Features
Thomas H. Green
Interest in Britney Spears has not waned. The #FreeBritney movement, the new documentary Framing Britney Spears, and the ongoing controversy around her father’s legal conservatorship have served to put her back in the public eye over the last year. Not that she ever drifted very far away from it. She is, after all, Britney Spears. Eight years ago, theartsdesk offered an overview of her career via her videos. We now revisit it. Despite many dismissing her output as empty fluff, I argued then that “there's a rich story to be told, reflecting the paradoxical nature of the woman herself and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Theartsdesk is a labour of love. Bloody-mindedly run as a co-operative of journalists from the beginning, our obsession with maintaining a daily-updated platform for good culture writing has caused a good few grey and lost hairs over the years. But it has also been rewarding – and looking back over the 10 years of Disc of the Day reviews has been a good chance to remind ourselves of that. One thing in particular that drew me into the collective when it was founded, and has kept me going throughout, was the understanding that artistic forms would be treated with equal respect and Read more ...
mark.kidel
Writing for theartsdesk offers a freedom that I‘ve never experienced before. Encouraged by the much-missed Sue Steward and by Peter Culshaw, two of the website's founders, I started by writing solely about music – something I've done since I was a student. But very soon, I was covering theatre in Bristol, where I lived at the time, and I occasionally wrote about the visual arts, and then the cinema. What a joy, not to be bound by specialism but inspired by my enthusiasm and curiosity!With music, I’ve usually avoided going off-piste. I‘ve mostly selected albums by artists I knew, or who Read more ...
Nicky Spence
Forget the pandemic, it's Brexit which could ring the death knell for artists who are currently hoarse from begging to be taken seriously as a respected export. From Tchaikovsky to Britten, music itself has always been offered visa free but as the repercussions of Brexit are truly felt in the UK, the stories I've collected below from my singing colleagues highlight our increasingly vulnerable position as artists.Thinking back to summer jobs selling tequila on the strips of Magaluf and now selling a Schöne Müllerin to a tentatively packed auditorium in Barcelona, the annexes negotiated in the Read more ...
Sara Deborah Struntz-Timossi
Sara Deborah Struntz-Timossi is an international award-winning violinist who has toured with early music ensembles like the European Union Baroque Orchestra, Dunedin Consort and The English Concert, as well as performing across Europe as a soloist and chamber musician. She is also Artistic Director of the Spirit of Music Festival that brings music right into her east Hampshire community.Everything in my life as a musician and private person was facilitated by the mutual agreements within the EU. My studies in the UK as a German citizen were funded by reciprocal EU study regulations. Within Read more ...
Victoria Sayles
In March 2020, all my work in Australia and Sweden, where I had won contracts for several months to come, was cancelled on the day I was due to fly. Both organisations who had engaged me promptly honoured their contracts with me financially nevertheless. Thank goodness they did, because as UK tax payers and residents, my partner Roland Palmer and I have, for 10 months now, received zero help from SEISS and UC.Coincidentally, Roland (pictured below by Dan Wiebe) had a seat as the cellist and guitarist in the West End in a show that came from Broadway, New York, meeting with tremendous success Read more ...
Sophia Rahman
“Fuck business,” Boris Johnson is alleged to have said while Foreign Secretary. (He didn’t deny it). We have seen enough over the past three weeks of the impact of Brexit on fishermen, hauliers, wine merchants and a host of business people to know that he wasn’t joking.What of the impact on musicians?Some politicians and members of the public seem to believe that when we’re touring we’re on a kind of permanent holiday. We’re not. Music is one of the UK’s most successful exports. Yet the (cleaner but offensive in a whole new way) language used by Johnson in this “clarification” implies a kind Read more ...
Raffaello Morales
As this most remarkable year prepares to enter the history books, most of us who are part of the music industry have come to realise that the western world is desperately looking for solutions to an emergency of unprecedented dimensions in post-war times, and that music is not widely perceived to provide any. As unemployment rises and GDPs tumble across most advanced economies, concert halls sparsely populated with socially distanced orchestras and audiences end up being seen at most as a first-world problem of a nostalgic elite.Most governments have consistently demonstrated Read more ...
theartsdesk
"Ugh, I just feel so fat today," the woman near me in the locker room says to her friend as they get dressed after their workout. I look over – discreetly, as one does – to catch a glimpse of the grimacing side of her face as she zips up a pair of close-fitting blue jeans over a barely rounded lower abdomen, hip bones evident under taut fabric.As I sit putting on my socks, I wonder whether this woman, who has just complained of feeling fat, has even registered that there is an actual fat woman not ten feet away. While she "feels fat" as she frowns her way into her formfitting tank top and Read more ...
Adam Gatehouse
Dame Fanny Waterman was a true force of nature, in the best sense of the word. Her diminutive height belied a giant intellectual force and a steely determination to achieve the seemingly unachievable through every means she could muster.She certainly had a powerful armoury at her disposal: charm (which she possessed in spades – who has not been totally seduced by that wonderful twinkly smile, or that throaty chuckle?); an energy that continued unabated right until the end and that many of us half her age envied; an uncanny nose for musical talent, particularly among the very young; an Read more ...
Johannes Vogel
Think of the finale at a big fireworks show: the anticipation; the build up. There is nothing bigger than the Ninth Symphony. It is the climax of this year’s Beethoven celebrations. A year ago, no-one would have expected 2020 to be turned upside down in the way that it has, with so few concerts being held in Europe. Optimism is growing and what better way to bring joy into people’s lives than with a colossal event celebrating one of the greatest composers of all time?As conductor of the 123-strong Sychron Stage Orchestra for the performance, I wanted to be able to lead a concert so magical Read more ...
Susan Bullock and William Dazeley
Two of the singers in an ambitious project to film Britten’s opera based on a Henry James story – part timeless tale of repressive tradition which chimed with the composer's pacifist beliefs, part ghost story – which was originally “made for television” and premiered on the BBC, give their impressions close to the time of filming.William DazeleyIt began with an email under the heading “another crap job!” It involved traipsing around town, trawling through charity shop clothes rails in search of a slightly shabby, well-loved jacket. Then came two highly unusual costume fittings, one in a car Read more ...