Features
fisun.guner
Addressing a crowd of journalists gathered at the press launch of her major retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Yoko Ono begins by telling us how cynical she is. It’s quite a claim considering it’s just about the last thing you’d ever think to call her. Perhaps she’s finally tired of being dismissed as a naive idealist. But no, it’s just a roundabout way for her to express her astonishment at the extraordinary architecture of Frank Gehry’s glinting, titanium-clad masterpiece, which opened 16 years ago in this Basque city of northern Spain. Being “naturally cynical” she hadn’t, she said, Read more ...
Ron Peck
It was very odd, in January this year, to see that Super-8 camera of Derek’s in a glass case and a few open notebooks in his beautiful italic handwriting in some other glass cases in the same room. There were five or six small-scale projections from his films in other rooms, including The Last of England, and some art works, but, somehow, Derek wasn’t there at all for me.The location where all these things were turned into what felt like sacred relics was the Inigo Rooms at Somerset House and the exhibition was Derek Jarman: Pandemonium. Pandemonium didn’t sound so out of place in relation to Read more ...
David Nice
Der Rosenkavalier, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 “comedy for music” about love, money and masquerading in a putative 18th-century Vienna, is a repertoire staple around the world. Continental houses throw it together without a moment’s thought, a single rehearsal (Felicity Lott memorably recalls a Vienna Staatsoper performance in which the first time her character, the Marschallin, met the mezzo singing the trousers role of her young lover Octavian was when they woke up in bed together at the beginning of the opera).Glyndebourne is different, with a luxuriously long Read more ...
theartsdesk
Even more deserving of the sobriquet “the beautiful voice” than Renée Fleming, the natural successor who virtually copyrighted it, Kiri te Kanawa was one of the great sopranos of the 20th century. With those big, candid brown eyes and bone structure she’s still a beauty, as the images of her cameo role in the Royal Opera’s La Fille du régiment underline. The voice now – well, as I wrote in my review of Monday’s opening, it’s what you’d expect of a 70 year old with form. Last night was the big birthday with Downton Abbey butler Carson (Jim Carter) wheeling on the cake for that other stately Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Whether fingerprint or labyrinth, the swirly logo for Marrakech Biennale 5 feels apt. The festival has left its mark upon the city. It questions Moroccan notions of identity. And, going by the tagline, “Where are we now?” it reflects the ease with which you can get lost in this rich and bewildering land.But the artists in this 10-year-old event, know their way round North Africa. Almost a quarter of the 43 participants are from Morocco. Many more have strong links with the region. And the majority of works are site-specific, that is, fully orientated to the five main venues.Curator Hicham Read more ...
Gareth Williams
The British Museum's exhibition The Vikings: Life and Legend promises to redefine the Viking age for a new generation. First seen at the National Mueum in Copenhagen, it has now travelled - much as the show's subjects once did - across the North Sea. It includes objects from 25 lending institutions spread across nine countries - 10 if you include Scotland, whose national law requires export licence. To celebrate the exhibition, theartsdesk invited Dr Gareth Williams to pick 10 exhibits that walk us through the Viking story.1 Which exhibit says something new and unexpected about the Vikings? Read more ...
David Nice
Jean-Philippe Rameau, the most radical and inventive of French composers before Berlioz, died in Paris 250 years ago this September. 16 years later a gem among theatres opened its doors for the first time with a long evening’s entertainment including Racine’s Athalie, supported by an incidental score from the resident music master Franz Beck.There I caught in full, startling production flight not the Rameau opera which most often turned up in the Grand-Théâtre de Bordeaux's early repertoire, Castor et Pollux, but what was originally called a "ballet heroïque", Les Indes galantes. You can hear Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
“Follow the instructions."David Lean’s suggestion to a costume designer shows the importance of the script – a film’s “recipe”. This is why the Oscar categories for Best Adapted Screenplay and Original Screenplay are so important: without great bones, we'd have nothing good to watch.In the second part of our Oscars preview, here are our predictions and picks for the screenplay gongs, alongside our look at the scene-stealers in the supporting acting categories.ADAPTED SCREENPLAYIn the Adapted Screenplay category, the leading nominee is, as expected, John Ridley’s superb script for 12 Years a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Is it just me or are the Oscars getting better? I don't necessarily mean the show itself, rather the films selected for nomination and the eventual winners. In recent years we've seen films as brilliant and diverse as The Artist, The Hurt Locker and No Country for Old Men take the top prize. And whilst The King's Speech, Slumdog Millionaire and Argo might have been crowd pleasers, they were also finely crafted and help banish memories of seeing Chicago, A Beautiful Mind and Crash crowned, or Forrest Gump trumping Pulp Fiction and Titanic sinking everything in sight.This year's nominees Read more ...
David Nice
Nature declined to reveal the Northern Lights over a long winter weekend in Iceland. My hotel was geared up to the spectacle, offering the option of a phone call any time in the night should they appear; but no call came. I only hope the tourists who packed the outward-bound plane hadn’t booked just for that. They’d surely not be disappointed in this most spectacular of lands so long as the weekend package-tour selling point wasn’t an idée fixe, and in any case I suspect half had come to club the night away.Our own Aurora Borealis was simulated in one of the halls of Olafur Eliasson’s Read more ...
philip radcliffe
We are witnessing the end of an era in the long history of Manchester’s theatreland: the disappearance, after more than 60 years, of the treasured Library Theatre. Coming full circle, it is ending as it began, with a production of The Seagull.Modestly located in the basement of the city’s grand Central Reference Library (pictured below), where it was opened by King George V in 1934, the theatre has a distinguished history, boasting European premieres of Sondheim musicals and quality productions, especially of plays by Neil Simon and Bertolt Brecht. Some successfully transferred to the West Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Long before the stars had begun walking (and working) the red carpet, this year's British Academy Film Awards were a hot topic. Unfortunately it was for all the wrong reasons. A whistleblower writing for the Daily Mail alleged that many of the Academy's 6,500 members make little effort to consider the full gauntlet of options, often voting for the big-budget American favourites sight unseen. Furthermore, the dubious inclusion of Saving Mr Banks, Rush and Gravity in the Outstanding British Film category edged out smaller, less controversially British efforts (the excellent For Those in Peril Read more ...