Features
Sarah Connolly
The decision of Arts Council England to withdraw funding from the English National Opera and force it to move out of London is not only another hammer blow to the opera industry but it has huge ramifications for the extensive number of British freelance artists the company employs.ACE made this decision with no consultation with the ENO or the wider industry, and now huge numbers of freelancers are vulnerable and potentially without employment.We call on Sir Nicholas Serota and ACE to rethink this terrible decision, and to reflect on the choice they have made to target opera as an industry in Read more ...
Leo Hussain
I still remember vividly my first encounter with ENO. I was taken, as a nine-year-old boy, on a school trip to see a performance of Peter Grimes. And I was hooked. I pestered my parents to take me back several times to that same production. I can still hear the ringing of the "Storm" Interlude, and see the waves projected outside the door as the characters entered the pub (and I still remember sniggering with my classmates at the line "that’s a bitch of a gale out there").Over the following few years, many more school trips to ENO followed. Xerxes, Love for Three Oranges with its scratch Read more ...
Shelley Roden
The projection screen reflects light onto the Foley stage. I can just make out the edges of the built-in cement and metal surfaces around the floor’s perimeter and the large dirt pit centre stage. Bamboo poles, a hockey stick, and a shovel poke out from storage bins to my right. The corner of a car hood winks from underneath a furniture blanket. These tools wait their turn to become something other than what they were originally designed for. There is a stillness in this repurposed garage the size of a small aircraft hangar. The cue begins. I focus on the screen watching Read more ...
Sally Beamish
I was first approached by Quaker Concern for the Abolition of Torture (Q-CAT) in 2016 with the idea of a creating a piece of music to raise awareness of torture – its use worldwide, and the terrible damage it does both to victim and to perpetrator.They had thought of asking me as I am a Quaker myself. I have written several pieces in the past which express views and concerns shared by Quakers – for instance my violin concerto, based on Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which is a passionate expression of my pacifist beliefs. Knotgrass Elegy, written for the Proms in 2001 with poet Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Leslie Phillips would have known for half a century that at his death, which was announced yesterday, the obituaries would lead with one thing only. However much serious work he did in the theatre and on screen, he is forever handcuffed to the skirt-chaser he gave us in sundry Carry Ons and Doctor films and London bus movies. Although he was to reach the age of 98, he already felt very senior when I met him at his home in his mid-seventies. He was very keen to stress that his abilities stretched beyond delivering a famous catchphrase and luring girls into an open-top sports car.Those famous Read more ...
Kate Whitley
We started The Multi-Story Orchestra back in 2011 with a group of friends when we’d left university. Conductor Christopher Stark and I basically wanted to find new ways to play orchestral music that would escape formal concert halls and be more exciting and more accessible.We thought car parks might be good places to try – they’re big, they’re open, and people don’t really associate them with anything in particular. We started off playing in a car park in Peckham, run by Bold Tendencies, and we now play there every summer. We’ve also played in other car parks around the country – in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The fictional world is our world, but at the same time it’s another place. We want our writers to invent interesting characters, gripping plots and to take us to unexpected places. We want them to delight us, and sometimes to fright us. We want to immerse ourselves in their inventions, lose ourselves in their fictions, and explore their newly created worlds. But are writers allowed to say anything they want? Is there a limit in our progressive and increasingly sensitive society on what they can invent? Would any theatre in Britain stage a play about young black women which was written by a Read more ...
Jasdeep Singh Degun and Laurence Cummings
We believe that with Orpheus, we are creating something which will invite audiences to rethink what opera can and should be. Inspired by Monteverdi’s 1607 work L’Orfeo, it grew out of Opera North’s long-standing relationship with South Asian Arts-uk, a Leeds-based centre of excellence for South Asian music and dance.Sung in Italian and Urdu with excerpts in Malayalam, Bengali, Panjabi, Hindi and Tamil, it brings together European baroque and Indian classical music in a way which has never been heard before.We are only too aware that we are working with two massive musical traditions, but the Read more ...
Kevin Sullivan
The Khanenko Museum stands opposite the Taras Shevchenko Park in central Kyiv, a popular green oasis next to the University. One of the 83 Russian missiles fired into Ukrainian cities on Monday this week landed at an intersection on the edge of the park, killing several commuters. Just a few days earlier, on 1 and 2 October, the Khanenko was the venue for a remarkable new opera by the Ukrainian composers Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko – a work of art that eloquently testifies to the value of human experience and will continue to do so long after the present assault on Ukraine’s civilian Read more ...
Elena Dubinets
Just as I was moving from the US to the UK to begin working as the Artistic Director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra last summer, the orchestra was emerging from the COVID-19 period and our audiences began coming back. During the course of the first few concerts, I realised over and over again that the LPO’s strategy should be based on creativity, flexibility and access – and on tying our work to the needs of the community.In the COVID years, when nothing was normal anymore, we all realised that orchestras have a broader role in civic life and in society and that we must strive to Read more ...
David Nice
In its three weeks of world-class events, Muskfest Berlin has managed to be all things to all people – like a mini-Proms distilling the aspects of top international visitors alongside home-grown excellence, and of a focus on at least one relatively unfamiliar 20th century/contemporary work per concert. The Berliners deserved the cornucopia of very special guests, but to justify my visit, I went for the local – Berlin Phiharmonic, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester and Berlin choirs on a par with very distinguished counterparts from the UK and Georgia.It was disappointing that my third train on the Read more ...
Bjarte Eike
History first. The 17th century London of Oliver Cromwell and its puritanical quest to curb all creativity – banning music, closing down theatres, restricting alcohol and all the rest – provided an incredible backdrop for Barokksolistene’s project The Alehouse Sessions. How music survived with its tunes and tales, in song and dance, has for me been a true revelation.The out-of-work court musicians mingling with the locals at London’s many public drinking houses created a huge amount of wonderful music. Defying prohibition and censorship, human creativity survived with creative people just Read more ...