Features
ben.ferguson
Damien Hirst this week unveiled No Love Lost, Blue Paintings among the Old Masters at the Wallace Collection. Although an exhibition of 25 new paintings by Britain's most talked-about artist might seem a change of direction, Hirst takes a different view. The new works, created between 2006 and 2008, mark the artist's return both to hands-on production and a quieter life at home. Is it the recession? Or is he getting old?BEN FERGUSON: No Love Lost is a move away from your trademark plastic pieces. What has brought about this shift to painting?DAMIEN HIRST: I have always had a romance with Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“You’ve no idea how boring everything was before I met you.” As written by Nick Hornby and spoken by Carey Mulligan in An Education, these words of gratitude come after a moment of stillness in which Jenny, Mulligan’s character, reflects on her experience as a 16-year-old schoolgirl taken on a social joyride by a 35-ish hustler, David (Peter Sarsgaard). It’s Twickenham in the early Sixties, the age of austerity's not yet over, and they’re sitting in his Bristol outside her house at night. She tells him she sometimes thinks he’s the only person who’s done anything in “this whole stupid Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A century ago Sergei Diaghilev launched the Ballets Russes, the crucible where modern lyric and dance theatre was born. Picasso and Matisse jostled against Nijinsky, Debussy and Markova, Satie and Cocteau against Fokine, Stravinsky and Pavlova. Tomorrow the spirit of Diaghilev is invoked in the premiere at Sadler's Wells, London, of four new dances by today’s leading choreographers. Russell Maliphant: AfterLight ISMENE BROWN: What object or image would you say most captures for you the spirit of Diaghilev?RUSSELL MALIPHANT: I’ve worked with a lot of photographs of Nijinsky, but also Read more ...
edward.seckerson
theartsdesk.com presents The Seckerson Tapes, a series of live and uncut audio interviews from acclaimed broadcaster Edward Seckerson. We start with Jamie Bernstein - Leonard Bernstein's eldest daughter - who has been in London launching the year-long Bernstein Project at the South Bank. Seckerson, a long-standing Bernstein devotee and disciple, sat down for a frank and open discussion about exactly who her "dad" was.This is the uncut interview.
Jasper Rees
I Found My Horn is both an autobiography of sorts and a biography of sorts. It tells the story of those phases of my life, as a schoolboy and then again aged 40, when I happened to have a French horn in my hands. But it is also an account of the instrument's long and extremely colourful history. In the 20th century that history is inextricably connected to the name of Dennis Brain, probably the greatest soloist the instrument has ever known.Although he died in a car crash more than 50 years ago, since publication many people have written to me to say that Read more ...
josh.spero
The art world has never been unself-aware – its navel is deeper and more gazed-at than almost any other art form. So what happens when you bring artists unaware of the art world into the contemplated and contemplating fold? The Museum of Everything, a new space in Primrose Hill, north-west London, which opened this week, is devoted to Outsider Art and by extension to answering this question.James Brett is the founder of the Museum of Everything and a keen collector of art made by non-traditional artists; he rejects the term 'outsider art' as being too loose and inaccurate.He sees his artists Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The sealed invitation was from the man himself: no, not Andrew Lloyd Webber (who can, as we know, work in mysterious ways) but the Phantom. Nightly (and twice on Tuesdays and Saturdays) he vanishes from his underground lair deep in the bowels of the Paris Opera House (aka Her Majesty’s Theatre) leaving only his familiar half-mask as a symbolic reminder of his continuing omnipotence on stages throughout the world.For 23 years Phantom fans have been wondering what became of him after that “final” exit? Frederick “The Jackal” Forsyth, no less, raised hopes for a sequel with his novella The Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I am not that objective about Magma. For one thing, when I saw them as a 16-year-old in the Seventies the intensity of the band caused me to have an out-of-body experience, something that has happened neither before or since. It’s the kind of thing you remember. It’s hard to formulate balanced critical opinions when you are floating up near the ceiling, looking down on your body. I met the leader and creative visionary behind the band, Christian Vander, a couple of weeks before last night’s Barbican concert, which was billed as a Celestial Mass. As someone more expressive than me put it Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Children’s theatre is rarely given serious attention by the critics and while it’s true that much of it doesn’t bear scrutiny, there are companies whose work could teach adult theatre a thing or two. Theatre-Rites is the trailblazer of those companies. For the past 14 years it has produced some extraordinarily ambitious work.Where most children's drama takes place in proscenium-arch theatres with interval ice creams on ready supply, Theatre-Rites produced Salt in a derelict salt factory in Essen. Its award-winning show, Mischief, is slightly more accessible: it is currently touring and can be Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
You may have your favourite version of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and a front-runner in many lists will be William Christie’s version with Les Arts Florissants (Christie will be performing it again with them this Saturday at the Barbican). But easily the most memorable one I have ever heard was conducted by Teodor Currentzis. In Siberia.Currentzis, whose career trajectory seems to have been vertical, is someone who completely polarises critics. I met the conductor in a basement restaurant in Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia. We were only on the starter, borshch-like soup with unnamed Read more ...
sheila.johnston
The Nouvelle Vague was always a bit of an all-boys club, but Agnès Varda counts as a good deal more than the token female of the gang. Her name might come to mind less quickly than Godard, or Truffaut, or Chabrol, when the talk turns to the fiery young turks who transformed the face of French cinema (and of world cinema, come to that). But Varda's films, with their wicked humour, their razor intelligence and effortless panache, stand proud alongside those of her peers. And her status is sealed by the release this month of her latest movie, The Beaches of Agnès, and a box set (the first of two Read more ...
anne.billson
Your friends never learn. No matter how many times you tell them you don't look on going to the cinema as a social activity, they still insist on dragging you along with them. And even though you've told them a hundred times that, after a hard day's writing about Béla Tarr the only film you can even consider watching afterwards is District 9, they still call up and say things like, "Hey, let's go and see the latest Michael Haneke," or, "What do you say to Hunger?" or, "How about that new Iranian film?"The usual arguments ensue. They say, "But Mr McCritic gave it five stars and four smiley Read more ...