Features
Matthew Wright
Norwegian-Danish singer Live Foyn Friis (for English-speaking readers, Live is her first name) has released six albums, and leads several different ensembles, scattered intriguingly across the divide between jazz and pop. Her voice is recognisably Nordic, with an ethereal quality that expresses yearning, in particular. In this respect she evokes the tradition of Björk; yet she also loves Billie, Ella and Frank Sinatra and is capable of a more strident, swinging, jazz-infused expression, too. Originally trained as a saxophonist, she came to singing later, and was immediately struck with the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Rachid Taha, rockeur and provocateur, died this week of a heart attack. He was one of the last of the rebel rockers, a devotee of both The Clash and Oum Khalsoum. He brought rock and Algerian music together in a fabulously invigorating way. And while many younger rockers do yoga and sip herbal tea, he was committed to the Rimbaudian derangement of the senses and was great fun to get trashed with - I spent a few memorable all-nighters with him in Paris. Apart from general sadness, reactions range from those mourning the loss of someone so young, at 59, and those impressed that Read more ...
Jeanie O'Hare
I admit it took me a while to give myself permission to do this project. We English are very squeamish about altering Shakespeare. Our cousins in Germany thrive on radical undoings of our scared son, but we cross our arms and say no. I started thinking about making this play when I was at the RSC ten years ago. Queen Margaret, aka Margaret of Anjou and wife to Henry VI, thumped me in the heart as I watched Katy Stephens's peformance in Michael Boyd's History Cycle (the three Henry VI plays and Richard III). She then nagged at me every day as I nodded to the enormous photo of Peggy Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sir Peter Hall had no ordinary life, as might be expected from the director who more than any other defined the British theatre of the last half of the 20th century. The same can be said of the unforgettable two-part send-off he received exactly a year on from his death in 2017, age 86. Yesterday's events coupled a properly weighty memorial service at Westminster Abbey with a looser, larkier afternoon knees-up at the National Theatre, his onetime home. Both occasions felt absolutely true to Hall’s capacious and protean spirit.The midday gathering at Westminster found a steady stream of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Fenella Fielding - “one of the finest female impersonators in the business,” joked Eric Morecambe – has died at the age of 90. Most actors of such a great vintage tend to be forgotten, but not Fielding. Last year she celebrated her big birthday with a memoir. Its alluring title Do You Mind If I Smoke? was lifted from that succulent scene in Carry On Screaming! Playing a femme fatale draped on a divan, Fielding seemed to exude sultry clouds of steam from her very pores.The memoir brought her a great deal of publicity. She did book events, she read the readers’ news on Radio 4’s PM, she was Read more ...
theartsdesk
Discreetly poking his camera through one of the red curtains around the Albert Hall, chief Proms photographer Chris Christodoulou gets the action shots others would kill for. They're of orchestras, a mixed roster of soloists and what this year remains the mostly male world of conducting; of the five women conductors originally scheduled, the most electrifying to date, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, had to take maternity leave.Many more are coming up through the ranks at last, though, and meanwhile there was much to celebrate in a more conspicuous show of Read more ...
Steven Eastwood
Most of us have very little knowledge of the process of life ending, physically and emotionally, until it comes suddenly into our own experience. Dying remains taboo. We don’t talk about dying, we don’t teach it in schools, and yet this event is as natural and everyday as birth. Having been one of the central subjects for art for a millennium or more, death has come to be one of the least broached. The images we have are medicalised or euphemistic. All of the beauty, grace and candour of death visible in classical painting is gone. So too is the representation of our very creatureliness, that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The terrace beside the restaurant in Cologne’s Stadtgarten – the city park – is heaving. Agreeably so. A bar and a food counter facing onto it are fringed by rows of long tables. Overhanging trees unite in a canopy suggesting this might be forest clearing. And despite the amount of people of all ages and despite the amount of the local Kölsch beer and the Riesling you’d expect in Rhine-straddling city flying around, the atmosphere is relaxed.On the terrace’s bandstand, Tigger-ish Berlin band Champyons bounce through a mix of electro-inclined pop and guitar-focused songs suggesting a punked-up Read more ...
David Nice
If only Liszt had started at the end of his Byron-inspired opera Sardanapalo. The mass immolation of Assyrian concubines might have been something to compare with the end of Wagner's Götterdämmerung. Instead he only sketched out the first act, complete until nearly the end, and the inevitable comparisons with the Wagner of the late 1840s are not unfavourable by any means. This is no for-the-hell-of-it resurrection, but a unique, high-octane fusion of Italian opera – the forms of cavatina and cabaletta still traceable – with the through-composed dream of Wagner's music-of-the-future, from the Read more ...
David Nice
Like the Proms, but over a more concentrated time-span, in a much better concert hall and with a swankier audience paying a good deal more, the Lucerne Festival offers a summer parade of the world's greatest orchestras and conductors night after night. Hardly anywhere else, though, offers a home-assembled band of top players quite like the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, even if it will never be the same without Claudio Abbado. And this year, following his extraordinary Easter Festival conducting masterclasses just after his 89th birthday, Bernard Haitink resumed his very special rapport with the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
This year’s nominees represent the wealth of innovative activity that makes British art, craft and design fresh and exciting. Artists and makers dominate the shortlist, and rightly so, but curators, an educator, and a journalist reflect the importance of public engagement with the visual arts, and the many ways in which this is achieved.Nominated for her most recent book, The Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century, Georgina Adams (pictured below)is a rare voice of scepticism in art journalism, her book a landmark exposé of the murky connections between art Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Theatre for children can often be dismissed – a box to tick for parents who want to keep up with cultural practices; a job for actors who haven't quite made it in the mainstream; theatre that mums and dads want to see that works for their little ones, too.It's actually quite rare to find theatre that works purely for children – something that excites, inspires and invigorates on their level without worrying too much about the olds. But at bOing! International Family Festival, contemporary dance, conceptual theatre, live art installations, classical and modern music, film and storytelling Read more ...