Features & Interviews
For Folk's Sake: 'I owe my very existence to Morris dancing'
Monday, 01 April 2019
Halfway through filming For Folk’s Sake, a documentary for BBC Four about Morris dancing, I received a package in the post that would dramatically change the course of the programme. It was from my mother.
In the spirit of the composer as innovator: Samir Savant on the London Handel Festival
Wednesday, 27 March 2019
This is my third year as festival director of the London Handel Festival, an annual celebration of the life and work of composer George Frideric Handel, which takes place every spring in venues across the capital.
theartsdesk in Zanzibar - behind the veil
Saturday, 09 March 2019
Damn exotica. It has a habit of marshalling your gaze away from shabby Soviet-style apartment blocks and training it on white-washed palaces with...
Keith Flint, 1969-2019
Tuesday, 05 March 2019
It is hard to absorb the news that Keith Flint of The Prodigy has been found dead at his home in Essex. Keith Flint! The guy with the double Mohican...
A Previn treasury
Saturday, 02 March 2019
In a way, he was a second Bernstein. Only 11 years Lenny's junior, and living to the much riper age of 89 – his 90th birthday would have been on 6...
Trevor Nunn: 'I'm amazed by Harley Granville Barker's prescience and extraordinary modernity'
The veteran director introduces the London premiere of the English dramatist's heretofore unknown play, 'Agnes Colander' |
theartsdesk in Tromsø: the celluloid Cold War
The Tromsø Film Festival in Norway has revealed some little-seen spy films from behind the Iron Curtain |
theartsdesk Q&A: Shirley Collins - 'There was no way I could ever sing to be popular'
Ahead of next week’s Roundhouse concert, the voice of traditional English music reveals some unexpected musical likes and much more |
Director Alexandria Bombach: 'I feel like a completely different person'
Director of On Her Shoulders on filming Yazidi campaigner Nadia Murad |
theartsdesk Q&A: Hedvig Mollestad, Norway's bridge between heavy metal and jazz
The genre-busting guitarist talks about new album 'Smells Funny', a rotting eyeball and more |
'Bringing things to life is what opera is all about': Robert Howarth on a 'Magic Flute' with a difference
Opera North's Mozart conductor on taking a careful look at a masterpiece |
Best of 2018: Classical concerts
Abundant megatalent in works great and small |
Best of 2018: Opera
A year more remarkable for high musical values than any wealth of great UK productions |
Global fiction: the pick of 2018
From Iraq to Japan, a baker's dozen of translated novels to widen literary horizons |
theartsdesk in Brno: Czech 100th feted through Janáček and Smetana
Rarities in a festival featuring an entire operatic canon, plus heartfelt celebrations |
'I’ve told everyone that it’s a comedy – but will anyone laugh?' Jonathan Dove on his new Marx opera
Top British composer awaits Bonn premiere of his new work about a German in London |
theartsdesk in Gothenburg - Wagner's gold turns green
Stephen Langridge talks about his eco-friendly Swedish 'Ring' |
10 Questions for DJ / producer Rob Smith of Smith & Mighty
Bristol bass movers and shakers rightly getting their due |
Robert Hastie: 'a seam of love runs through the play' - interview
The director talks about Macbeth in the candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, cross-gender casting and the director's role |
Don Quixote rides again, and again
The RSC's stage version reaches the West End, while Terry Gilliam's film is stuck in a legal vortex |
First Person Plural: the Calidore String Quartet on music for their torn nation
How Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Janáček and Golijov speak for our troubled times |
Refreshing the sonic spectrum: disability and excellence in British orchestras
A musical evolution for the 21st Century |
More Blood, More Tracks review - Bob Dylan opens up
The fourteenth volume in the Bootleg Series is a keeper |
theartsdesk in Stockholm: the Birgit Nilsson Prize unites two great Wagnerian sopranos
Nina Stemme does honour to her compatriot, who would have been 100 this year |
Montserrat Caballé (1933-2018): from Bellini to 'Barcelona'
Glimpses of the Spanish soprano who could float a line like no other |
James Graham: 'the country of Shakespeare no longer recognises arts as a core subject'
Full transcript of the playwright's passionate speech about the importance of the arts at the Hospital Club's h100 Awards |
Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto: 'We figured Molière would have toyed with it too'
The co-adaptors of the RSC's new 'Tartuffe' talk about translating a French classic to our times now |
10 Questions for singer Live Foyn Friis
Charismatic Norwegian singer on her journey through genre |
'I read French from left to right and Arabic from right to left': remembering Algerian rebel rocker Rachid Taha
Recalling a night out drinking in Paris with the Algerian rocker who died this week |
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