Features
Jasper Rees
The energy of Antony Sher, who has died at the age of 72, was prodigious. He not only acted like a fizzing firecracker. He wrote books about his most celebrated roles, and several novels set in his native South Africa. He also wrote plays, and he painted. It was as if the stage could not contain him. The screen certainly couldn’t: Sher's acting style was so volatile, so expansive, so technically adapted for the theatrical space that aside from his well-remembered turn as Howard Kirk (pictured below), the voraciously heterosexual lecturer in Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1981), his Read more ...
India Lewis
Perhaps appropriately, when I called Pete Tong for his 10 questions I was hungover, on the phone in a park after a night at a very good party. It’s a sign of the times that things are appearing to return to a relative normal, despite the threat of Omnicron and a precipitant winter lockdown.Pete is on the cusp of releasing his new eight-track EP, to be accompanied by a live show on December 3. These live shows with the Heritage Orchestra were the genesis of the series of four releases, of which Pete Tong + Friends: Ibiza Classics is the latest. Tentatively, the nights are opening up again just Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Film festival chiefs the world over have been having a tricky time navigating the pandemic, juggling ever-changing Covid rules with an industry desperate to return to normal. Yet it’s no surprise that Estonia’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF to the locals) has managed better than most. After all, the event was borne of adversity, 25 years ago, when Estonia’s independence from the Soviet Union was inadvertently killing both its filmmaking, and its filmgoing. “It was a very critical situation for Estonians, cinema, and for myself,” recalls PÖFF founder and festival director Tiina Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It seemed impossible and yet, the other evening, while idly flicking through emails, I learned the unimaginable: Stephen Sondheim, age 91, had passed away. And very quickly by all accounts, given that he was reported to have enjoyed a Thanksgiving meal with friends just the previous day."They die but they don't," goes a lyric from Into the Woods, as my mind filled with multiple responses to the news, many of them culled from his work (and often cited by others in their own, instantaneous reactions). I, too, was "sorry/grateful" – bereft at the news and yet grateful for the work. But I suppose Read more ...
Cheryl Frances-Hoad
In the darkness my dreams are interruptedI see the blackbird in my mind and the whirring of my brain beginsScenes from the Wild begins at dawn on a spring day, at that moment between sleep and wakefulness where dreams and reality are intermingled. During the writing of this 70-minute song cycle for tenor and chamber orchestra, I'd often find ideas coming to me at this time of the day, musical fragments waking me before the blackbird had a chance to. One of the joys of setting text as evocative as Dara McAnulty and Amanda Holden's is that it often feels as if the songs compose Read more ...
Conor Mitchell
A mass, in its simplest form, is the order of prayers that are said in a religious service. It is standardised and has been for centuries, in order to create a theatrical journey that takes us through a service. Composers have always been drawn to the mass as a structure because it has an inherent drama. It draws on themes of rebirth, change, redemption.As a gay man, finding myself and being "reborn" as an authentic "me" has always been held in a state of balance with faith-based backgrounds that have been embedded in society from childhood. I reacted against this. Then I embraced it. Then I Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Henry Woolf's place in theatre history is small but significant, a bit like Woolf was himself. Until his death on November 11, at the age of 91, he was the last survivor of a gang who made friends at Hackney Down grammar school in the 1930s. The most famous member of the group was Harold Pinter. The Room, Pinter’s first play, was more or less commissioned by him.“Commissioned is an awfully grand word,” Woolf told me when I first met him in 2000. In 1957 he was a postgraduate at Bristol when the new drama department was looking for one-act plays. Pinter was a freshly married actor, toiling Read more ...
Judith van Driel
In every life there are moments of great significance. Experiences that stick with us and define our own personal story.Growing up as a young violinist, one of those defining moments for me was the first time I played a piece by Johannes Brahms. It was his Second Violin Sonata; I was sixteen years old. Of course I had heard Brahms’s music before, but by bringing his notes to life myself I discovered a whole new range of emotions I had never experienced with any other composer. Or even more than that: the music opened up a new, illuminated world to me. Playing Brahms made me feel a little Read more ...
Jessica Baldwin
It’s been a turbulent week for British artist Kate Daudy. Am I My Brother’s Keeper, her refugee tent (main picture), the art installation and seminal work that propelled her to international fame is gone, thrown out with the trash."A nun destroyed the tent," Daudy explains. The work, a UNHCR tent embroidered with words and pictures, was being stored at a convent in Spain where it was unintentionally thrown into a skip. It’s a big loss.Working on the project, meeting Syrian refugees in Jordan and hearing their stories, Daudy says, changed her life. The refugees’ own words adorned the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Tonight a version of Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle launches in the intimate surroundings of Stone Nest, a former Welsh chapel in London's West End. Its conductor along with soprano Susan Bullock and baritone Gerald FInley, alternating in the roles of Judith and Bluebeard with Gweneth Ann Rand and Michael Mayes, discuss its special claim on our attention. Stephen Higgins, conductor and co-founder of Theatre of SoundWhilst working with my colleague and friend, baritone Gerald Finley, on a production of Bluebeard’s Castle that he was singing at the Met, in between rehearsals I was also Read more ...
theartsdesk
Few musicians get to stage-manage a dignified departure from the world. Among his last compositions, Richard Strauss set a poem by Eichendorff depicting an old couple looking into the sunset and asking “is this perhaps death?”, and towards the end he told his daughter-in-law that “dying is just as I composed it in [the symphonic poem] Death and Transfiguration". That great Dutchman Bernard Haitink, a peerless interpreter of Strauss’s music, knew when to retire: he withdrew from official engagements not long after his 90th birthday in March 2019, marked by two concerts with the London Symphony Read more ...
David Nice
“I want to tell her that people will be good,” Tewodros Aregawe of Phosphoros Theatre confided to us as Little Amal closed her eyes on the giant bed made up for her in the Paul Hamlyn Hall, “that all the people with kind eyes who have walked alongside her and listened to her story will be louder than those who wish she wasn’t there”.It’s a Utopian vision that has largely gone hand in hand with the three-and-a-half metre tall creation of the wonderful Handspring Puppet Company on her 8000 kilometre journey from the Turkish-Syrian border, though even this ultimate exercise in magical moving Read more ...