bring you an exclusive preview of Marc Quinn's new sculptures to be placed outside the White Cube gallery on the grass of Hoxton Square.Quinn will be putting two colossal orchids (over two metres squared each), cast in bronze and painted white, in Hoxton Square as part of his new show Allanah, Buck, Catman, Chelsea, Michael, Pamela and Thomas (7 May-26 June). According to the application, submitted to Hackney Council, The Archaeology of Desire is "based upon a naturalistic Phalaenopsis, a genus of the orchid family, which has Read more ...