obituary
Jasper Rees
Henry Woolf's place in theatre history is small but significant, a bit like Woolf was himself. Until his death on November 11, at the age of 91, he was the last survivor of a gang who made friends at Hackney Down grammar school in the 1930s. The most famous member of the group was Harold Pinter. The Room, Pinter’s first play, was more or less commissioned by him.“Commissioned is an awfully grand word,” Woolf told me when I first met him in 2000. In 1957 he was a postgraduate at Bristol when the new drama department was looking for one-act plays. Pinter was a freshly married actor, toiling Read more ...
theartsdesk
Few musicians get to stage-manage a dignified departure from the world. Among his last compositions, Richard Strauss set a poem by Eichendorff depicting an old couple looking into the sunset and asking “is this perhaps death?”, and towards the end he told his daughter-in-law that “dying is just as I composed it in [the symphonic poem] Death and Transfiguration". That great Dutchman Bernard Haitink, a peerless interpreter of Strauss’s music, knew when to retire: he withdrew from official engagements not long after his 90th birthday in March 2019, marked by two concerts with the London Symphony Read more ...
theartsdesk
Few singers really change your life. Norman Bailey did that for me [writes David Nice of theartsdesk]. The occasion wasn't my first experience of a Wagner opera, but it was the first time I'd been to a performance of his great human comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, during the early 1980s on one of Scottish Opera's visits from Glasgow to the vast barn of Edinburgh's Playhouse.The central figure who slowly steps into the limelight is an operatic version of the real-life 16th century poet-philosopher and shoemaker Hans Sachs. Act Three changes from extrovert comedy and lyricism to Read more ...
David Nice
I only saw Christa Ludwig twice live in concert, but those appearances epitomise her incredible dramatic and vocal rage as well as her peerless artistry in everything she did. The first event was Schubert’s Winterreise with pianist Charles Spencer at the Southbank Centre, at a time when it was less common for women to take on the role of the heavy-hearted wayfarer: the intensity still resonates. The second time was when she played the one-buttocked, easily-assimilated Old Lady in Bernstein’s Candide, conducted by the composer in his last Barbican concerts: the joie de vivre went beyond the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Each generation is given an actress who can do everything – be intimate with the camera but also coat a back wall in honey from 100 paces. There was Judi Dench, and then there was Imelda Staunton, both loved by all. Helen McCrory – who has died at the age of 52 – was the next in line, and she was destined to be as great for as long.Even in her late twenties, when she was barely known, she was already and obviously different. She had a face that seemed prematurely mature and wise. She didn’t look like anyone else, nor sound it. Her voice was a husky instrument that moved between Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ronald Harwood, who has died at the age of 85, was best known for his play about tending to the needs of the larger-than-life actor-manager Donald Wolfit. The Dresser, adapted by Harwood, went on to become a great film success starring Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney. His career in the theatre thrived without quite ever scaling the heights of Harold Pinter or his other great friend Simon Gray, but past the official age of retirement he enjoyed a remarkable Indian summer in both film and the stage.It began in 2002 when he won his first Oscar for the script of The Pianist, directed by Roman Read more ...
Ismene Brown
"You talk like Marlene Dietrich, you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire, your clothes are all made by Balmain, and there’s diamonds and pearls in your hair…" . Peter Sarstedt may have been a one-hit wonder, but his 1969 pop song, "Where do you go to (my lovely)?" passed into British popular culture in a flash, even if many of its chic references were lost on future generations. Zizi Jeanmaire, who died last Friday aged 96, personified the Paris of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and beyond.In her cabaret shows, the pixie-ish little figure with boy-cut black hair and fabulous legs would twerk with Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Ennio Morricone was a genius, or as close to that description as makes no odds. If we mean someone who created a unique body of work, one that changed culture, had a distincive style and was massively influential, then Morricone fitted the bill. theartsdesk's Joe Muggs was discussing today on Facebook and Mixmag his influence on dubstep and Jamaican music, for example. He was uncompromising, never learning English or moving to Hollywood, however much he was cajoled by film types there.It appears he saw his non-film music as the serious work and posterity will no doubt give the verdict on that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ian Holm was once in his local cinema on High Street Kensington, enquiring at the ticket office about concessions for people who appeared in the film they wished to see. The unlucky vendor failed to make the connection between the short customer with full beard and the clean-shaven priest in the sci-fi caper showing on Screen Four upstairs. He had to make an internal call to the manager. "There's someone here who says he's in The Fifth Element. Wants a discount." "Oh yeah. What's his name then?" "Ian Holm." "Ian Holm!"Holm, who has died at the age of 88, became a prolific screen actor partly Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Larry Kramer, who has died at the age of 84, was the Solzhenitsyn of AIDS who indomitably reported from the gay gulags of Manhattan’s quarantined wards and revolving-door hospices. “I felt very much like a journalist who realises that he has been given the story of his life,” he told me when I met him. “I don’t consider myself a writer. I don’t bring the question of art into it at all like most writers do. I’m a messenger. As with activism, you figure out your target and the best way of reaching that target.”His most celebrated work, The Normal Heart, was a polemic about the early years of Read more ...
Gerard McBurney
November 1979… and a small group of Soviet composers (dubbed the "Khrennikov Seven") unexpectedly found themselves the targets of a boorish public assault by that once infamous General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, in a speech at the organisation’s Sixth Congress in Moscow, describing them as “pretentious… pointless… sensation seeking… noisy filth… a so-called ‘avant-garde’…” Dima and his wife, Lena Firsova, were among that seven, along with Denisov, Gubaidulina and others. Their offence? That their pieces had been performed in a “modern music” festival in Cologne (in “the West Read more ...
Jasper Rees
John Prine, who has died at the age of 73 from a Covid 19-related illness, was one of the great American folk poets. Having spent his early adulthood pounding the sidewalks as a mailman in Chicago, he never quite shucked that blue-collar aura of the working man's minstrel. His best songs - "Paradise", "Angel from Montgomery", "Speed of the Sound of Loneliness", "Souvenirs" - are gritty and unpretentious snapshots of ordinary American lives, but inflected by Prine's quirky worldview and way with words.He was no overnight sensation. He had been making a good living in folk clubs when one night Read more ...