Features
josh.spero
Surrounded by a heaving, drinking, swooning, sweating blanket of admirers and professional artworld partygoers, Ryan McGinley has come a long way from the caves he shot for his latest show, Moonmilk, which opened at Alison Jacques Gallery last night. He finds it hard to move without being papped or kissed or having a catalogue thrust into his hand for a dedication. He thought about Jonah and the whale when immersed in taking these pictures, so is it like being inside a whale now, at the opening, with churning crowds and this feeding frenzy? “Absolutely!”The relevance of the whale to his work Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The great Spanish lyric tenor Alfredo Kraus died ten years ago, on 10 September 1999, celebrated by opera epicures, but less well-known to mass consumers of the Three Tenors publicity phenomenon. In 1992, during an engagement at Covent Garden, he spoke frankly to me about the deep issues - and dark politics - he felt were raised when populism took over from taste. This interview was published in the Sunday Telegraph.When The Three Tenors got on stage together in Rome on the humid night of July 7, 1990, the world blinked with gratitude and then rushed to the shops to buy the video. Harmony Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When Carlos Acosta danced Spartacus with the Bolshoi Ballet in London in 2007, the man, the time and the place united the strands of a most extraordinary story in ballet, a story of peregrination, of dreadful reverses, of the pursuit of civilisation, of holding on to the best of human values in despairing times.This might, yes, describe Acosta’s own story (captivatingly told in his new memoir No Way Home, HarperPress) - but there is a more epic tale at issue here. It is the story of a dynasty of very great teachers and performers, the Messerers of Moscow.From Russia to Cuba, from London to Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I once asked John Adams the best way to experience his music. "Imagine you're driving on one of those absolutely flat roads in the Midwest where you make out something which turns out to be a grain elevator, or then there's a range of mountains in the distance. The form of my music is as if moving over landscape."It is certainly true that Adams's music is perfect for listening to on trains and planes, with its exhilarating pulse of forward projection and shifting horizons. He once said he would love it if someone saw a typical American scene, such as a gas station at dawn, and said, "That is Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Hunter S Thompson always had one beady, sun-bespectacled eye on posterity. At 21, living in poverty in a remote cabin in the Catskills and toiling away at an autobiographical first novel, Prince Jellyfish (still unpublished), he would immodestly compare his own progress to that of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, two other writers who came late to public recognition.He kept files of self-portraits, which he took by setting the timer on his camera, and was even cataloguing photographs of the many empty rooms in which he had ever lived. An ardent letter-writer, he made carbon copies of Read more ...
sheila.johnston
When Johnny Depp first met Tim Burton, twenty years ago in a Los Angeles coffee shop, he was struck by the otherworldiness of this "pale, frail-looking, sad-eyed man." While the two men traded fragmentary insights about the raw power of velvet Elvis paintings, the nervous young actor marvelled at his new acquaintance’s wide, glaring eyes, his uncontrollable hands, his scarecrow hair. "A comb with legs would have outrun Jesse Owen, given one look at this guy’s locks," recalled Depp later, in his foreword for Faber's excellent collection of interviews with the director. A surreal metaphor Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There aren’t many composers or musicians who can say that they changed society. And by that I mean really changed it. Few have ever come close to materially or politically transforming their surroundings in any truly meaningful way. There are many who claim they have, or wish they had: Wagner or Beethoven in the 19th century, Barenboim most notably – but doubtfully – in our own. But there is only one musician who actually did: the conductor, Kurt Masur.Earlier today, at the German embassy, the Mayor of Leipzig and the Sheriff of the City of London formalised the Barbican’s partnership with Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A funny thing happened to the Broadway theatre as the summer drew to a close: every single play except one (The 39 Steps) closed in relatively quick succession, as if to remind showgoers that in New York's main commercial thoroughfare, the musical is king.That wouldn't constitute news were it not for the fact that in the theatre season just gone, it was the play that remained the talking point throughout a 2008/9 Broadway lineup that saw the unexpected presence of Chekhov, Ionesco, Beckett, Ayckbourn, and Schiller in the playhouses studded across Manhattan's West 40s and 50s. And that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Antonio Gades, who died on 20 July 2004 in Madrid aged 67, was a giant of modern flamenco, a magnetic dancer and theatrical director who gained an international audience for flamenco while guarding its unique and complex character. His dance films and flamenco theatre productions, notably Blood Wedding and Carmen, trod the difficult line between modern innovations and ancient traditions, pleasing millions around the world while also being acclaimed by flamenco's purist cognoscenti. He himself despised many of flamenco's modernisers, particularly at the showbusiness and pop-culture end, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
At this time of year people who love ballet divide into two tribes: those who are too sophisticated for The Nutcracker and those who will never been too sophisticated for The Nutcracker. The former will say that The Nutcracker is a children’s ballet. For the latter, Christmas would not be Christmas without hearing probably the most familiar and adored of Tchaikovsky’s music scores.One man has the means to both persuade the doubters and satiate the faithful - Sir Peter Wright, the creator of two great productions of The Nutcracker that this Christmas will be vying to brand the ballet’s magical Read more ...
Ismene Brown
THE choreographer George Balanchine died on April 30, 1983, aged 79, of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, a rare, if nowadays notorious, condition only discovered at his autopsy. What had been recognised long before his death, though, was that this man was one of the very greatest geniuses of the 20th century, a figure to be reckoned alongside Pablo Picasso in art and Igor Stravinsky in music.What he did for ballet was nothing less than complete reinvention, applying his mind energetically for almost 60 years to turning the conventional art he had learned in St Petersburg at the Mariinsky Theatre Read more ...