Features
Electra Perivolaris
My brief for this exciting and empowering project was to compose a new choral piece for the BBC Singers, to form one movement of a composite work, bringing together seven female composers spanning the generations of womanhood. The project offered the possibility of examining what it means to be a woman living at this time, as well as the chance of viewing the world through the eyes of seven unique women, each presenting an alternative vision of life in 2020 from a female perspective, largely absent from classical composition until very recently.The project was also personally significant, Read more ...
Hassan Abdulrazzak
You are at a party having a good time when someone gives you a glass of champagne. You take one and then another and soon the party is over. You get in the car to go home and are driving along when you see a police car in the rearview mirror: how annoying! Now you are regretting that indulgent second glass but what’s done is done. The cop gives you a breathalyzer test and you are exactly at the legal limit. The cop says you have to be below that limit, and you are arrested, charged, imprisoned and deported.This is just one of the stories in my new play, The Special Relationship, based on Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The 92nd Academy Awards saved its surprises for a final stretch that saw Parasite make history as the first foreign language film ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture, pipping to the post the presumptive favourite, the World War One drama 1917 (pictured below). The top prize marked the fourth Oscar of the night for the South Korean success story, following a no less startling director trophy for Bong Joon Ho over 1917’s heavily favoured Sam Mendes, as well as prizes for best original screenplay and best international film.“I will drink until next morning,” Bong remarked to an adoring crowd Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
"Let’s make an album” is an easy thing to say but an infinitely more difficult thing to actually make happen. But at some point in early 2016 conductor Tom Hammond said it to me (or I said it to him, we can’t remember which) and four years later Not Now, Bernard & Other Stories is about to be released: four years of hard work, setbacks, stress – but also days of wonderful creativity and a sense of achievement.Although things have worked out very much for the best, almost every detail of how things have panned out is different from how we provisionally mapped it in 2016 – not least in that Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Brussels – The Cultural Guide” for 2020 is a very substantial book. It consists of 212 tightly-packed pages in a quite small font. The message is that there is indeed a lot going on culturally in Belgium’s capital city.Whereas the separatist-led government in Flanders has recently, visibly chosen to make culture into a battleground by reducing subsidies, raising the public ire of internationally known figures such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Ivo van Hove, the Brussels-Capital Region is keen for culture to be a magnet.There are all kinds of events across all art forms throughout the Read more ...
Sergey Smbatyan
We’re touring across Europe in January 2020, visiting five countries to perform eight concerts with the world-class violinist Maxim Vengerov as our leading soloist. The tour has been organized by the European Foundation for Support of Culture.As Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra, I’ve always sought to combine the eastern and western musical traditions together when programming concerts for the orchestra, whilst also presenting new music to audiences.On the European Tour, the ASSO and Vengerov will pair Bruch’s heartfelt First Violin Concerto Read more ...
Susanna Hurrell
In 2010, my best friend and I made a whimsical decision to go backpacking in India over the Easter break. I had developed an interest in Eastern philosophy through exposure to the teachings of the ancient Vedas, and through the practice of Transcendental Meditation, so I jumped on the opportunity to experience the culture that gave birth to so much wisdom and ancient knowledge.I went with stars in my eyes and was shocked to discover it was nothing like the romantic India of my imagination. It was louder, more aggressive, more heavily polluted and far more chaotic. On our first night, in a run Read more ...
Helen Wallace
When I mention Nature Unwrapped, a year-long series at Kings Place subtitled "Sounds of Life", the responses are often tinged with cynicism: "Oh, very 2020", "So, what’s the carbon footprint with all those musicians flying in?" There’s an assumption that the series is focused solely on climate change and current protest. In fact, its roots lie at a much deeper, older cultural level, and it’s all the richer for that. Ideas came from a multiplicity of different sources, not least from the female composers of Venus Unwrapped, our focus in 2019. It was when interviewing a host of these women that Read more ...
David Nice
How is it that, in the nearly 900 pages of Sondheim's collected lyrics with extensive comments Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat, with numerous special boxes celebrating other composers and lyricists, he managed to mention Jerry Herman only once, and in passing? Most perceptions of their differences overstate the case: Sondheim could write big, generous melodies as rich as Herman's, Herman's lyrics can be as literate and as laugh-out-loud funny as Sondheim's, and invariably they fit the tune just as well (chances are higher when, like these two and Cole Porter, you do both).With Herman Read more ...
David Nice
Culturally, "the little country that could" - as Estonia's ex-Prime Minister and historian Mart Laar dubbed it - punches well above its weight. While it educates the young with a musical instrument made available to every child, Estonia continues to shine through its musical leaders. Grand old man Arvo Pärt continues with his jewel-like craftsmanship, shining in a blissful reworking of an early piece in Zurich; and while fellow octogenarian Neeme Järvi may just have handed over his post as music director of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (henceforth here ERSO, Eesti Riiklik Read more ...
David Nice
It's a very big deal for musical Prague: Czechia's symphonic epic, the six tone poems that make up Smetana's Má vlast (My Homeland), launches every Prague Spring Festival at the Smetana Hall, but in the Czech Philharmonic's opulent home, the Rudolfinum, the work hasn't appeared in any of its seasons for 49 years. This is also an important test case for the orchestra's chief conductor and music director since the beginning of the 2018-19 season, St Petersburg-born Semyon Bychkov: will he give this hard-to-please audience the essence of what it expects?The answer seems to be a "yes," by and Read more ...
David Nice
He was indeed "one of the greats" among conductors, as theartsdesk's Gavin Dixon put it in reviewing Mariss Jansons' January visit to the Barbican, and remains so by virtue of his recordings. Affable and natural in person, though not hugely revealing of his work or the music he loved, at least when I interviewed him in a snowy and newly-renamed St Petersburg during sessions for Rachmaninov's Third Symphony and Symphonic Dances, he kept a steady and sometimes inspirational hand.Mastering orchestral colour was his supreme skill, with symphonic shaping a good second; thorough preparation was a Read more ...