Features
Adam Sweeting
Here at theartsdesk we still receive the occasional missive from readers on several continents incensed at the BBC's axing of Zen in February 2011, a decision taken by then-controller of BBC One Danny Cohen. Zen didn't get a mention in Cohen's article in Wednesday's Times, entitled "Never mind the box-set brigade, let's celebrate British drama", but he managed to plug plenty of more recent BBC drama productions (and a couple from ITV, in a token attempt at even-handedness). It was as if a long list of titles would be enough to demonstrate the truth of his argument that British TV drama is Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Transylvania in Northern Romania remains yoked to the memory of Vlad the Impaler, the ruthless individual immortalised as Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel, but, on a sunny midsummer week in early June, the mood was anything but stygian in Cluj, the region's capital and the country's second-largest city.Cold War brutalism sits alongside elaborate Austro-Hungarian wedding cake fancies in this elegant, eclectic, battered melting pot, where a constant chain of arts festivals is to be found pretty much throughout the year (Cluj is currently contending for the crown of European City of Culture in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the midst of ferment as the arts world faces fast-shrinking public subsidy, Sir John Tusa, former managing director of the BBC World Service and the Barbican Arts Centre, publishes this week a brisk new book that urges arts and politicians to reject the emotive clichés and lazy token battles and focus on what matters. In Pain in the Arts, Tusa urges that both sides take personal responsibility for an essential part of human life.His title, beyond the dubious pun, refers to the very real, and feared, pain in the long-established arts world right now, caused by current government pressure Read more ...
Matthew Wright
New Orleans. New York. Kansas City. Chicago. These are the places where the soul of jazz breathes free. In London, you’d head to Soho. Dalston, or Camden; none of these places have a blade of grass to share between them. Jazz must be one of the most determinedly urban genres of music. Even rap these days has flirted with country music. (Look up Spearhead’s entertaining “Wayfaring Stranger” if you don’t believe me.)So when I heard about an Austrian festival subtitled “Jazz am Bauernhof”, which literally means jazz on the farm, or jazz in the farmyard, the very idea of reconciling this musical Read more ...
David Nice
Richard Strauss was born in Munich 150 years ago today. Christian Thielemann is celebrating the fact by conducting the Staatskapelle Dresden in the juiciest of all-Strauss operatic potpourris, a festive concert to be held in the city’s glorious Semperoper. What wouldn’t I give to hear Anja Harteros, alongside Anne Schwanewilms the loveliest of Strauss sopranos, and chaste nymph Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel in a peerless operatic epilogue? In fact the Dresden Music Festival, my host, ended yesterday and seems to function as a separate entity with its own period-instrument orchestra. I Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Sprawling over the East End of London for the next thirteen days and boasting an illuminating line-up of new voices, retrospectives and debate in its 13th year, the East End Film Festival ensures no cinematic rock is left unturned with its bold programming choices.Monte Hellman’s controversial Cockfighter gets a rare outing at Red Gallery, a grand Masonic Temple is home to a weekend of macabre cinema and the opening night gala proves the festival’s dedication to championing filmmakers they believe in with the world premiere of Ross Clarke’s first feature, New Orleans-set drama, Dermaphoria. Read more ...
fisun.guner
I’ll admit, there's a scene that made me well up during the excellent Marina Abramović biopic The Artist is Present. If you've seen it you’ll know the scene I mean – it’s where Ulay, Abramović’s former partner, in art and in life, takes the seat opposite her on the last day of her MoMA marathon performance. And the tears come, hers and his and then ours, and she takes his hands, and then more tears. Oh god.Abramović and Ulay did some powerful work in the Seventies. As a couple they gave expression, in a highly wrought, often florid fashion, to the psychological violence that often bubbles Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
If the Hungarian State Opera wanted to demonstrate that it is now back on top form, it could not have chosen a better way than this six-opera celebration of Richard Strauss’s 150th anniversary. Mahler conducted here before moving to Hamburg, Vienna and New York. Filled with new ambition, after a contractual shake-up under General Manager Szilveszter Ókovács, Budapest displays revitalised strength and amazing depth in all departments.The 2014 Strauss showpiece was a national premiere: Hungary’s belated first staging of Die Frau ohne Schatten, the fairy-tale opera with which Strauss and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Sitting outside Mrs Fitzherbert’s, the pub named after George IV’s notorious mistress, nursing a pilsner top and a packet of peanuts on a sunny Saturday afternoon, the world is a benevolent place with the Brighton Festival (and Fringe) at the heart of the fun. My daughters, aged 11 and 16, and girlfriend, age unknown, are with me (fizzy lemon, Coca Cola and pilsner, no top, respectively), and in front of the retina-scorching white, grandiose columns of the Unitarian Church opposite a group of men perform acapella songs.We can’t stay long, as we have an appointment a few yards down New Road at Read more ...
caspar.gomez
It’s certainly different from the Glastonbury shuttle, I’ll tell you that. I’m sitting with Finetime on the minibus that takes festival-goers from Lewes Station to the opening day of Glyndebourne Opera Festival 2014.Finetime’s looking very much the peacock today, a suit of many colours and he’s even wearing an earring with a blue feather. I clank my Asahi beer against his.“The first of too many,” I say.All around us the full minibus is silent but not unfriendly. Opera people do anticipation differently from us rockers and ravers. A man of 50-ish in a kilt sits down next to us, smiles and asks Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At last night’s Eurovision Song Contest, host country Denmark submitted “Cliché Love Song”, a weedy Bruno Mars-a-like designed to ensure they did not win for a second year running. It came ninth. While understandable that Danish national broadcaster DR would try to duck the expense of staging the extravaganza in Copenhagen again in 2015, they could have displayed some imagination by choosing an entrant that was certainly not a winner but had some worth. Instead of Basim wth his paper-thin “Cliché Love Song”, Aalborg’s Get Your Gun would have made a grand choice to showcase Denmark in fine Read more ...
David Nice
Poised when I met him six weeks ago between 40th anniversary celebrations of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, of which he has been a shaping chief conductor for the past five years and putting his new music directorship of Glyndebourne into action, Robin Ticciati hardly seemed like a man in positions of power, more an idealistic youth with a touch of the dreamer softening a powerful intellect.He was much the same, in short, as when I’d first encountered him sharing a 2009 Glyndebourne study day on Janáček's Jenůfa (Ticciati holding the score below) in the then-26 year old’s last Read more ...