Features
Peter Culshaw
Pete Townshend was always the most literate of stars, not merely a rock icon but someone who believed in Art with a capital A – he even ran his own publishing company and had an editing job in the 1980s with Faber and Faber, where he made friends with writing giants like Ted Hughes (he adapted his Iron Man) and William Golding, who he used to go boating with. Lucky Pete - except, he never thinks so, and beats himself up for not appreciating his good fortune.So we might have expected a proper literary autobiography from the Who guitarist and author of Tommy and Quadrophenia. Recent Read more ...
graeme.thomson
On December 18, 2000, Kirsty MacColl was killed after being struck by a motorboat while scuba diving with her two sons in Cozumel, Mexico. The tragic, criminal circumstances of her death – the boat was speeding in a restricted area – and subsequent fight for justice have tended to overshadow the fact that her unique, witty, deceptively emotional pop manoeuvres have been much missed.The daughter of folk capo Ewan MacColl, she emerged in the punk slipstream, signing to Stiff in 1979 and unleashing the fizzing girl-pop of "They Don’t Know", later a huge hit for Tracy Ullman. She went on to Read more ...
David Nice
One of Russia’s greatest and most inspirational sopranos, Galina Vishnevskaya died on 11 December at the age of 86. To the world at large, she will probably be most famous for taking an heroic stand alongside her husband, cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, against the Soviet authorities over the treatment of Alexander Solzhenitsyn; in 1974, the couple were stripped of their citizenship as a result.Inside the Soviet Union up to that point she had long been the Bolshoi Opera’s prima donna assoluta, and though she went on to record some roles past her prime, there are peerless Read more ...
Mark Kidel
While living in Bombay in the late 1940s, betrayed by a business partner and his first marriage in the midst of painful implosion, Ravi Shankar decided to commit suicide. At the eleventh hour, a holy man, who happened to be passing by, knocked on his door asking for water. The man told Shankar that he was aware of his fateful decision. This wasn’t, he went on, the right time to be renouncing life. He had a great future ahead of him, the sadhu continued, and a major role to play in the dissemination of Indian music throughout the world. The man became Ravi Shankar’s spiritual teacher, and for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In 2006 an elderly dancer died in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex. She was 88, and had once been one of Britain's most recognised ballerinas. Why did she die in obscurity? Why is the great ballet company that she ran now a forgotten name? This was what I set out to explore in a BBC Radio 4 documentary which aired yesterday. Inglesby's story has the improbability of an epic. As a very young woman she defied wartime conditions to launch a major ballet company, which introduced the British public en masse to grand ballet. She was also nothing less than the saviour of the most precious texts in all Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Martin Crimp defies labels. He has been called obscure and oblique, too difficult and, worst of all, too Continental. But although he is feted on the European mainland — George Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin, with text by Crimp, comes to the Royal Opera House next spring but it began its much-lauded European tour in Aix-en-Provence — he is also a quintessentially British playwright: his style is colloquial, socially aware and politically acute.When I meet him at the Royal Court, where his latest play opens this week, he seems almost part of the furniture. His work is the great Read more ...
Tim Cumming
October Gallery first mounted a show of William Burroughs’ paintings in 1988, soon after the writer had published The Western Lands, the last novel in his final trilogy. More books would come – on lemurs, pirates, Madagascar, cats, dreams – but no further fiction. And with the death in 1986 of Brion Gysin, his friend and collaborator in Cut-Ups, films, arcana and performance art, Burroughs became a painter, exchanging brushes for firearms, and hung his first exhibition of shot gun art in New York and then London.Some of them are here, and they dominate the show with visceral impact. His Read more ...
David Nice
Never mind the huge interpretative challenges; Mahler’s Eighth, dubbed the "Symphony of a Thousand" owing to the gargantuan forces the composer marshalled as conductor of its 1910 Munich premiere, needs an even greater mastery of logistics. Markus Stenz (b 1965), who has been chief conductor of Cologne’s 500-year old Gürzenich Orchestra since 2003 in addition to major posts at the Hallé and Hilversum's Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, had so far wielded a Mahler cycle of terrific impetus and fresh approach to detail. How would he get 600 or so singers and players to move forward with an equal Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
What would Sigmund Freud say to newcomers infiltrating his priceless collection of Greek, Chinese and Egyptian antiquities? His study on the ground floor of 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, where Freud and his family lived after fleeing the Nazis in 1938 (he loved the house, saying it was “incomparably better” than his flat in Vienna, but only lived in it for a year before he died in 1939) has always been filled with his Egyptian gods and goddesses, bodhisattvas and buddhas, Eros figures, mummy masks and Greek vases. He was “like a curator in a museum”, said the American poet Hilda Read more ...
kate.bassett
When I first mentioned to a colleague that I was embarking on a biography of the doctor/director Jonathan Miller, he instantly yelped, “My God, your work’s cut out! The man must have met half the famous names in the twentieth century!"My subsequent conversations with Miller provided a cornucopia of highly entertaining anecdotes. These included his brushes with Princess Margaret (who was very taken with his comic turns in the 1950s); Bobby Kennedy (who told him to shut up, shortly before being shot); Bridget Riley (who nearly sued); and Kevin Spacey (who got his big break by stalking Miller Read more ...
graeme.thomson
In 2009 I interviewed Jamie Cullum about Dave Brubeck, who has died today just a day before his 92nd birthday. What follows are Cullum's recollections of falling in love with Brubeck's music, and later knowing and working with a jazz legend."My parents weren’t into jazz at all, but my dad did have a tape of Dave Brubeck and, as most people did, loved "Take Five". I heard that in the car long before my jazz awakening through Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters and In A Silent Way - swampy, odd music. Dave was on my radar long before that.I’m very fond of playing those stabbing, sharp notes, and Read more ...
fisun.guner
Unusually for a Turner Prize, or for contemporary art generally for that matter, it was the year that film outshone other media. Paul Noble may have initially been the popular, and the bookies' favourite, but as technically impressive as his panoramic drawings are they are also quite lifeless, made inert by the process of their meticulous execution.Neither was it to be the year for performance art, for although performance has received a tremendous boost with the opening of Tate Modern’s The Tanks, as well as the recent high profile appearances of veteran practitioner Marina Abramoviç, Read more ...