Features
Jasper Rees
"I am amazed to be still alive. Two hours of medieval torment.” Franco Zeffirelli - who has died at the age of 96 - had spent the day having a lumbar injection to treat a sciatic nerve. You could hear the bafflement in his heavily accented English.It was a warm Roman evening in Casa Zeffirelli in September 2009. The grandest old man of the arts — who worked with Callas and von Karajan, Tennessee Williams and Toscanini, Burton and Taylor and Olivier, who had the ear of popes, princes and prime ministers — was now visibly in the deep winter of a lifespan that began in 1923. “Il maestro”, as Read more ...
Roger Wright
The composition course founded more than 25 years ago at Snape by composers Oliver Knussen and Colin Matthews is in full swing. The scene is the Britten Studio at Snape Maltings on the Suffolk coast. Like Colin, Olly's connections to Aldeburgh and Snape are deep and long lasting, including his Artistic Directorship of the Festival. Young composers are having their work tried out by an instrumental group, also being mentored by Olly. The ink is still wet on their scores.The scores have been given to Olly and Colin and the run through of a new piece begins. After less than a minute, Olly shouts Read more ...
Matt Henry
When I first read One Night in Miami, I instantly felt a strong connection to the piece and its story. The fact that Sam Cooke, Malcolm X, Cassius Clay and Jim Brown, four iconic black men at the top of their game in 1964, actually hung out in a Miami motel room on the night that Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston was fascinating to me. I had no idea of this encounter and as I read, I could imagine myself watching as a fly on the wall. Stepping back in time, seeing these icons of the Civil Rights Movement brought to life and imagining their experience of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
As Martin Scorsese’s new feature film, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, hits Netflix and cinemas, and a new 14 CD boxed set enters the official Bootleg Series, theartsdesk talks exclusively to Scarlet Rivera, the violinist on Desire and the Rolling Thunder Revue tours of 1975 and 1976, about her experiences of encountering, recording and touring with Dylan.I wrote to Scarlet Rivera via her website, expecting only the outside chance of a reply, because few who have worked and spent time with Dylan tend to open up about their experiences in public. I stressed my interest in the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Tomorrow, Martin Scorsese delivers, via Netflix, two hours and 22 minutes of screen time devoted to Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, following on from the release last week of the latest Bootleg Series boxed set, 14 CDs covering five full concerts from November and December 1975, as well as rehearsals and sundry soundboard cuts from other shows. Casual fans may be content with the excellent 2 CD Rolling Thunder set issued back in the Noughties; collectors, however, will be clearing shelf room to set it alongside the rest of an increasingly cyclopean Bootleg Series. The rehearsals, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Ole Bull sounds like some legendary gun-slinging hero of the Wild West. A legend he definitely was, and he spent long enough in the US to found a migrant community in Pennsylvania. But the Norwegian virtuoso (1810-1880) made his name not with a rifle but a fiddle. Back in Bergen, his birthplace, Norway’s first global superstar bought an entire island, Lysøen. He commissioned a fantasy mansion there from the architect Conrad von der Lippe. A Moorish dream in blue-grey pine, the Lysøen house makes an absurdly picturesque venue – one of several scattered in and around the coastal city – for the Read more ...
David Nice
There was a special celebratory aura to the start of Swedish city Gothenburg's first Point Festival. Earlier in the week its Symphony Orchestra's Chief Conductor, electrifying Finn Santtu-Matias Rouvali, had not only announced a renewed contract there but also been appointed to the same position with our own Philharmonia Orchestra, to succeed Esa-Pekka Salonen. Further excitement was further guaranteed by the fact that two of the world's finest ensembles, the GSO and violinist-genius Terje Tønnesen's uniquely innovative Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, would share five of the 11 major events, all Read more ...
Maxime Pascal
Stockhausen stands alongside Monteverdi and Beethoven as a composer who exploded the understanding of his art. Stockhausen deeply changed the relationship between space, time and music; there’s a human, intimate dimension to his composition, and he predicted the future. If Edgar Varèse anticipated the invention of electronic sound, then Stockhausen imagined a theatre of the future, combining electronics with the metamorphosis of the space and the circulation of sound in the concert hall to explore questions of acoustic properties that much newer forms of technology are still probing today. Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Every year the Cannes Film Festival is a swirl of chaos, excitement, and controversy. Last year, the festival had a markedly different feel. Gone were the big starry names. Replacing them were less glitzy films that were given a chance to shine.There were delights like the monochrome wonder that was Cold War from Paweł Pawlikowski, and the magical-realist fable Happy as Lazarro from Alice Rohrwacher. Both directors are back again this year, sitting on the competition jury headed up by The Revenant director Alejandro González Iñárritu, alongside Elle Fanning, Yorgos Lanthimos, Enki Bilal, Read more ...
Ellen McDougall
I’ve wanted to direct Thornton Wilder’s Our Town for a long time.The play is beautifully written and its form feels not only ahead of its time (it was written in 1938), but also extremely powerful for a contemporary audience in an open air theatre.As you might guess from the title, Our Town tells the story of a community: in the first act we meet everyone in the town from the paperboy to the doctor. But, as well as the people alive at this moment in time within the town, the scope of the play also stretches back into the historic and prehistoric life of its community, and stretches Read more ...
Liam Byrne
When you dedicate your life to studying and performing on a musical instrument that essentially went extinct at the end of the 18th century, nostalgia plays a certain unavoidable role in your daily routine. I don't mean fetishistic historicism - I'm very happy with plumbing and penicillin, thank you - but my job as a viola da gamba player is to try and absorb information about my ancient instrument and its historical repertoire in a sort of empathetic way. I try to understand how it works on both technical and emotional levels, so that I can perform beautiful and obscure old music for modern Read more ...
David Nice
First under Soviet rule, then in the remarkable flourishing of a liberated nation, Estonian contemporary music has held its independent head high and showcased it, under the aegis of the Estonian Composers' Union, first for a few days and now for more than a week in spring. In this, its 40th anniversary year, Estonian Music Days became World Music Days, hosting composers from 60 countries as the base for the 96-year old ISCM. Maybe it was partly because Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania understand the two aspects of its chosen theme, "Through the Forest of Songs", so well that they still came out Read more ...