Features
Svend McEwan-Brown
They say that you discover who your true friends are when you find yourself in direst need. East Neuk Festival, our success story on the Fife coast, which should have been happening this week, faced the deepest crisis in its 16-year history this spring when, due to the pandemic, 2020’s festival was cancelled. Three years of preparation went up in smoke, and we found the organisation exposed to all manner of risks and challenges. Overnight, 40 per cent of the projected income disappeared while we were still left with many of the costs and commitments. Boy, did we discover who our friends were! Read more ...
Nancy Evans
Next month (July 2020) marks 20 years since I started work at Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, initially as their first Education Manager and then in my current role as Director of Learning and Participation. So when we were awarded a significant grant from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Arts-Based Learning More and Better fund to lead an exciting new composing project, Listen Imagine Compose Primary, it felt like a real celebratory moment – recognition of years of hard work and enquiry into placing contemporary music into school life.Listen Imagine Compose Primary is a three-year project Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Might we be nearing light at the end of the lockdown tunnel? It definitely seems that way, with the news in recent days that social life beyond the home may be resuming soon, at least after a fashion. All the while, theatrical offerings continue to come thick and fast, all the while offering up a cheeringly broad away of online prospects. This week's quintet includes a piece of installation art that you are encouraged to experience lying flat on your back, alongside an acclaimed Shakespeare extravaganza from just last year that many at the time experienced on their feet. We've got something Read more ...
Chi-chi Nwanoku
The worldwide reaction to the horrific murder of George Floyd via the renewed focus on the Black Lives Matter movement is not a minority issue. It concerns people of all ethnicities, education and economic backgrounds who want a better, fairer world. The Black and ethnically diverse people protesting and speaking out are being supported by people of all backgrounds, ages and races, here in the UK, the USA and across the globe. They are screaming out for action: for governments across the world to work together to legislate, educate and change people's lives for the better.For the majority of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ian Holm was once in his local cinema on High Street Kensington, enquiring at the ticket office about concessions for people who appeared in the film they wished to see. The unlucky vendor failed to make the connection between the short customer with full beard and the clean-shaven priest in the sci-fi caper showing on Screen Four upstairs. He had to make an internal call to the manager. "There's someone here who says he's in The Fifth Element. Wants a discount." "Oh yeah. What's his name then?" "Ian Holm." "Ian Holm!"Holm, who has died at the age of 88, became a prolific screen actor partly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As lockdown continues, National Theatre at Home has announced its final sequence of plays, and several of the very best are being saved for last. That certainly applies to this week's offering, Small Island, whose dissection of Britain's racist past couldn't be timelier. Broadway's Lincoln Center Theater, meanwhile, mined a bygone theatrical period in the comparably epic Act One, whilst the week's offerings also accommodate in-the-moment protest theatre, an acclaimed West African Hamlet, and a recent Olivier Award-winning actor playing a peacock, as you do. For more on the latest amalgam of Read more ...
Noemi Gyori
The magnitude of challenges that the entire classical music industry is facing due to the coronavirus pandemic is unprecedented. In the twinkling of an eye, cultural life became suspended. Many of us, mostly freelancers and entrepreneurs, smaller organizations, but even employees of large orchestras across the world are now dealing with stark financial and psychological pressure. If this wasn’t enough, we need to address difficulties in partial or full isolation - a highly unusual situation for us musicians, who otherwise are so connected to others and are extremely aware of the essentiality Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The government may occupy shifting sands when it comes to handling Covid-19, but the arts thank heavens continue to step up to the plate with a dizzying array of online options. This week's output mixes a soul musical from 1970s Broadway alongside a major revival of a play by Alan Bennett whose enquiry into the psychological well-being of those in charge will doubtless resonate anew today.Not to be forgotten is a tiny west London venue that consistently punches above its weight, alongside a slice of something more radical coming soon to a continent near you. This quartet represents just the Read more ...
Paul Lewis
As an instrumentalist, you can sit down and play music and escape from the stress. It’s a privilege to be able to do something that takes you to a different place – you’re removed from everything that’s happening. When you stop, there are reminders all around, though: worry about the health of friends and family, and concern about when we’re going to play concerts again and what it’s going to be like when we do.I like a bit of structure to my day so that I don’t swim around in lots of time. I practise in the morning until lunchtime. The kids are learning online, so in the afternoon I help Read more ...
Ian Page
My latest recording with The Mozartists is the first in a seven-volume series [reviewed by Graham Rickson in his Classical CDs Weekly column] exploring the so-called “Sturm und Drang” (literally translated, “storm and stress”) movement that swept through music and other art forms between the early 1760s and the early 1780s. In its strictest sense this was an exclusively literary movement which developed in Germany during the 1770s, and which owes its name to the title of a play written in 1776 by Maximilian Klinger. Its general objectives were to frighten and perturb through the use of a Read more ...
David Nice
As more musicians emerge from lockdown to conduct, play and sing in audience-less venues - ongoing kudos to the Wigmore Hall for its weekday lunchtime concerts, a fixure for so many viewers and listeners - here are some more off-piste treasures, a past glory from the Royal Opera, a chance to vote for lockdown's musical heroes and what promises to be a compelling discussion on Samuel Beckett translated into opera.Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and Jurowski back in action Permission to return to their usual haunt was granted to these first-rate players and their brilliant chief conductor Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As we continue into a third month in lockdown, the arts continue to suggest ever-changing worlds beyond. The invaluable National Theatre at Home this week looks across the Thames to a smaller venue's large-scale Coriolanus, starring a certain superhero movie icon, whilst the equally cherished Graeae streams their lively musical theatre tribute to the late Ian Dury. Beauty and the Beast, from a Chichester ensemble of young people, reminds us of the durability of that tale as old as time, even as The Shows Must Go On continues to look beyond Andrew Lloyd Webber to other musical mainstays, this Read more ...