Features
Edgaras Montvidas
As a child back in Lithuania, I always wanted to be an actor, but opera has taken me in a different direction – though recently it has opened up doors for the big screen and TV. This month Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail is being beamed live from Glyndebourne Festival into cinemas across the globe with simultaneous streaming live online to some 100,000 people (more than would attend the whole summer festival). Earlier this year, I was filming for a forthcoming documentary – La Traviata: Love, Death and Divas. In both, I’m singing opera but in terms of acting, the screen, Read more ...
David Nice
If this were only the usual international festival – and it’s still a big “only” where Bergen’s flagship fortnight of theatre, dance, art and music is concerned – it might not be easy to justify swanning off to one of the most beautifully situated cities in the world. What drew me in the programme, though, were two unique and probably unrepeatable concerts put together by local boy made more than good Leif Ove Andsnes. Norway's most feted pianist worldwide keeps being showered with international awards but who now, with three young children to think of, wants to concertise less, spend more Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
More than anywhere else, the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music has been the place where I have gone annually for most of the last 20 years to retune my ears, to find inspiration and connections, and to discover new international music. For fans, it was always more than a mere music festival; there was a visionary, idealistic element. The founder, Faouzi Skali, is a Sufi who started the festival as a response to the first Gulf war and invited musicians, thinkers and practitioners from all religious persuasions as a counterpoint to extremism and intolerance elsewhere. That mission’s importance Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Reggie Watts has a few things to say about Norway. In Bergen to play Natjazz, the annual jazz festival, he’s concerned about the local predilection for fish soup. Be careful, he warns, it can be dangerously hot. Then there are trolls and the Norwegian crispbread knekkebrød, which is especially impressive as it can keep fillings dry. Sandwiches can be eaten in the rain – and it rains in Bergen. A lot. Watts is fascinated by the countryside cabins Norwegians take off to in the summer. Most of all though, the word Norway distracts him. It’s this close to “no way.” Don’t worry about your country’ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a lot of Seventies revivalism in the ether. Fleetwood Mac are back as a famous five after many years asunder. 10cc have on at the Albert Hall, although one astutely remarked that they really should have been billed 2.5cc. In When Pop Ruled My Life, the recent BBC Four documentary about fandom, it was lear that the Bay City Rollers are still very much a going concern. And this week it was announced that three titans of glamrock would stomp once again on British boards. They include The Rubettes, a band coyly billing themselves Mud 2 and – holy of holies – The Sweet.The Sweet were one Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Sticky Fingers is the Stones’ defining album, a record that preserves the band in all its ragged, outlaw rock'n'roll glory. It captured them, too, between worlds of their own making, as the exploratory Sixties solidified into the excessive Seventies, Mick Jagger turned left into the first-class jet-set life, and Keith Richards turned the other way, into an image-defining drug addiction, scoring his mythos as permanently as a prison tattoo. Some things never fade away.In pretty well every aspect – music, image, cover, line-up – Sticky Fingers represents the Rolling Stones at their peak, on the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Hottest tickets for seats at the Proms have probably all gone already. Yet the beauty of it is that so long as you start queueing early enough you can always get to hear the greatest, or rather the most popular, artists, for £5 in the Arena which is of course easily the best place to be acoustically in the notoriously unpredictable Royal Albert Hall. And don’t say you’re too old to stand: a 91-year-old student of mine – her name, Grace Payne, needs celebrating – has been doing it, with a few breaks overseas, since 1947, and she’ll be there again this summer.First reactions to the Read more ...
Paul Gent
Dresden is slowly opening up to the world. All but destroyed by British bombing in the Second World War, locked away inside Communist East Germany for 40 years, it is now becoming a tourist honeypot. On a warm day in May, you can see the snap-happy groups of Japanese and Germans trailing behind their guides, marvelling at the imposing Baroque buildings in the Old Town. You see them queuing patiently for the extraordinary museums and poring over the the restaurant menus in the city’s huge squares. One of the local specialities is potato soup, but then nothing’s perfect.There are buskers on Read more ...
elaine.lipworth
B B King was the greatest blues guitarist of the age. Many contemporary rockers credit him as a formidable inspiration, from Mick Jagger to Eric Clapton to Bono. But when I met him in 2006, the then 83-year-old musician had a different perspective on his ability. "I don't think it's true," he says with a shrug. "A lot of kids tease me when they see me, they start to bow. I'm not trying to stop them. I think I'm a pretty good musician, I don't think I'm the best, that's all. I just do what I do my way."When I point out that he's often hailed as the second-most gifted guitarist of all time, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Composer Gavin Higgins and choreographer Mark Baldwin’s Dark Arteries is billed by Rambert as “the world’s first brass band dance work” and has its premiere this week at Sadler’s Wells. Higgins was born into a family of brass players in the Forest of Dean, later studying at Chetham’s School and the Royal Northern College. He spoke to theartsdesk in between rehearsals last week.GRAHAM RICKSON: How important was music-making when you were growing up?GAVIN HIGGINS: It was part of my life. Literally everyone in my family was in the local brass band. Of my two grandads, one conducted and the other Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The great Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, renowned for her deathless Dying Swan and a performing career that lasted more than 60 years, died suddenly of a heart attack at home in Munich at the weekend, aged 89.To the West she epitomised the Bolshoi ballerina in style, fierily expressive, virtuosic, larger than life, but she was also an unclassifiable individualist who challenged Soviet norms.Her longevity was legendary. Dismissed from the Bolshoi aged 65, she simply carried on dancing on pointe, even longer than the tireless Margot Fonteyn and her Cuban counterpart, Alicia Alonso (who at Read more ...
theartsdesk
Basketball doesn’t often stray onto the arts pages. Cinema pays the occasional visit. White Men Can’t Jump starred Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as a pair of slamdunking hustlers. Hoop Dreams followed two inner-city college kids in Chicago as they tried to turn pro. The hero of Almodovar’s Live Flesh was a wheelchair-bound basketball player embodied by Javier Bardem. But what about theatre?A bouncing ball is an unruly prop, so basketball (like other ball games) tends not to trespass onto the stage. A new play by spoken word artist Inua Ellams changes all that. The Spalding Suite explores Read more ...