Features
Peter Culshaw
The workers at the smart Borusan Holdings head office are expected to be tidy, especially on a Friday. That’s because their office doubles up as an art gallery, the Borusan Contemporary, at weekends. There are some paintings, like the attractive wall paintings of Jenny Zenuik, although the main thrust of the collection is up-to-the-minute electronic art. Some seem a little gimmicky, like superior executive toys, such as one where you place your finger in a hole and the frame turns into images of your fingerprint, but it’s an excellent way to pass an hour or two.There’s a separate space for an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It began with a warning. Opening the fourth Tallinn Music Week, Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves cautioned, “In a free society, it’s risk-free. In an un-free society, it’s not risk-free. It’s not all fun.” From behind a hotel conference room lectern, he then began rolling a video of Russia’s Pussy Riot being arrested in Moscow a few days earlier. Not everyone can make their point, make their music, choose how they want to get it across.The contrast between Pussy Riot’s fate and a festival that celebrates new music in all its forms, held in a country bordering Russia, was marked by Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
In the past few decades we've all learnt to pay at least lip service to ecological matters, and millions of people in this country are members of environmental organisations. But perhaps we should also focus our attention on an issue that could be one of the big causes of the 21st century - the disappearance of languages.While estimates suggest that in the next 100 years perhaps five per cent of species will be wiped out, languages are under as much or more threat. The consensus (Mark Abley's book Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, for example) seems to be that on current trends Read more ...
ronald.bergan
For most film buffs, the name of director Vincente Minnelli immediately recalls the quintessence of the MGM musical of the 1940s and 1950s - a world of fantasy, brilliant colours, stylish décor and costumes in which Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dance and sing. The name also evokes steamy dramas and civilised comedies such as Some Came Running and Father of the Bride. As the BFI launches a major season of his films this week, however, it's worth pondering whether there is more to his oeuvre than meets the eye. Could Minnelli make claim to being an auteur? Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As Damien Hirst’s Tate retrospective looms large on the horizon, the million-dollar question is whether the work has withstood the test of time. Will exciting and provocative sculptures like the pickled shark, which became an icon of Brit Art the minute it swam into view at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992, still send shivers down the spine, or has it become too familiar to arouse anything more than a yawn of recognition?I hope the answer is yes, because many of my most treasured memories as a critic involve encounters with Hirst’s work and that of his fellow YBAs (Young British Artists). I’d been Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You can’t walk down the street in central Abu Dhabi. Not because of any danger or prohibition, but simply because there just aren’t any pavements yet. Look out of any one of the high-rise buildings that dominate the city, and you’ll see a landscape modestly veiled in the dust of construction. Roads, schools, hospitals and inevitably hotels are all emerging from the desert at a rate that renders the city map unrecognisable every six months. But while the developments of infrastructure and architecture are proclaimed in the fog and clamour of drills, there’s an altogether quieter project at Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If you’re game for a galling statistic, here’s one that’s guaranteed to stun: at present, only 14 per cent of British films released in the UK are directed by women. If that seems oddly as well as infuriatingly low, it’s probably because so many of the brightest and boldest British film-makers of recent years, from Lynne Ramsay to Lucy Walker, are women – women who it seems are exceptions as well as being exceptional. These towering talents, it could be said, give the impression that opportunities for women behind the camera are at a high, rather than being persistently paltry. And so it’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
How many classical ballet dancing jobs, full-time, are there in Great Britain? I make it just 289. That's the Royal Ballet 94, English National Ballet 67, Birmingham Royal Ballet 57, Scottish Ballet 36, Northern Ballet 35. Rambert does sometimes take classically trained dancers: another 23. So, at a stretch, 312 full-time jobs for Britain's classical ballet graduates to be searching for a vacancy in. Moreover, a profession in which most are tenacious of their jobs, staying perhaps 10-plus years.Out of this tiny profession (likely to shrink, with the next stage in the subsidy cuts) only some Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For a small(ish) city, Belfast punches well above its weight where the arts are concerned. Northern Ireland's capital may have only 270,000 residents (with a further 500,000 in its catchment area), but it has a notable array of large venues serving several art forms in a vibrant cultural scene. The city houses the Grand Opera House and the newly renovated Lyric Theatre, the Odyssey Arena, the Kings Hall, the Ulster Hall and the Waterfront Hall; and now another venue is about to open in the city centre - the MAC, or Metropolitan Arts Centre.The MAC, in the newly created Saint Anne's Square Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Krzysztof Penderecki's Polymorphia for 48 string instruments dates back to 1962, and still stands as one of the grand milestones of the avant-garde. It epitomised the Polish composer's technique of "timbre organisation", in which the plucking and bowing of strings was merely a small part of an astounding array of effects."I had to develop some new techniques to produce this kind of sound, using different kids of vibrato," Penderecki explains, down the phone from Kraków. "Using the tailpiece to play on with the double basses and celli, also playing directly on the bridge using the highest Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Like a streamlined sandstone-coloured satellite berthed unexpectedly in Manchester’s medieval quarter, the new addition to the country’s largest specialist music school, Chetham’s (pronounced Cheetham’s), makes a confident statement for the future. It looms seven storeys high amidst atmospheric buildings dating back as far as 600 years. At yesterday’s opening ceremony, heralded by a newly-composed fanfare, Head of School Claire Moreland said: “This new building will take Chets into a whole new era, providing the world-class facilities for music making that our students deserve and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s 11pm on a Thursday night. The kind of weather that makes balloon animals of umbrellas, that raises a tsunami in a bird-bath, is raging outside. Inside the Harpa concert hall some 300 people are gathered in attentive silence while five musicians, each sat at a brightly-coloured piano barely two feet tall, play hairdryers, flippers, and drop small change from boxes onto the floor, in a solemn performance of John Cage’s Music for Amplified Toy Pianos. Only in Reykjavik; only under Ilan Volkov; only as part of the Tectonics festival.When youthful maverick Volkov was appointed Music Director Read more ...