Features
fisun.guner
I’ll admit, there's a scene that made me well up during the excellent Marina Abramović biopic The Artist is Present. If you've seen it you’ll know the scene I mean – it’s where Ulay, Abramović’s former partner, in art and in life, takes the seat opposite her on the last day of her MoMA marathon performance. And the tears come, hers and his and then ours, and she takes his hands, and then more tears. Oh god.Abramović and Ulay did some powerful work in the Seventies. As a couple they gave expression, in a highly wrought, often florid fashion, to the psychological violence that often bubbles Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
If the Hungarian State Opera wanted to demonstrate that it is now back on top form, it could not have chosen a better way than this six-opera celebration of Richard Strauss’s 150th anniversary. Mahler conducted here before moving to Hamburg, Vienna and New York. Filled with new ambition, after a contractual shake-up under General Manager Szilveszter Ókovács, Budapest displays revitalised strength and amazing depth in all departments.The 2014 Strauss showpiece was a national premiere: Hungary’s belated first staging of Die Frau ohne Schatten, the fairy-tale opera with which Strauss and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Sitting outside Mrs Fitzherbert’s, the pub named after George IV’s notorious mistress, nursing a pilsner top and a packet of peanuts on a sunny Saturday afternoon, the world is a benevolent place with the Brighton Festival (and Fringe) at the heart of the fun. My daughters, aged 11 and 16, and girlfriend, age unknown, are with me (fizzy lemon, Coca Cola and pilsner, no top, respectively), and in front of the retina-scorching white, grandiose columns of the Unitarian Church opposite a group of men perform acapella songs.We can’t stay long, as we have an appointment a few yards down New Road at Read more ...
caspar.gomez
It’s certainly different from the Glastonbury shuttle, I’ll tell you that. I’m sitting with Finetime on the minibus that takes festival-goers from Lewes Station to the opening day of Glyndebourne Opera Festival 2014.Finetime’s looking very much the peacock today, a suit of many colours and he’s even wearing an earring with a blue feather. I clank my Asahi beer against his.“The first of too many,” I say.All around us the full minibus is silent but not unfriendly. Opera people do anticipation differently from us rockers and ravers. A man of 50-ish in a kilt sits down next to us, smiles and asks Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At last night’s Eurovision Song Contest, host country Denmark submitted “Cliché Love Song”, a weedy Bruno Mars-a-like designed to ensure they did not win for a second year running. It came ninth. While understandable that Danish national broadcaster DR would try to duck the expense of staging the extravaganza in Copenhagen again in 2015, they could have displayed some imagination by choosing an entrant that was certainly not a winner but had some worth. Instead of Basim wth his paper-thin “Cliché Love Song”, Aalborg’s Get Your Gun would have made a grand choice to showcase Denmark in fine Read more ...
David Nice
Poised when I met him six weeks ago between 40th anniversary celebrations of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, of which he has been a shaping chief conductor for the past five years and putting his new music directorship of Glyndebourne into action, Robin Ticciati hardly seemed like a man in positions of power, more an idealistic youth with a touch of the dreamer softening a powerful intellect.He was much the same, in short, as when I’d first encountered him sharing a 2009 Glyndebourne study day on Janáček's Jenůfa (Ticciati holding the score below) in the then-26 year old’s last Read more ...
Brian Dickie
I started work at Glyndebourne in 1962 at the age of 20 and remained there for 27 years, for the last seven of which I was General Administrator. Throughout that period George was Chairman of Glyndebourne Productions, and my ultimate boss. George was six and a half years older than me, and had already been Chairman for three years in 1962. He was still working full time at the Gulbenkian Foundation and he and Mary, with their first child Hector, were living during the week in their Godfrey Street house in London. They were, however, in Glyndeboune every weekend. So George was a regular Read more ...
Hofesh Shechter
On a lovely sunny Saturday morning the Children’s Parade was a really amazing start to things. The Brighton Festival team, the mayor and I started the parade, leading from the front for a few streets, then we went and watched from the side, wonderful, it made the hairs on my neck stand up. That evening was the first performance of my show Sun which opened the Festival and we had a big party afterwards. Not only that but it was my 39th birthday so it was a triple celebration. I didn’t feel rough on Sunday, though. I had a good amount of champagne but I’m still young - not 40 yet.On Sunday we Read more ...
fisun.guner
Maria Lassnig, the Austrian figurative painter best known for her emotionally complex self-portraits, died yesterday aged 94. She was virtually unknown in the UK until her solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 2008. In a compact survey which focused on recent work one self-portrait - You or Me, 2005 (main picture) - attracted the greatest attention. Here the artist, aged 86, wears a startled expression while pointing a gun at her temple and one straight at the viewer. It is a promise of mutual destruction utterly alive with the presence of the artist. Lassnig’s self-portraits, in Read more ...
Roger Montgomery
Horn concertos don't make frequent appearances in the standard concert repertory and when they do it will usually be a work by Mozart or Richard Strauss. It wouldn't be entirely true to say that horn players feel keenly the lack of a serious core of works such as that available to pianists, string players and singers. This is partly because of the wealth of sumptuous orchestral writing which allows the horn to shine from the back of the orchestra at key moments without requiring it to carry the entire performance, and also owing to the small number of significant solo works by some great Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Bob Hoskins had one of those faces that was equally adapted to boyish bonhomie and something altogether more threatening. It helped explain the length and variety and sheer unexpectedness of his career. He could scowl for England, which is why he was so horribly convincing as a gangland boss in The Long Good Friday. But he also exuded vulnerability and even innocence in his Oscar-nominated turn as the henchman who falls for a prostitute in Mona Lisa.Meanwhile his precision skills as a physical actor were a fine foil for the curvaceous Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? – though he had Read more ...
Matthew Sharp
Shakespeare's ubiquitous “planetary influence” is well-documented. As Stephen Marche points out in How Shakespeare Changed Everything, not much from our sex lives to the assassination of Lincoln remains untouched. And, of course, there's the language. You may think that what you are reading has more rhyme than reason, be madness (though there is method in it) or amount to nothing more than a wild goose chase. It may be Greek to you, make your hair stand on end or set your teeth on edge. It goes without saying that brevity is the soul of wit and that comparisons are odious, so why does he lay Read more ...