Features
Joe Muggs
Amongst all the musical benefits for the victims of the Haiti earthquake, one club event which took place on Wednesday night in London stands out as a small, but powerful, beacon of hope. Not because it could rival Jay Z and U2 for levels of funds raised, but because it represented levels of commitment, self-motivation and unity among the capital's multi-ethnic youth subcultures that flies in the face of scare stories about gang violence, drugs, educational failure and all the rest of it. Raising well over £10,000 for Haitians, the entire event on Wednesday night at the club Den/Centro was Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Gilbert & Sullivan's audacious parody of Victorian melodrama, Ruddigore, is as spirited a piece of topsy-turvy confection as the celebrated Savoyards ever produced. It arrives at Opera North in a brand-new production directed by Jo Davies and conducted by John Wilson, whose loving restorations of MGM musicals proved such a sensation at last year's BBC Proms season. Edward Seckerson went behind the scenes to meet them both and his exclusive podcast whets the appetite for an evening of cunning disguises, dastardly deeds, and an abundance of cracking good tunes.Click here to listen to The Read more ...
hilary.whitney
"What is it about Schubert’s music that has such power 180 years on? It has nothing to do with who he slept with or what he had for breakfast – it’s the work," insists filmmaker Christopher Nupen, whose series of films about composers is currently showing on BBC Four. "If you’re dragged towards the quotidian and the sensational, you’ll be pulled away from that elusive essence in the work that nobody has ever succeeded in explaining, but which remains one of the highest expressions of the human mind.”Nupen is also emphatic that the films, which feature Bizet, Sibelius, Respighi, Paganini, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Nashville is much more than the Grand Ol’ Opry, big hairdos and rhinestones, and I was looking for something beyond the occasionally enjoyable kitsch. I was failing to make much sense of the place and fell back on a technique which I’ve often found produces results when somewhere unfamiliar – ask the musicians themselves who they most respect. One name kept coming up – Guy Clark, who it became obvious was a city legend, a songwriters’ songwriter. I turned up at Clark’s house at 11 in the morning, and he offered me a drink from an already open bottle of Bourbon. I asked him for an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In this era of spectacular divas from Russia, Latvia and Romania, it is often remarked that the Italian lyric soprano is a commodity in distressingly short supply. Hoping to rectify that sorry situation is Tuscany’s Maria Luigia Borsi, who will be making her London debut at the Wigmore Hall on Sunday, singing a luxuriant programme of Puccini, Catalani and Mascagni.“My favourite composer is Puccini,” says Borsi, “and I feel very good when I sing Puccini’s music. I was born in the south of Italy, near Rome, but I grew up in Tuscany not far from Pisa and Livorno. Perhaps for that reason I love Read more ...
michael.pennington
The Russians have always been good at writers' houses. The Soviets especially. When I first saw Tolstoy's house his blue smock was hanging behind the door, a manuscript was on his desk but the chair pushed back as if he'd nipped out for a moment and would be back. It was a frankly theatrical effect and the better for it. Like Tolstoy’s, Chekhov's two houses - one in Melikhovo near Moscow and the other in Yalta in the south - were well funded and maintained and imaginatively presented in those days. Only the last is true now.When I went to Melikhovo in 1997 it was in the hands of dedicated Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Don’t look down,” comes the exhortation from somewhere on the floor. "Look ahead." I am testing out a new bit of kit, a large wooden cylinder encased in a metal frame, suspended via ropes and pulleys from a high ceiling. The diameter is big enough for me to be able to stand up and walk. Or not. The inclination is to watch your feet as, like a hamster, you power the rotation of the drum. Trouble is if you look down you lose your balance. So I look ahead and take grandmother’s footsteps which are barely strong enough to get the thing moving at all. "Take bigger strides," comes more advice. But Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Poetry on the underground – we all know it: those well-intentioned verselets that set out to brighten the weary traveller’s journey. But poetry about the underground? You begin to worry about some sub-Larkinesque aubade on the brevity of life and the length of the trip. In Three Men on the Metro, poets Andy Croft, W N Herbert and Paul Summers face the challenge squarely, though they skip the stations of their native Tyne and Wear, bypass what passes for a mass transportation system in London, and journey to the mother of all metros – Moscow.In the process they discover as much about what’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The career of Andy Serkis tends to point in one direction: darkness visible. Onstage, more recently on screen, he has inhabited a series of characters for whom violence is second nature. His Bill Sikes was utterly deranged, though a pussycat next to his Ian Brady in Longford (pictured below), whose ghastly charisma he seemed intuitively to understand. Serkis’s performance-captured Gollum gave global audiences the creeps. And that was him somewhere under the computer-generated fur as the ultimate unreconstructed he-man Kong. Whence it is but a small step to Ian Dury. In sex&drugs&rock Read more ...
josh.spero
Your browser could search a long time for philiproth.com. There are some writers, it is plain, who are not the web type. I find it hard to envision a site garnished with a picture of a smiling – scowling – Roth standing outside his Connecticut farmhouse, beckoning web traffic to read his latest blog post (“My new year’s resolutions”) or even providing a biography beyond the terse notes on his flyleaves. An author who is reclusive in life is unlikely to be prodigious online. You would not define these solely as “literary” writers, but the high priests of prose style are not often found in the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The received opinion is that the music of the 2000s has been characterised by fragmentation, discontinuity, faddishness and a lack of coherent identity. And while that perhaps is true on a macro scale, within underground music completely the opposite has been the case: throughout the decade dance and electronic music underwent a process of consolidation, of putting down roots, and sounds new and old have been establishing or re-establishing themselves as fixtures on the cultural landscape.The decade began inauspiciously – the late-1990s explosion of superstar DJs and “superclubs” in a state Read more ...
robert.sandall
The point at which the, ah, Noughties revealed themselves to me as a decade in search of more than just a decent name arrived when Sky News' showbiz gofer phoned up to ask me to come on and blah about this exciting new band that everybody was talking about, Arctic Monkeys. I'd only heard their first single, “Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”; but that was OK with the gofer because what really interested Sky was how the band had achieved their popularity. Allegedly Arctic Monkeys, he said, were the first group who had built a following on the new social networking site MySpace.Never mind Read more ...