Features
Sally Beamish
I was 13. It was a Saturday, and Mum was working. On this occasion she asked if I’d like to come along and bring a book. I was wearing a dress I’d made myself – psychedelic orange and pink, with red edging. It was 1969. I don’t remember what the book was, but I know I didn’t look at it once that day.The Kingsway Hall was set up for a group of 15 or so musicians, with a harpsichord at the centre. Mum was in the second violins. I was welcomed by her friends, who asked how the music lessons were going. The elegant, charming and charismatic man called Neville made me especially welcome, with lots Read more ...
theartsdesk
Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former USSR conducting interviews with the “the little great people” who had lived under Soviet communism and witnessed its demise. The resulting book, Second-Hand Time, is an oral history which tells through the words of ordinary people the end of what she, in her 2015 Nobel Prize lecture, called a “historical experiment”. This is the first of three extracts.— My whole life, I’ve kept my arms at my sides! I didn’t dare breathe a word of any of this to anyone. Now, Read more ...
Judith Webster
Music resonates with everyone. It plays a powerful and evocative role in people’s lives; it punctuates our memories and changes our mood. We can all remember our first album and the songs our parents and grandparents listened to. One of the first ways that we teach very young children is through singing and nursery rhymes. From that point onwards music continues to soundtrack our lives.A recent survey by the IFPI shows that 54% of young people around the world describe themselves as music fanatics. Not only that – the increasing use of streaming sites means music is more accessible than it’s Read more ...
'These were the quartets that made us fall in love with the genre': Dudok Quartet Amsterdam on Haydn
Dudok Quartet Amsterdam
As a string quartet, it’s not easy to distinguish yourselves from others. There are so many string quartets playing the great repertoire, and the level of quartets has never been as high as it is now. Everybody is trying to be unique.We are all part of a very long string quartet tradition. We have so many examples of great string quartets, so many fantastic recordings, so many people that played the same pieces. If you really want to distinguish yourself as a string quartet, would it not it be clever to step away from the core repertoire, to look for other opportunities?We have been thinking Read more ...
Simon Stephens
Light Falls is the sixth play that I have written for the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester and the fourth that its outgoing Artistic Director, Sarah Frankcom, will direct.She directed On the Shore of the Wide World, Punk Rock and Blindsided. In many ways Light Falls marks a culmination of a collaboration that has informed my working life and a return to ideas I have been interrogating in that collaboration.I was born in Stockport and lived there until I went to university when I was 18. I live in London now and have done for 25 years. The relationship between the two places continues to Read more ...
Hannah Khalil
It all started in 2009 in the National Portrait Gallery. I’d had a meeting nearby so popped in to get a cuppa and stare at the beautiful rooftop view of London from their top-floor café, but a picture caught my eye. It was part of an exhibition of Victorian Women Explorers, a photograph of a woman with a rather severe face. The label said something like: "Gertrude Bell – Mountaineer, Explorer, Diplomat and Spy. Travelled widely through the Middle East, spoke every dialect of Arabic and Persian and was responsible for drawing the lines of what became modern Iraq. Founder of the Museum of Iraq Read more ...
Gabriela Montero
For as long as I can remember, there has been a continuous loop of original music playing in my mind. My father used to joke about my “tuyuyo” – a little bump I have on the back of my head – that it was my personal repository for music. My husband, less versed in Venezuelan colloquialisms, simply refers to it as “the iPod”.However mysterious its source, music is a constant soundtrack to my life. Since my mother first placed a toy piano in my crib when I was just seven months old, I have been playing original pieces of music with the same abandon and freedom I experience when talking or Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The magnificent, controversial Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso, who asserted that she would live to 200, died yesterday in Havana, aged nearly 99. Legends are always well protected by their own mythology, yet in 2004, when attending the Havana Ballet Festival, I had a long interview with her, finding her surprisingly open and genial for such an autocratic icon. What she had to say was fascinating as a record not only of history's sweep and ballet's charmed circles of talent, but of the gritty human being who reached the pinnacle of ballerinadom and political influence despite near Read more ...
David Nice
Two hours' drive from Tbilisi over a beautiful mountain pass, lushly wooded on the descent, the Tsinandali Estate has been central to Georgia's wine-growing district of Kakheti since poet-prince Prince Alexander Chavchavadze produced the first bottle in 1841. Natives and overseas tourists come to wander the English-style arboretum, described by Alexandre Dumas the Elder as the Garden of Eden, and visit the modest palace where rakish Russian writer Griboyedov putatively seduced his host’s 16 year old daughter Nino, married her and travelled with her to Iran, where he was promptly murdered in Read more ...
theartsdesk
She has more armed guards than she has luggage. She has a sense of purpose even Magsalin admires. She rides along the coast toward a historic place and, by simply stepping on its soil, she will accomplish her duty. An homage to the dead, but not only for her benefit. Films, after all, have a sociality not even the most narcissistic can subvert. They require the possibility of observers. Thus consumers are significant to her story. For an inland, riverine town, this coastal road is invigorating. So much of this journey seems to be a start. Holiday goers pass by in a rented vehicle toward the Read more ...
theartsdesk
She had clutched the envelope given by the shy messenger, but she had never opened it. The Intended.True. The message from the director was for her.A joke between them—a bond.Though in her view he was no Kurtz: all he wanted was to finish his film.Caz is surprised at the attendance.There is no body, just this blasphemy, his inexplicable remains in a jar, a bowl of ashes that mocks his actual mortal substance, this foreign form of dying—as if some obscene power had turned him into what repulsed him, an indifferently presented dish.She thinks—but how everyone is at his wake. Now they come. A Read more ...
theartsdesk
At first, what puts Magsalin off at the pastry shop is Chiara’s voice. It is nasal, and her monotone, a bored flatness, even in the most interesting parts, keeps Magsalin, or the pastry shop waitress, or anyone else willing to listen amid the humid baking scones and moist pan de sal, at bay, as if an invisible wall, maybe socioeconomic, exists between Chiara’s voice and your attention. It is past one o’clock, and outside, the truant boys are shrugging back into their white button-down polo shirts, the uniform of all the Catholic schools that dot EDSA, done with their lunch-hour video Read more ...