Features
Tom Birchenough
It’s a rare national culture festival that presupposes its audience will have no knowledge whatsoever of the culture concerned - or even be able to locate the country itself on a map. But that, we must assume from the “Azerbai-where?” promotional bus ads, was the starting point last November for organisers of the BUTA Festival of Azerbaijan Art, a series of very well-connected art and music events in London going on this month. Realistically, until petrol starts to be sold with a “produce of” notice, the country’s brand recognition looks set to stay on the low side.BUTA may have started as Read more ...
simon.tait
We’d almost blown the so-called Cultural Olympiad, and if the appointment of Ruth Mackenzie as artistic director had come a moment later than the turn of this year, we would have done. Not my opinion: this from Tony Hall of the Royal Opera House, and he chairs the board that appointed her. More than that, on Friday Hall was given a cross-bench seat in the House of Lords to thump the tub for the arts in 2012, and we’ll take notice then. Won’t we?The entire soap opera is eerily reminiscent of the events preceding Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture. That too was all set to be an Read more ...
william.ward
The latest subject in the BBC Four series of composer portraits by Christopher Nupen is Ottorino Respighi. One of the most unfairly neglected major composers of the first half of the 20th century, his reputation has suffered less from not being considered at all, but for having been confined to his trilogy of tone poems that evoke respectively the Fountains, the Pines and the Traditional Festivals of Rome. Nupen's film, made in 1982, puts a welcome case for his more challenging but less well-known work.Composed over the course of 12 tumultuous years – from Italy’s disastrous participation in Read more ...
joe.muggs
My abiding memory of The Foundry is being held aloft by my throat by the landlord, Falklands veteran and notorious band manager Alan "Gimpo" Goodrick, as he accused me of stealing a Shirley Bassey album. I had been DJing for a book reading by Mark "Zodiac Mindwarp" Manning, and there was a lot of absinthe being drunk thanks to some fellow from The Idler. I knew at that point I shouldn't have begun the evening by playing the line "there may be trouble ahead" from Bassey's version of "Let's Face the Music and Dance" over and over on a loop. It's a dreadful cliché to say knowingly of a bar "it Read more ...
tom.paulin
I came to Medea because 26 years back, the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry - started by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea - asked me to a version of Antigone. Entitled The Riot Act, it was staged in the Guildhall in Derry in September 1984 and toured Ireland after that. It has been produced several times since then, most recently at the Gate Theatre in London.The following year the Open University Arts and Civilisation course asked me to do a version of Prometheus Bound – it was broadcast that year and published by Faber as Seize the Fire. I didn’t do any version of a Greek play Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Since releasing her first solo album in 2006 while still a member of the acclaimed Northumbrian group Rachel Unthank and the Winterset - who also garnered three Folk Award nominations for themselves this year – Oates has developed a unique repertoire of English balladry to which her clear, richly emotive voice is so suited.That repertoire largely comes not from books or records but from years of taking part in folk sessions in pubs, clubs and homes around Devon, where she has lived since 2000. The tragic, dark-hearted ballads that stud her three solo albums come directly from a remarkable Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Whoever first made the observation - some say Winston Churchill, others Ronald Reagan - there is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man, and a woman. On stage these noble beasts have inspired some highly successful plays, including Peter Schaffer's Equus, recently revived with Daniel Radcliffe, and War Horse, still living up to its name in the West End after over two years (panto horses probably don't count). In cinema, the legacy is more mixed; but not for nothing is the Western, arguably the greatest of film genres, also known as the horse opera. Horses Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Catching an impression of contemporary Russian drama may have become easier for British theatre goers over the last decade, but the work that has come through nevertheless looks like only parts of a wider picture. Four staged readings by the British-based Sputnik Theatre Company at the Soho Theatre at the beginning of February are the latest chance to take the sometimes chilly temperature of what’s been written there recently.Credit for beginning the dialogue goes squarely to the Royal Court’s international department, which back in 2001 pioneered a programme that brought four plays to London Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In his forbidding dark suit and heavy-framed sunglasses, declaiming his artfully wrought texts to camera with the ominous certainty of a hanging judge, Jonathan Meades is one of TV’s most unmistakable presences. While it may be lamentable that we don’t see him more often, it’s miraculous, in the current climate, that we see him at all.His films are densely layered brain-twisters where history, architecture and folklore collide, ripe with allusion, metaphor and facts carefully selected for their provocative value. His best-known series include Abroad In Britain, Further Abroad with Jonathan Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Craig Urquhart was Leonard Bernstein's personal assistant for the last five years of his life. In this touchingly frank interview he talks about the man he knew, the man he revered, the man who wanted to be all things to all people and who consistently pushed himself to the limit in the service of the music that drove him.
Click here to listen to this episode
The Bernstein Project is a 10-month celebration of Leonard Bernstein - one of the most charismatic men of the 20th century. A composer and conductor who wrote poetry and loved science; a pop icon revered by audiences, critics and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) may be the great idealiser of American smalltown life, but many of his paintings took their cues from Dickens, and they thus have an English tang. None more so than Merrie Christmas (pictured below), which Rockwell painted for the cover of 7 December 1929 edition of the Saturday Evening Post: Tony Weller, the philosophising coachman father of Mr Pickwick’s manservant Sam, is shown cracking his whip with one hand and doffing his holly-spiked hat with the other.Resplendent in a great blue coat, a red scarf and beige breeches and waistcoat, as fat-bellied if not as Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Craig Urquhart was Leonard Bernstein's personal assistant for the last five years of his life. In this touchingly frank interview with Edward Seckerson he talks about the man he knew, the man he revered, the man who wanted to be all things to all people and who consistently pushed himself to the limit in the service of the music that drove him.
The Bernstein Project is a ten-month celebration of Leonard Bernstein - one of the most charismatic men of the 20th century. A composer and conductor who wrote poetry and loved science; a pop icon revered by audiences, critics and musicians alike, and Read more ...