Features
Adam Sweeting
Mobster roles have helped define many of America's greatest screen actors, from James Cagney to Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Thanks to his portrayal of Tony Soprano in HBO's TV masterpiece The Sopranos, James Gandolfini has made an unforgettable addition to their ranks.Though he has died, apparently of a heart attack, at the shockingly early age of 51, Gandolfini's performance across the six seasons of The Sopranos felt more like a piece of American folklore than a mere acting performance. Violent and thuggish yet also confused and conflicted, Tony Soprano was the all-powerful Read more ...
Ross Ericson
A few days ago I found myself sat in a Finsbury Park pub talking to a man who dismantled bombs for a living, who had completed two tours in Afghanistan fighting the unending war against Improvised Explosive Devices, and I will admit to being more than just a little nervous. You see, he had just read the script of my play Casualties.Casualties deals with the effect the pressures of fighting in Afghanistan have on the relationship between two members of a Counter IED team and the woman one of them has left behind. It is of course a dramatic fiction but I felt it was important for it to be based Read more ...
Sebastian Merrick
I can’t wait to check out Istanbul’s galleries in a couple of years. Already endowed with an exploding arts and design scene, with Istanbul Modern in its unique location hanging over the Bosphorus, the retrospectively-looking Santral half integrated into an Ottoman power plant, and the area around Tophane sprouting art boutiques and design outlets like nobody’s business, its creative output has just been given a huge boost.The boost comes thanks to, of all things, an ex-footballer Prime Minister who has overseen protests throughout Turkey not by trying to calm the situation but by toughing it Read more ...
joe.muggs
If anyone in British music still deserves that rinsed-to-death term "maverick" it is Battersea-born "Dr" Alex Paterson. From roadie for postpunk industrialists Killing Joke in the early Eighties, he went on to work as an A&R then - originally collaborating with The KLF's Jimmy Cauty - formed The Orb in the heat of the acid house explosion to bring the world "ambient house". Inexplicably the loose collective, which has featured Berlin producer Thomas Fehlmann as a key member, became huge, their dub basslines and loony-tunes samples somehow encapsulating the psychedelic oddness of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Almost a decade on from their debut album, Tunng’s founding folktronic ethos no longer carries the shock of the new, but the sprawling and vaguely mystical collective continue to make ever more beautiful and interesting sounds. Turbines, their fifth album, is released on Full Time Hobby next Monday. To get in the mood, readers of theartsdesk can catch a world exclusive eyeful of the video for their new single “The Village”. Let us know what you think.
Jasper Rees
Iain Banks, who has died at the age of 59 only two months after revealing that he was suffering from terminal cancer, was a leading purveyor of contemporary fiction. Iain M Banks was eminent in the field of science fiction. Iain "Spanks The Plank" Banks, however, was less well known as the composer of about 60 rock songs from the palaeolithic period, 1972-75.An explanation. Banks's Espedair Street is one of the better British novels about pop music. It chronicles the rise, not to mention the fall, of Frozen Gold, a Glaswegian student pub band who go global when budding writer Daniel "Weird" Read more ...
Gareth Davies
As we approach the end of what feels like a long season of concerts, I cannot think of a more satisfying way to finish than with Bernard Haitink on the podium. All conductors have different styles, whether dancelike, quivering, rude, tormented genius, or extended baton (others are available). Bernard is one of a precious few who don’t really seem to do anything much when they stand in front of an orchestra.Let me clarify that straight away: less is more. I am positive that as Haitink has grown older, as with Sir Colin, economy of effort has influenced his conducting style; but with an Read more ...
natalie.wheen
If you look at a map of Russia, you will find the city of Perm just west of the spine of the Ural Mountains which divides European Russia from Asia, about 720 miles north-east of Moscow. Just under two hours away by plane, you only understand the reality of its remoteness going there by Russian train: 24 hours’ slow chug through endless forests of silver birch, pines and bog, only occasionally enlivened by the startling yellow of kingcups. You feel yourself being translated into a different dimension.In Russian cultural memory, it’s a symbolic place: the faraway country, northern, pagan, a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“My generation all were steeped in Bollywood.” Meera Syal, Wolverhampton born and bred, is recalling the cinematic influences of her youth. “It was our major link to India and was much more current than trying to make a phone call. You did feel that, though you were so far away, you were watching the same movies as your cousins.”We’ve moved on a bit since the 1970s. Bollywood is now much closer to the British cultural mainstream, helped along by entertainments as diverse as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams (co-written by Syal, pictured below) and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which Read more ...
Gareth Davies
New York City, the movie star, is so familiar now even to those who have never visited that it’s difficult to imagine the impact on the LSO players of arriving there for the first time. As they stood on the deck of the Baltic, the Statue of Liberty must have been a welcome sight after 10 days at sea. First impressions of the city were not entirely favourable: before they could get to their hotel, the entire orchestra with its baggage, instruments, and music had to be checked through customs. The timpanist Charles Turner notes:Awake about 3 or 4 am. Still dark. The engines are stopping and it Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Which came first: the performance or the platform? Writers used to say that festivals were never part of the deal. They’ve long since stopped now that the publishing industry has changed and the public demand has grown for authors who don’t simply tell stories, but sell them too. Hence Cheltenham, hence Oxford, hence Ilkley, hence Dartington. Hence, above all, Hay, which last night completed its 26th year. The nowadays global brand among literary festivals has 11 other homes around the world, from some of which theartsdesk has reported (next stop Kells in Ireland). But Hay in Hay-on-Wye is Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Sitting in the concert hall in Dresden’s Albertinum – the city’s modern art gallery – is a paradoxical experience. You are indoors, but faced on all sides by external walls, framed by Dresden’s typical bourgeois 19th-century architecture but looking up to a giddyingly contemporary, asymmetric ceiling. Neon-lit signs cover one wall, while the other gives way to a gallery of classical sculpture. Confrontations between old and new, history layered so tightly that you can barely peer between the levels – that’s the essence of Dresden, a palimpsest-city at the political and cultural heart of Read more ...