Features
Rachel Halliburton
Four storeys above Oxford Circus, the noise and bustle recedes to be replaced by a parallel universe of gleaming glass-fronted workspaces and discreet installations of modern art. The room where I am sitting looks towards the upper reaches of the grand neo-classical façade of the London Palladium, framed by a blue early evening spring sky. On the table in front of me, a chess board displays pieces representing landmarks from London and New York that include tastefully sculpted models of the London Eye and the Chrysler Building. On the wall next to the reception, a quote from Leonardo da Vinci Read more ...
Claire Booth
The relationship between words and music is a long one — but not an exclusive one. Indeed, the idea of a chamber music festival with words and storytelling at its heart has ruffled a few feathers. After all, there is a wealth of repertoire for instrumentalists alone - isn’t this what Sheffield Chamber Music Festival is here to celebrate?For singers, however, discounting the odd “vocalise”, words and storytelling are at the heart of things. The drama of opera is an obvious place to find narrative, but inside every German Lied, English song or Mayan lament there is a character—whether Read more ...
Sarah Ruhl
Perhaps fate led me inevitably to the theatre as a great love because my first kiss was in a scene study class when I was 14 years old. My scene partner and I were working on a sweet little scene that ended in a kiss; at least, that’s what the stage directions told us.We were studying with the great Chicago acting teacher Joyce Piven. At the end of our performance for the class, the very sweet young man I was acting with planted one on me. I drew back in surprise, and Joyce said, in her unmistakable deep growl to the young actor, “Dear boy, you have to plan these things first!”I never became Read more ...
Flora Wilson Brown
How do you adapt a book like The Waves? A terrifying idea, and one I could not get out of my brain, from the moment the director Jùlia Levai asked if I had ever considered doing it.For those who haven’t had the joy of reading it yet (and I would highly recommend doing so!), Virginia Woolf's experimental 1931 novel follows six friends from childhood to middle age, in as many stream of consciousness monologues covering the events of their lives, and also their musings on the cosmos, on past lives, on making art, trying to find purpose, surviving grief. These are all combined with huge, Woolfian Read more ...
Benjamin Baker
For me, New Zealand has always felt like both a centre and an edge. It is a place people travel to, rather than through. That sense of distance brings clarity and space to explore, but it can also mean that New Zealand’s creativity develops slightly out of view of the wider world.At the World’s Edge (AWE) Festival grew out of that tension. We launched in 2021 in the Queenstown Lakes region of New Zealand’s South Island with a simple idea: to bring people together through the intimacy of chamber music, and to create a space where New Zealand artists and composers could be heard alongside Read more ...
Guido Martin-Brandis
In preparing to direct Handel’s rarely staged Imeneo for Cambridge Handel Opera Company (CHOC), I have been fascinated to reflect on the periods of surging interest decline in the history of opera. Imeneo is Handel’s penultimate Italian opera, and as the genre waned in popularity in London, Handel needed to reinvent his business model and artistic outlook to be able to create and live. His solution was English Oratorio: unstaged concert works that were nevertheless still highly dramatic and narrative focussed, starting his final period of enormous creativity and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There were scattered moments of genuine excitement during the 98th Academy Awards, which saw One Battle After Another emerge with six Oscars, best picture and director amongst them, followed by the 16-times-nominated Sinners with four, including Michael B Jordan as best actor, and Frankenstein with three. It was hard not to thrill, for instance, at Sinners' Autumn Durald Arkapaw making history as the first woman ever to win for cinematography, a milestone she registered by having all the women in the audience stand: "I don't get here without you guys," she told the crowd. Or to be moved Read more ...
Bill Rosenfield
There are many things that drew me to re-imagining Noel Coward's The Rat Trap, an early play from the author of such enduring classics as Private Lives and Hay Fever.First, since the age of 16 I have been a die-hard fan of his. To have this opportunity (with his estate's blessing) to explore in depth an unknown work of his with the hope of making it more immediate for a modern audience and to actually collaborate with Noel Coward is an honour.Ninety-nine percent of Coward's career happened after he wrote The Rat Trap at the age of 18. So for me, it was a rare gift to have the knowledge of how Read more ...
Katie Bray
Lotte Lenya, Ute Lemper, Marianne Faithful, Teresa Stratas, Cathy Berberian, Dawn Upshaw, Brigitte Fassbaender, Louis Armstrong, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Sting, Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald. It would be difficult to imagine a more varied list of interpreters of just one composer’s work, but this is only a small selection of the artists who have performed and recorded Weill’s music. But what is it about Weill’s work that is so universally appealing, and so adaptable, making as much sense sung by Tom Waits as it does by Ella Fitzgerald or Anne Sofie von Otter?I’ve been drawn to Read more ...
theartsdesk
Pop music and politics, fiction and fact, debut novels and posthumous publications: TAD’s reviewers reveal their best reads of 2025.
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The poet Tom Raworth passed away in 2017, leaving an irreconcilable space in the heart of contemporary British poetics. His is verse of swift wit, formal innovation, and biting critique: the weird inheritor of the British Poetry Revival’s serious-mindedness and Frank O’Hara’s sense of fun. Thankfully, this year Cancer (Carcanet, £12.99), a posthumous "lost book" of three sections: "Journal", "Logbook Read more ...
theartsdesk
SASKIA BARON1 One Battle After Another2. Sinners3 It was Just an Accident4 Palestine 365 Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight6 April7 Motherboard8 Holy Cow9 The Brutalist10 Pillion It was hard work finding ten films I wholly loved this year, and even then, these have flaws (particularly the last third of The Brutalist). But I’m pleased to find that five of my favourite films were directed by women, each exploring very different genres, and that Sinners and One Battle After Another were such densely visual treats they required repeated viewings. JUSTINE Read more ...
Kerem Hasan
There is a scene in the second act of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s Dead Man Walking in which the man condemned to death, Joseph De Rocher, with his spiritual advisor Sister Helen Prejean in tow, have a devastating interaction with his mother. A final, inconsolable goodbye before De Rocher is processed for his impending execution. As an opera conductor, I find myself maintaining a fine balance between keeping a practical, level-headed overview of the elements under my leadership; the balance of the orchestra, the way the stage is connecting with the music, the singers’ cues, Read more ...