Features
David Nice
José Mourinho is Setúbal’s most famous son. Non-Portuguese readers are not expected to know the two other celebrities most feted by this extraordinary port city on the estuary of the River Sado, with miles of sandy beaches opposite where a school of dolphins resides and the lush national park of the Arrábida mountain range just to the west. Luísa Todi, the Portuguese mezzo who graced the court of Catherine the Great, gives her name to the lovely garden avenue which is the city’s most relaxed hub; poet Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage’s statue looks over the central square in his honour (“hardly Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
You are or maybe wish you were at Glastonbury this weekend. Not me. I last went six years ago and it’s just too big for me. And you need about four different passes to get backstage should you have a good or a bad reason to get there. Too bureaucratic. However, I was, as ever, more than glad to be at the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, which is more human in scale, sociable and, at times, transcendent. This year was the 20th edition. I have gone as many times as I possibly could.A couple of decades back, one autumnal morning in my flat in North London my fax machine juddered into Read more ...
Frederic Wake-Walker
La finta giardiniera is about seven characters in search of love. They are all pretending to some extent – they are not being truthful to themselves. It’s a classic Mozartian conceit which comes back in Così fan tutte in particular but also in Le nozze di Figaro – that, in order to love someone, you need to know yourself. Finta is about these seven characters coming to some level of understanding by the end, and therefore being able to love each other.The title character, the “fake garden girl”, is called Sandrina, but that’s only a made-up name. She’s actually called Violante. Before the Read more ...
Robin Soans
A still Sunday morning in late October… the sky monotone grey… my friend and I are on a fact-finding mission in Jackson, Mississippi. We drive to the outskirts of the city, take a left onto Hanging Moss Road, and see ahead of us, in isolation among the pines, the Word and Worship church where Bishop Jeffrey Stallworth will be conducting morning service. For the next two hours I listen to the words and music which will, five years later, form the basis of my thinking for Perseverance Drive.The two most vivid memories of that service were the preaching, which struck me as being retrogressive Read more ...
David Schneider
When Dostoyevsky was asked why he wrote Crime and Punishment he famously replied, “To further my career and get shortlisted for book prizes.” He didn’t, of course. I made that up. But what artist/writer/actor creates a piece of art/writing/acting without at least a bit of shallow consideration for their career? (What?! Just me?) The opening of my play Making Stalin Laugh at JW3 in London has been a joyous reminder that there’s so much more to writing than getting good reviews and checking the number of Twitter followers you have once an hour. Not that I do that, of course. No. Definitely not. Read more ...
Ian Knight
I can remember the exact moment that Zulu grabbed me. I was seven at the time and watched the film at some now-defunct widescreen cinema in Brighton early in 1964, probably just a few weeks after it was released.I had been intrigued by the posters spread on hoardings around my nearby hometown. They depicted small figures locked in battle at the foot of the gigantic letters making up the title, which stood, Ozymandias-like, in the African veldt. The movie promised to be right up my street, a classic Boys’ Own adventure – although I can’t remember now if I badgered my parents to take me to see Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Here at theartsdesk we still receive the occasional missive from readers on several continents incensed at the BBC's axing of Zen in February 2011, a decision taken by then-controller of BBC One Danny Cohen. Zen didn't get a mention in Cohen's article in Wednesday's Times, entitled "Never mind the box-set brigade, let's celebrate British drama", but he managed to plug plenty of more recent BBC drama productions (and a couple from ITV, in a token attempt at even-handedness). It was as if a long list of titles would be enough to demonstrate the truth of his argument that British TV drama is Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Transylvania in Northern Romania remains yoked to the memory of Vlad the Impaler, the ruthless individual immortalised as Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel, but, on a sunny midsummer week in early June, the mood was anything but stygian in Cluj, the region's capital and the country's second-largest city.Cold War brutalism sits alongside elaborate Austro-Hungarian wedding cake fancies in this elegant, eclectic, battered melting pot, where a constant chain of arts festivals is to be found pretty much throughout the year (Cluj is currently contending for the crown of European City of Culture in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the midst of ferment as the arts world faces fast-shrinking public subsidy, Sir John Tusa, former managing director of the BBC World Service and the Barbican Arts Centre, publishes this week a brisk new book that urges arts and politicians to reject the emotive clichés and lazy token battles and focus on what matters. In Pain in the Arts, Tusa urges that both sides take personal responsibility for an essential part of human life.His title, beyond the dubious pun, refers to the very real, and feared, pain in the long-established arts world right now, caused by current government pressure Read more ...
Matthew Wright
New Orleans. New York. Kansas City. Chicago. These are the places where the soul of jazz breathes free. In London, you’d head to Soho. Dalston, or Camden; none of these places have a blade of grass to share between them. Jazz must be one of the most determinedly urban genres of music. Even rap these days has flirted with country music. (Look up Spearhead’s entertaining “Wayfaring Stranger” if you don’t believe me.)So when I heard about an Austrian festival subtitled “Jazz am Bauernhof”, which literally means jazz on the farm, or jazz in the farmyard, the very idea of reconciling this musical Read more ...
David Nice
Richard Strauss was born in Munich 150 years ago today. Christian Thielemann is celebrating the fact by conducting the Staatskapelle Dresden in the juiciest of all-Strauss operatic potpourris, a festive concert to be held in the city’s glorious Semperoper. What wouldn’t I give to hear Anja Harteros, alongside Anne Schwanewilms the loveliest of Strauss sopranos, and chaste nymph Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel in a peerless operatic epilogue? In fact the Dresden Music Festival, my host, ended yesterday and seems to function as a separate entity with its own period-instrument orchestra. I Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Sprawling over the East End of London for the next thirteen days and boasting an illuminating line-up of new voices, retrospectives and debate in its 13th year, the East End Film Festival ensures no cinematic rock is left unturned with its bold programming choices.Monte Hellman’s controversial Cockfighter gets a rare outing at Red Gallery, a grand Masonic Temple is home to a weekend of macabre cinema and the opening night gala proves the festival’s dedication to championing filmmakers they believe in with the world premiere of Ross Clarke’s first feature, New Orleans-set drama, Dermaphoria. Read more ...