Features
David Nice
We had, as presenter James Naughtie so wryly remarked, set aside our mourning weeds for the low-key glamour of celebrating a far from moribund classical recording industry. Movers, shakers and humble BBC Music Magazine contributors all shifted from the airy dining space at the ever-accommodating Kings Place yesterday - I won't forget the mint marshmallow - and descended to woody Hall One for the magazine's 2013 awards.Editor Oliver Condy had a hard act to precede in the shape of quick-quipping Naughtie, but he made us laugh with news of an anniversary less vaunted than Wagner’s, Verdi’s or Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If ever there was such a thing as a safe pair of pianistic hands then they would belong to Norway’s Leif Ove Andsnes. There’s a cool, patrician control to everything he does that speaks to thorough preparation, careful interpretative choices and immaculate technique. Thrill-seekers and risk-takers may want to look elsewhere, but for everyone else Andsnes offers the chance to hear cleanly through to the skeleton of a work. No histrionics or affectations muddy the silhouettes on show, and if occasionally one longs for a moment of abandon then it’s a desire easily satisfied by 10 minutes in the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Mrs Thatcher famously presided over a huge rise in unemployment, but down the years she kept a large sorority of impersonators (and one male one) off the dole. She was lucky with her mimics, who included some of the great actresses of the age, and never luckier than when Meryl Streep (pictured below) inhabited the role of Britain's first female Prime Minister. To her three election victories, Thatcher was able to add - if by proxy - an Academy Award for Best Actress.The first person to grab the handbag was Janet Brown on The Mike Yarwood Show, even before the Conservatives' return to office Read more ...
theartsdesk
One of the great British singer-songwriters of the past half-century, Nick Drake is the subject of a new tribute album, Way to Blue, released next Monday on Navigator Records. A companion piece to the concerts staged worldwide over the last four years, the artists involved include Teddy Thompson, Vashti Bunyan, Robyn Hitchcock, Lisa Hannigan, Scott Matthews and Danny Thompson. We are a delighted to have an exclusive preview from the album, of Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside performing “Fruit Tree”.According to Joe Boyd, Drake’s producer and the man who coordinated the album and the Read more ...
Dave Eggers
A new edition of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, with an introduction by Dave Eggers, forms part of a series of classic reissues from Abacus. The publishing imprint this year reaches its 40th birthday, and to celebrate it is giving 18 books from its back catalogue a fresh lick of paint, each with a new jacket design and some with a new introduction. They include monolithic memoirs by Primo Levi and Nelson Mandela, seminal British fiction from the likes of Beryl Bainbridge and Iain Banks, and significant works of contemporary American literature such as Infinite Jest and Candace Bushnell Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Rijksmuseum is reopening after 10 years. What took it so long? Escalating costs, contractual problems, a protracted battle with the cycling lobby (this is Amsterdam, after all). I’m sure there’s more, but one whole decade’s worth? It’s a long time to go without a national museum that represents the best of Dutch art to the Dutch people, and to the world.It’s easy to forget what a spectacular Medievalist fantasy the building actually isBut it’s all OK now. It’s been worth the wait. In fact, the improvement is staggering. The crepuscular gloom has been lifted and light has flooded in. You Read more ...
Sam Mills
On Wednesday I will strap on a guitar and take the stage at the Royal Festival Hall for the opening night of this year's Alchemy Festival. I am the musical director and happy accompanist to a line-up of spectacularly talented musicians, all with roots in different parts of the Indian subcontinent. As I write, visas are being stamped and air tickets finalised for 11 musicians flying in from India and Pakistan. I am part of the London contingent: Susheela Raman (pictured below right), whose concert this is, is a Tamil Londoner. Aref Durvesh, a longstanding colleague and the UK’s funkiest tabla Read more ...
Amanda Whittington
"Why write about Ruth Ellis?" It’s a question I’ve been asked many times in the run-up to The Thrill of Love and it’s a good one. I’d like to know the answer, too. Three years ago, I was commissioned by the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme to write a play which I suspect is some 30 years in the making. I can trace its beginnings to the mid-Eighties, when I was 17 years old and on high-alert for the kind of gritty icons who graced the singles covers of The Smiths. I discovered Ruth Ellis at the cinema, played so vividly by Miranda Richardson in Dance with a Stranger. Read more ...
simon.broughton
"Multi-instrumentalist" is a catch-all phrase that usually means somebody who plays flute, clarinet, sax and perhaps a bit of guitar. When it comes to Stephan Micus, he’s a multi-instrumentalist of an altogether different calibre. He plays hundreds of instruments – he doesn’t know how many – which he’s collected and commissioned from all over the world.Micus, who has a rare London concert this month, has just released his 20th album on ECM, which puts him up there with Keith Jarrett as one of the label’s most prolific artists. But Micus’s art is of a totally different nature. While Jarrett Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Victims driven to death by the mob, women and men violently rutting in animal costumes, a black comedy about a snatched baby, a naked man dancing alone in his own fantasy - many and varied are the images in the nearly 200 danceworks created to the notorious Rite of Spring since its premiere exactly a century ago. Nothing created in performance art in the 100 years since has had so decisive an aftermath as this seismic work. Nothing has liberated creators from rules quite as emphatically as the uncategorisable theatre piece put before shocked audiences in Paris and London in the late Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s an instinct of curators to put the pieces back together, to reintroduce works of art which time and market forces have scattered to the four winds. In recent memory, exhibitions have reunited in one space all of Monet’s haystacks, Cézanne’s card players and, in the case of the National Gallery’s momentous Leonardo show, both versions of The Virgin on the Rocks. A new exhibition opened this week in Florence which takes the business of synthesis to the next level.The Florentine Renaissance – as implied by the name conferred on it by Burckhardt in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Richard Griffiths, who has died at the age of 65 from complications during heart surgery, will be remembered above all for three performances, two on screen and one onstage. In Withnail & I (1987), he embodied in Uncle Monty a predatory homosexual who, according to the film’s director Bruce Robinson, was based on Franco Zeffirelli. Many years later Griffiths found himself playing a character parked on the same spectrum in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2005). As Hector, the teacher with a roving mind and wandering hands, he bagged a notable brace of awards in the form of an Olivier and Read more ...