Features
alain.debotton
Judging from the success of interior design magazines and property shows, you might think that this country was now as comfortable with good contemporary architecture as it is with non-native food or music. But scratch beneath the metropolitan, London-centric focus, and you quickly discover that Britain remains a country deeply in love with the old and terrified of the new. Country hotels compete among themselves to tell us how ancient they are; holiday cottages vaunt that they were already in existence when Jane Austen was a girl. The draughty sash window shows no signs of retiring. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Amazingly, the Vale of Glamorgan Festival has been on the go for more than 40 years, and has got better and better as it has gone along. Until recently, any kind of mould-breaking musical enterprise was likely to collide with the entrenched interests of the Taffia, the Cardiff and County Club, the Welsh Arts Council and the Land of Song.John Metcalf, the festival’s founder and guiding spirit, has somehow managed to thread his way through this hostile territory, and established a festival which is today the pride, if not of Cardiff, at least of Llantwit Major, 20 miles away on the south Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 1913 a 25-old-year mathematician from Tamil Nadu sailed to England. He journeyed at the behest of a Cambridge professor who had been mesmerised by the display of untutored genius evident in the young Indian’s correspondence. Within four years the visitor had grown so depressed by his isolation that he attempted to throw himself under a train.Nearly a century on, the story of the collaboration between Srinivasa Ramanujan and G H Hardy began suddenly exciting the interest of storytellers. In 2007 there was a play premiered off Broadway by David Freeman called A First Class Man. Also in Read more ...
edward.seckerson
René Jacobs: singer, conductor, scholar, archivist, alchemist, teacher. In recent years he's been "rehabilitating" the Mozart operas for the Harmonia Mundi label, eradicating 19th-century retouchings and stylistic anomalies in order to restore these great works to their vibrant original colours. He and his handpicked performers have now arrived at Mozart's beloved Singspiel Die Zauberflöte and the results are quite revelatory.
Jacobs talks about his crusade on behalf of style, 18th century and otherwise. He talks about the hours of reading and researching, the endless detective work offering Read more ...
iris.brooks
The group Pingasan’k “calls for good spirits”. The name refers to “a bucket to put rice in, tied with the bark of a tree”. Regardless of rice or spirits, this band touched my heart. The gentle, haunting sounds come from the bamboo tube zithers (pratuon’k) made from giant mountain bamboo, which is only cut down when they see the moon. “We do not want our instrument to smell sweet or our insects will bite it,” explains leader Arthur Kanying.But the hypnotic groove of the music does sound sweet (Pingasan’k pictured right). Who would expect that these gentle sonic waves include pieces for Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As there's something of a forest theme this weekend on theartsdesk, with the Royal Opera House's If-A-Tree festival curated by Joanna McGregor with Scanner, and a report from this year's Borneo Rainforest World Music Festival, and here, a diary of an extraordinary trip I took in 2003 to sample the culture and music of the Pygmies deep in the heart of the Central African Republic.Day 1: The Beauty Contest
The Miss Bangui beauty contest takes place at the Palais de l'Assemblée, an edifice built by North Koreans, where the Central African Republic's parliament used to meet. Since democracy was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No woman has ever achieved a higher profile on the French horn than Sarah Willis. Why? It's not as if she is a renowned soloist. But she is the first and only woman to join the brass section of the world's most celebrated and widely followed orchestra. It will be no surprise if this Saturday the BBC cameras as usual pick her out from row upon row of Teutonic males in the second of the Berlin Philharmonic’s two Prom 2010 appearances. But in addition to her Berliner duties, this year Willis has stepped out from under the orchestra’s giant shadow for the first time.She has recorded a CD of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As befits a film set in Tuscany, Certified Copy is an international affair. It stars Juliette Binoche as a French gallery owner and William Shimell as an English art historian. Its Iranian director is Abbas Kiarostami. The dialogue is in three languages. It’s the latest of la bella Toscana’s many starring roles in what’s been - let's face it - a chequered sort of film career.The film is curious and gets curiouser. Shimell’s art historian, as he reveals in his opening lecture to a respectful audience, is a kind of prophet in his own land. He is presenting a new book on fakes and copies to a Read more ...
ash.smyth
Since winning the Symphony Orchestra of Sri Lanka Concerto Competition at the tender (and record-setting) age of 16, Tanya Ekanayaka has become one of Sri Lanka’s pre-eminent concert pianists. Last month she was the first from her country ever to appear in the long-running Pianists of the World series at St Martin-in-the-Fields, with a programme featuring Bach, Beethoven, Ravel and her own improvised composition, Adahas: of Wings of Roots.A Fellow of Trinity College London and Licentiate of both the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music ( Read more ...
kate.connolly
It is tempting to playfully twist the German language a little to come up with a word that best describes the avant garde German theatre and film director Christoph Schlingensief. A “Wachrüttler”, literally a shaker-upper or rouser, is probably the best title to describe a man who seemed to put every vein and sinew of his body into shaking German society awake. The loss of Schlingensief, who died of lung cancer last Saturday aged 49, has left a gaping hole in the German arts world. One of the most controversial characters of cultural life here, Schlingensief made an enduring Read more ...
laura.thomas
The Leopard is being re-released by the BFI this week in a new digital restoration. Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great Sicilian novel was first seen in 1963 and went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Il Gattopardo, to give it its Italian name, charts the decline of the house of Salina, a once mighty clan of Sicilian nobles who watch their power slip away as Garibaldi drags 19th-century Italy toward unity and modernity. But alongside the political narrative, book and film give a starring role to another timeless Italian reality: food.Lampedusa’s novel Read more ...
mark.kidel
The world music scene is hungry for new sensations - and Omar Souleyman, about to hit London and the Shambhala Festival, well deserves to be one of them. In the early 1980s the hunger for the exotic focused on anything that came from the parallel universes untouched by the pressures of commercialisation: polyphonic pygmy singing from Central Africa, ecstatic Sufi soul doctors from Pakistan, drone-drenched bagpipe players from Bulgaria or heart-invading praise singers from Mali. Souleyman is the singer in a small band that plays dabke music at weddings in Syria.As the global village has shrunk Read more ...