Features
Pavel Šporcl
It is taken for granted today that Paganini is almost a God-like figure for violinists. After all, he epitomises the ultimate virtuoso figure, both as someone whose technique outshone (so we are told!) every other player of his time, and who oozed charisma.That’s the image, one that he carefully cultivated himself, and we know much of it to be true. But how that mythology built to a point where even in somewhere like the Czech Republic – where he had by his standards a terrible failure when he visited – I as a Czech violinist would shape much of my career around the idea of him and dedicate Read more ...
Femi Elufowoju jr
I find that my experience of living as a Black man in the UK cannot help but inform the way I approach my work and never more so than with Verdi’s Rigoletto. It was because Verdi’s and his librettist Piave’s exploration of the impact of difference resonated with me so strongly that I was encouraged to take on this directing role for Opera North. It also inspired me to make Rigoletto’s disability less about an anatomical anomaly and more about the paranoia engendered by a belief that you can never fully integrate with those around you. It is that paranoia which means Rigoletto’s brain is Read more ...
theartsdesk
“Duck! Here comes another year.” We can, I think, all empathise with the motions and emotions of Ogden Nash’s new year poem, “Good Riddance, But Now What?” Before, however, we bid a troublesome year farewell, we look back at the year in fiction and share our favourites. 2021 was the year that Sally Rooney, to high anticipation, published her third novel, that Damon Galgut (third time lucky) won the Booker, and that Hillary Clinton, continuing the family legacy, wrote a thriller. Read on for more. The best novel I read this year was without doubt Jon McGregor’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There was no live theatre at the start of 2021, just a return to the world of virtual performance and streaming to which we had become well accustomed, and very quickly, too. So imagine the collective surprise come the start of this month as show after show, venue after venue, ceased performance or curtailed operations, however temporarily. Hex, Force Majeure and Moulin Rouge were three prominent end-of-year openings to push their press nights into 2022, a year shrouded as I write this by Omicron-prompted uncertainty. All one can do, and hardly for the first time these days, is hope that Read more ...
First Person: young composer Nicola Perikhanyan on a new immersive reality experience at London Wall
Nicola Perikhanyan
There's something really moving about standing in the centre of London Wall's Roman ruins and looking up at the city that has grown around it. Thinking about our past, present and future simultaneously. More than 2000 years have passed since the Romans created our city, and while much has changed there's still so much consistency in how our society exists, both the beauty and the flaws. As a civilisation, how far have things really shifted?London is a city of contrasts, it's a city you can never tire of because it's constantly evolving and every layer of its history contributes to its Read more ...
Rachel Newton
I am fortunate to be one of the musicians involved in Spell Songs, a musical companion piece to both The Lost Words and The Lost Spells by acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane and award-winning illustrator and author Jackie Morris.There have been some truly magical moments since the project began back in 2018. When we gathered to make our first album, I remember watching as Jackie created the first of the beautiful paintings that went on to capture the essence of each musician, each of us painted as a bird with our musical instrument. The first was an egret perched on a harp, my Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The energy of Antony Sher, who has died at the age of 72, was prodigious. He not only acted like a fizzing firecracker. He wrote books about his most celebrated roles, and several novels set in his native South Africa. He also wrote plays, and he painted. It was as if the stage could not contain him. The screen certainly couldn’t: Sher's acting style was so volatile, so expansive, so technically adapted for the theatrical space that aside from his well-remembered turn as Howard Kirk (pictured below), the voraciously heterosexual lecturer in Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1981), his Read more ...
India Lewis
Perhaps appropriately, when I called Pete Tong for his 10 questions I was hungover, on the phone in a park after a night at a very good party. It’s a sign of the times that things are appearing to return to a relative normal, despite the threat of Omnicron and a precipitant winter lockdown.Pete is on the cusp of releasing his new eight-track EP, to be accompanied by a live show on December 3. These live shows with the Heritage Orchestra were the genesis of the series of four releases, of which Pete Tong + Friends: Ibiza Classics is the latest. Tentatively, the nights are opening up again just Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Film festival chiefs the world over have been having a tricky time navigating the pandemic, juggling ever-changing Covid rules with an industry desperate to return to normal. Yet it’s no surprise that Estonia’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF to the locals) has managed better than most. After all, the event was borne of adversity, 25 years ago, when Estonia’s independence from the Soviet Union was inadvertently killing both its filmmaking, and its filmgoing. “It was a very critical situation for Estonians, cinema, and for myself,” recalls PÖFF founder and festival director Tiina Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It seemed impossible and yet, the other evening, while idly flicking through emails, I learned the unimaginable: Stephen Sondheim, age 91, had passed away. And very quickly by all accounts, given that he was reported to have enjoyed a Thanksgiving meal with friends just the previous day."They die but they don't," goes a lyric from Into the Woods, as my mind filled with multiple responses to the news, many of them culled from his work (and often cited by others in their own, instantaneous reactions). I, too, was "sorry/grateful" – bereft at the news and yet grateful for the work. But I suppose Read more ...
Cheryl Frances-Hoad
In the darkness my dreams are interruptedI see the blackbird in my mind and the whirring of my brain beginsScenes from the Wild begins at dawn on a spring day, at that moment between sleep and wakefulness where dreams and reality are intermingled. During the writing of this 70-minute song cycle for tenor and chamber orchestra, I'd often find ideas coming to me at this time of the day, musical fragments waking me before the blackbird had a chance to. One of the joys of setting text as evocative as Dara McAnulty and Amanda Holden's is that it often feels as if the songs compose Read more ...
Conor Mitchell
A mass, in its simplest form, is the order of prayers that are said in a religious service. It is standardised and has been for centuries, in order to create a theatrical journey that takes us through a service. Composers have always been drawn to the mass as a structure because it has an inherent drama. It draws on themes of rebirth, change, redemption.As a gay man, finding myself and being "reborn" as an authentic "me" has always been held in a state of balance with faith-based backgrounds that have been embedded in society from childhood. I reacted against this. Then I embraced it. Then I Read more ...