Features
Daniel Hope
In 1998, as I was driving home and flipping through the radio channels, a piece of music caught my ear. A string trio. With elements of Bartók , Stravinsky and maybe Janáček? And yet I was pretty sure none of these composers had written for this combination. I pulled over and sat transfixed by the side of the road until the announcer said: “that was a string trio by Gideon Klein”. Who?I googled Gideon Klein and learned a lot about a place called Theresienstadt (also known by its Czech name as Terezín), a garrison town 60 km north of Prague, the central collection point or ghetto Read more ...
David Nice
You may have noticed an unholy silence from theartsdesk in the immediate aftermath of Sir John Tavener’s death a week ago today, just under three months short of his 70th birthday. Three of us in the classical team felt we just didn’t know his music well enough in the round, or care enough, to give an authoritative judgement.There were the early achievements – his trailblazing 1968 cantata The Whale, for instance – and then what felt like an increasing law of diminishing musical returns as Tavener took up the mantle of the Russian Orthodox Church. What ideas there were seemed spread thin over Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Doris Lessing’s storm-tossed life would make a stirring biopic. She spent her early years on an isolated farm in the Southern Rhodesian veldt, abandoned the children of her first marriage to take up with a German communist refugee during the war, then left for London, became a single mother with a third young child, and had her lifelong battles with her own mother. Much of it is recorded in the Children of Violence tetralogy about her literary alter-ego Martha Quest. And then there are Lessing’s memoirs, which took the reader up to 1962, just short of the publication of The Golden Notebook. Read more ...
Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
It begins on the street, nastily. An immigrant has got his hands on an English woman. Trouble is brewing. Then there is a dispute about money, involving a “Lombard” – the identification originally applied to immigrants from Lombardy in northern Italy, famous for its banking, but it had gradually become a term of abuse for all foreigners engaged in trade or banking, a word bandied around in the same way as “Jew”. Doll, the lusty London woman who has been hauled by the arm, sums up the popular sentiment of the day: “I am ashamed that freeborn Englishmen, having beaten strangers within their own Read more ...
theartsdesk
On 22 November 1963 President John F Kennedy was shot, yoking his name to an ex-marine and sometime defector to the USSR called Lee Harvey Oswald. Everyone old enough to remember is said to know where they were when they heard. As America dealt with its trauma, the conspiracy theories started,and spawned well over 1,000 books. The assassination also became the focus for artists in all art forms - in literature, theatre, film and even music. The latest is the movie Parkland, out this week, which reconstructs events in Dallas while steering clear of the main event. Meanwhile the Finborough Read more ...
fisun.guner
The trumpeting of a lone elephant can be heard all around Durham city centre, blasting across the River Wear. The organisers of Artichoke’s Lumiere Festival, now in its third biennial year, have been turning up the volume as the evening’s progressed. The 3D elephant, which is the work of French design group Top’là, is a magnificent optical illusion projected onto a replica medieval fortress arch on Elvet Bridge, complete with thunderous audio.It's one of several light works currently dotted around the city centre, which is known as The Peninsula – the river wraps around the old part of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
God morgen. Yes, Borgen is back on Saturday nights, and it’s all change at the top of Danish coalition politics. It gives nothing away to say that Birgitte Nyborg is no longer statsminister – she called an election and the opposition’s bluff at the end of the second series but it turns out that after three years in power Denmark’s fictional electorate had had enough of the Moderates. So the most glamorous and likeable of politicians is now on the lecture circuit in the private sector, and doing very nicely - she even has a new love in her life. This will be the last series of DR’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I've known rock photographer Tom Sheehan since we worked together at the Melody Maker in the 1980s, but even I didn't know that his stellar career stretches back "almost 40 years", or so it says in the programme notes for his new exhibition, Analogue, at the Lomography Gallery Store East in Spitalfields. Anyway, anyone who's ever been anyone in the great pop and rock malarky has been memorably photographed by Sheehan (or "painted with light," as he might facetiously put it). His work has appeared in Melody Maker, Mojo, Q, Uncut, The Times and Sunday Times, Time Out and many other places Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Kraftwerk closing a festival is a big deal. It’s an even bigger honour when the seminal German outfit reconfigure their set to acknowledge where they’re playing. Last Sunday, Kraftwerk performed the rarely heard “Airwaves”, from 1975’s Radioactivity album, within the honeycomb-windowed Harpa concert hall. They were paying tribute to Iceland Airwaves, the remarkable festival which was drawing to a closeOver five days, Kraftwerk were joined in capital city Reykjavík by more international names for the festival – John Grant, Anna von Hausswolff, Midlake, Savages, Omar Souleyman, Villagers. And Read more ...
theartsdesk
Of all the rock pantheon, Joni is the one who has evaded definition and over-determination better than anyone. The seemingly ethereal folkstress who partied with the most grizzled rockers and left them weeping for their mothers; the lover of the rock'n'roll life who can sing jazz standards and stand with the very greatest; the musical maestro who prefers to see herself as a painter - for all the reams of text written about her, the depths of armchair psychoanalysis attempted on her, Joni is always something other, and something more than anything you might expect. That is why, as much as any Read more ...
David Goodale
“She paused and heaved a sigh of relief that seemed to come straight from the cami-knickers.” Recounted our brother Andy, many years ago……. "A silence ensued." This was not his own observation, but a quote from P.G. Wodehouse, whom neither Bobby nor I had ever read. “I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl.” He continued. “A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits.” We were hooked.As an actor, Bobby, Andy’s twin brother, was looking at the possibility of adapting a Read more ...
theartsdesk
Following theartsdesk's Monday opinion piece on reasons for moving towards a boycott on Valery Gergiev's concerts, and in the general climate created by other reports and protests, the conductor has issued the following statement, to which David Nice responds with an open letter.Valery Gergiev's statementI am aware of the gay rights protest that took place at the Barbican last week prior to my concert with the LSO. I have said before that I do not discriminate against anyone, gay or otherwise, and never have done, and as head of the Mariinsky Theatre this is our policy. It is wrong to suggest Read more ...