festivals
Katie Colombus
For anyone who suffers from FIFOMO (festival-induced-fear-of-missing-out), Standon Calling is ideal. It’s like a pocket-sized version of Latitude, borrowing the Big Top and the mix of modern music with nostalgic pop acts, or Wilderness, borrowing the purple domed stage, the need for hot tubs and gastronimical treats. It has the feel of an epic house party, being set in the grounds of a 16th-century manor house 30 miles north of London.An area called "The Lawn" is home to Hartbeeps who hold daily baby raves in front of a yurt for nappy changing, and around the corner from a swimming pool where Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Camp Bestival, curated by DJ Rob da Bank, has taken place at Lulworth Castle in Dorset since 2008. It’s now an institution of sorts, rammed to the gills with ageing ravers pulling around colourfully decorated trollies and paying over the odds for “reimagined Eritrean street food” and the like. It is, as I’ve written many times before, the Waitrose of festivals but that’s no bad thing. An easy-to-ridicule, surface middle-classness masks a haven where parents and children can enjoy the wild, colourful, surrealist carnival of festival-land together, as well as a plethora of good music. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Nestling amid the area in the woods where they have the gong baths and the kora-makers and back massages was an art installation by Graeme Miller - basically, you lay back on a trolley while an intern/elf pushed you through the woods while you ponder the underside of leaves and the sky. WOMAD does give you a different perspective anyway - a welcome respite from post-Brexit, pre-Trump xenophobia - and as a live celebration of global musical treasures it remains unmatched.There was a sense, though, of things you had taken for granted, having added relevance. When the virtuoso Vishwa Moham Bhatt Read more ...
David Nice
Where would you go to hear the most electrifying and collegial orchestral playing in the world? It used to be Lucerne while Claudio Abbado was alive. Now that the Lucerne Festival Orchestra has become like any classy superband, the answer is Pärnu in the south of Estonia.It's a modest town of nearly 40,000 inhabitants, but its numbers treble in the summer, with visitors flocking to the eight-mile, south-facing white sand beach and the wooden villas in beautiful parkland (David Oistrakh and Shostakovich travelled westwards to Pärnu for their summer holidays). It also boasts a 900-seater Read more ...
Martin Longley
The Montréal International Jazz Festival's 37th edition presented its accustomed surfeit of gigs, covering the complete range from concert hall spectaculars to small club sessions. A large part of this, the globe's biggest jazzfest, is the massive-scale freebie shows on various outdoor stages. The festival completely takes over Montréal's downtown centre, which just happens to be this French-speaking city’s cultural area. These streets and plazas are already full of venues, from theatres to clubs, with a wide range of audience capacities to suit both the mainstream and the maverick.As if the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Familiar words pepper the lead item on the 9am radio news: "Brexit", "Theresa May", "Boris Johnson". Yet the bulletin is delivered in the first language of the 49,000-population Faroe Islands. The self-governing region of Denmark may be a remote cluster of 18 North Atlantic islands, but the Britain-watching contagion has spread to a place which has never been a member of the EU. Denmark is. The Faroes aren't.The Faroes do it their way. How much so is apparent at the annual G! Festival, hosted by Syðrugøta. At the west end of the Gøtuvik fjord, the village of 416 looks classically Nordic and Read more ...
Richard Bratby
It’s the kitchen of a Thai-Chinese-Vietnamese fast food restaurant. The onstage orchestra wear sweatbands and T-shirts, and a red work surface stretches across the stage. As the four chefs take the stage, the clatter of pans and knives is first noise, then a rhythm, then an overture of sizzling, clanging, chopping and hissing sounds that spreads throughout the whole orchestra. Vegetables are sliced, pans brandished and, sitting out front, as an escaped slice of courgette rolls wonkily downstage, is a young Chinese cook, wailing with toothache. No question, Peter Eötvös knows how to create an Read more ...
David Kettle
Even without any particular pomp or focus for celebration, the 70th Edinburgh International Film Festival has felt like a particularly strong and broad-ranging one, with a programme so big it was a struggle to take it all in.Opening golf drama Tommy’s Honour (reviewed by Demetrios Matheou last week) may have failed to thrill, but there’s been plenty more to entertain and provoke. And as the EIFF heads towards its closing gala – with the Gillies MacKinnon’s remake of Whisky Galore! on Sunday evening – it’s inevitably time for the festival to reveal its award winners.The Michael Powell Award Read more ...
joe.muggs
A few beers down, in the middle of a crowd listening to music you love, you tend not to think of the latest news story as your highest priority. But Britain's relationship to Europe weighs heavy on the mind these days, and when the news of the violent attack on Jo Cox started filtering through as we danced under the Catalan sun on Thursday afternoon, it threw the nature of Sónar festival into relief.Unlike a lot of international music events, which can often be little more than monocultural awaydays for Brits and/or Germans seeking hedonism in the sun, Sónar is both proudly reflective of its Read more ...
james.woodall
The Holland Festival is one of the greats. It has a British director, the articulate Ruth Mackenzie, formerly of the Chichester Festival and the cultural Olympiad, now into her second year. It’s the same age as Edinburgh and Avignon – 70 in 2017 – but not as well known, though it should be. “We must,” Mackenzie says, “seriously punch above our weight. And we do.” The festival was founded after the Second World War on, comparable to the Scottish and French ones, principles of reconciliation and presenting the best productions of the human spirt.Every June many opulent, and some rather more Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
To anyone who says that you can’t make a great film about golf, a film which is funny, sexy, and rousing, I have just two words; sadly, for those who attended the opening night of the Edinburgh Film Festival this week, those words are Tin Cup.That film was made in 1996 and starred Kevin Costner – the king of sports movies, in his goofy prime. The one that kicked off Edinburgh on Wednesday, Tommy’s Honour, has plenty of integrity and good intentions, as it celebrates a Scotsman regarded as the grandfather of golf, and his son, who was one of its first stars; it also confirms the movie star Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Found Festival 2016 got a couple of things right. The choice of music-makers was solid and the broad cross-section of friendly people who attended was admirable. But, unfortunately, everything else went wrong. Worst of all was the behaviour of the security team who, by the end of the day, had become hi-viz-jacketed herds of power-dizzy bullies, marauding around the site.The idea of the festival, born of a south London club night and in its fourth year, was to fill Brockwell Park, from 11am until 9pm, with five marquee tents of underground techno, disco and house, plus a sixth outdoor stage Read more ...