Features
David Nice
Little has changed about Pärnu, with its concentric rings of eight-mile sandy beach and dunes, wooded gardens and wooden old town, in the five years I've been going there. It came as a bit of a shock to find that voters in the region favoured the far right, which now has an unwelcome white-supremacist father and son in an otherwise progressive parliament; but the town in July is full of Tallinn folk heading south to Estonia's "summer capital". It's still a calm background for the intense creative work of the music festival dominated by the Järvi family: Paavo, "Artistic Leader" with his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
We’ve all had the experience of wandering into a church, only to discover it filled unexpectedly with music: the choir rehearsing for Evensong, a local orchestra practising, a soprano and organist getting ready for a weekend wedding. This spirit of serendipity, of startling, incongruous beauty, is the essence of the Dordogne’s annual Itinéraire Baroque festival, which invites its audience to stray into the many small churches that cover the region, filling these dark, quiet Romanesque buildings with music and life.And this isn’t just any music. When pioneering harpsichordist and organist Ton Read more ...
David Nice
Anna Larsson's fellow Swedes can count themselves lucky that the worldwide first choice to sing Wagner's Erda and the midnight song in Mahler's Third Symphony has made so much of her Dalarna inheritance. In what's called a "Concert Barn" (Konsertlada) built on land bought next to the birthplace of her father, who lived in Vattnäs, a small settlement on Lake Orsa, and later moved to Stockholm, she has already established a working theatre serving a strong operatic tradition with her country's best fellow singers, and a nurturing of young musicians who include many outstanding players in this Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Odessa, the so-called "pearl of the Black Sea", is a Ukrainian city full of lovely 19th-century Italianate architecture and sandy beaches, with a reputation, even in Soviet times, for a certain bohemian sense of freedom. It has also, for the past ten years, hosted an impressive international film festival, the 'Cannes of the East'. The city has echoes of its Soviet times; Hotel Londonskaya, where the festival had its industry workshops, bears some passing resemblance to Wes Anderson’s Hotel Budapest. Mainly staffed by volunteers, it seems faintly miraculous the Odesa International Film Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
For a time, Aung San Suu Kyi enjoyed a heroic status on the international stage perhaps surpassed only by Nelson Mandela. The politician won a Nobel peace prize for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights in her country, Myanmar (formerly Burma), endured almost 20 years of house arrest, then played a leading role as her country moved towards so-called democracy.But then her country’s military started a persecution of the minority Rohingya Muslims that quickly became genocide. Aung San Suu Kyi said nothing. And her refusal to condemn the action turned her from hero to villain Read more ...
Ewa Banaszkiewicz and Mateusz Dymek
Spoiler alert: About sixty-four minutes into our debut feature film, one of the main female characters undresses for the camera. Alicja is being filmed by the other protagonist, a young American documentarian named Katie. As the sexually charged long take progresses, it becomes apparent that what started out as an erotic provocation (catering to Katie’s palpable attraction to her) gradually descends into Alicja’s traumatic memory of sexual abuse. Despite the disturbing situation unfolding in front of her, Katie continues recording, and we – as the audience watching through her lens – become Read more ...
David Nice
Two years ago Ermanna Montanari and Marco Martinelli, the visionary partners who have powered Ravenna's revolutionary Teatro delle Albe since 1986, led local people and international visitors down through the circles of Dante's Inferno. In 2021, the 700th anniversary of the greatest Italian poet's birth, they will take us into the presence of God. This year’s Ravenna Festival special dealt with the most human of the three canticles, the central meditation and dramatisation of sharing and getting the chance to begin again. It concludes with the earthly paradise where Dante is reunited with Read more ...
Joseph Bullman
The Left Behind is a television drama marinated in real-world research. It tells the story of a young man unable to break free from his bullshit job, zero-hour existence, thrown out of his family home when the council decide that as a single man with no dependents he isn’t a housing priority. He is seduced by a far-right, anti-migrant explanation for his plight and eventually drawn into a sickening hate crime. But very unusually our film takes the perspective of the perpetrator of the hate crime. And this is why we felt we had to hear this side of the story.Last year we made Killed Read more ...
'A product not only of his era but also of his travels': Ian Page on Mozart's cosmopolitan education
Ian Page
When Mozart was an established composer living in Vienna during the final years of his short life, a young student seemingly came to him to seek his advice. The would-be young composer said that he was planning to write a symphony, and asked Mozart what advice he could give to him. Mozart replied that a symphony was a complex undertaking, and suggested that the youngster should first write a few keyboard sonatas and string quartets before undertaking an orchestral work. The student, however, was indignant. “But, Herr Mozart,” he allegedly retorted, “you were writing symphonies when you were Read more ...
David Nice
Fortunate those Italian towns and cities whose Renaissance rulers looked to the arts to enrich their domain. Now neglect of cultural heritage can be laid at the doors of successive governments, but regional enlightenment can make a difference even in the era of Salvini. Treviso, clutching the inevitable title of "the Venice of the mainland" and only 30 kilometres distant from that still dreamlike city, was lucky to have a cultured centre-left mayor for five years between Lega Nord representatives, one of them convicted for trying to form an armed criminal gang during the late 1990s; sadly in Read more ...
Damian Cruden
How we deliver culture in the modern day is complex. There are many misconceptions about where and who is capable of leading the nation’s cultural charge. The accepted conceit is that if culture doesn’t emanate from certain places, like London or Stratford, then it couldn’t possibly be of value. By way of response, Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre brings affordable, high-quality culture to audiences outside the M25. It promises an immersive experience, accessible to all and undeniably great fun. The artists creating the work have all had a wide range of experience gained in the major arts Read more ...
David Nice
You should not die or be born on Svalbard, 1,985 kilometres above Norway's northernmost coast, and at 18 you work or leave for the mainland. Hunting is over, mining nearly so. Tourism, carefully managed, and Arctic research are the future; the Global Seed Vault is also here, and Syria has been the first country to take from it. Excursions outside the biggest settlement, Longyearbyen, are advisable only with an armed guard; dangerous polar bears outnumber inhabitants and occasionally crash into town. A special Svalbardian variety of reindeer and arctic foxes seem comfortable ambling around Read more ...