Reviews
Reporting Trump's First Year: the Fourth Estate, BBC Two review - all hands on deck at the Gray Lady
Adam Sweeting
The cataclysm of Donald Trump’s election was like a second 9/11 for the East Coast elite (and not just them, obviously). It was a world turned upside down, the centre couldn’t hold, and, worst of all, why did nobody see it coming?Nowhere was it felt more keenly than at the New York Times, lumped in with various other media outlets by Trump as "the enemy of the people" and identified as a purveyor of "fake news". As Executive Editor Dean Basquet admits, the paper didn't have its finger on the pulse of the country, and they got it wrong.This was the opener of a four-part documentary series, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Just as the Last Night of the Proms is an end-of-term party with a concert tacked on, The Grange Festival (like other similar venues) offers a massive picnic interspersed with some opera. Unlike the Proms, however, where anyone can get in wearing anything they like for just £6, the English country house opera is the preserve of the well-heeled and genteel dressed in their finery, sipping expensive drinks.But as well as being socially elite, there is also a more admirable tradition of artistic elitism at these summer festivals, where top directors and singers do often fine work for the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Modern novels with an architectural theme have, to say the least, a mixed pedigree. At their finest, as in Thomas Bernhard’s Correction, the fluidity and ambiguity of prose fiction mitigates, even undermines, the obsessive planner’s or designer’s quest for a perfect construction. On the other hand, Ayn Rand’s all-too-influential The Fountainhead – loopy Bible of the libertarian right – shows that novelists too can fall for the tattered myth of the heroic, iron-willed master-builder.The first novel by a South African poet, OK, Mr Field shapes its architectural components into a haunting and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s a truism that history is written by the victors, but nowhere in classical music is the argument made more persuasively than in the legacy and reputation of Charles Gounod. In a year in which you can hardly move for Bernstein and Debussy-related events, a year in which even Couperin and Parry are getting a good showing, as well as the too-often-neglected Lili Boulanger, the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth is passing all but uncelebrated in the UK.It’s a sign of just how far out of fashion Gounod has fallen that none of the major British houses is taking the opportunity to stage Read more ...
Katherine Waters
When Sarah Langford goes to work, she puts on warpaint and wig and acts. But she is not an actor. She defends those who might or might not be guilty of the crimes with with they’ve been charged, or she acts on behalf of those bringing prosecutions who may or may not be telling the truth. But often it's more complicated; she is no mere janissary. In Your Defence is her memoir, not only of the cases she has worked on (anonymised, of course), but also of how they have changed her; because it is not just rights and wrongs she deals with every day – that is the law in abstract. No. It is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the cover of the 19 May 1979 issue of the music weekly Sounds was dominated by a photo of American rocker Ted Nugent, attention was also grabbed by a trail for a feature on “Heavy Metal…The New British Bands”. The two-page article it related to was headlined If You Want Blood, You’ve Got It. Under that were the words “The New Wave of British Heavy Metal: First in an Occasional Series”. The feature, by Geoff Barton, focussed on The Bandwagon, a heavy metal disco, and a triple-bill show at North London’s Music Machine with Angel Witch, Iron Maiden and Samson.Sounds had been buttering- Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Daft Punk! Kendrick Lamar! The Kinks! Yes! We blew the lid off!What? No! There IS no Glastonbury Festival 2018, I hear you cry. You think that’s going to stop Caspar Gomez? Never! I need my fix. If they’re not going to have Glastonbury this year, I will. In my head. And it will be on Worthy Farm. I call Loki, Glastonbury’s bearded archiving anarchist and trickster, and arrange to camp there. You can’t just plot up, it’s a working farm. I quickly pull together a reconnoitre unit; one of my usual Pilton partners-in crime, Finetime, and GE (pronounced “Jee"), a youthful understudy. We clamber in Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Iconoclasm, orgasms, and rampant rhetoric are all on irrepressible display in The Wooster Group’s recreation of the 1971 Manhattan debate that pitted Norman Mailer against some of the leading feminists of the day. The evening proved almost as notable for who didn’t attend (feminists Kate Millet and Gloria Steinem refused to debate him) as who did (Germaine Greer, Lesbian Nation author Jill Johnston), but its electric anarchy resonates powerfully in today’s confused world.The Wooster Group – under the simultaneously deadpan and excoriating eye of its director Elizabeth LeCompte – has been Read more ...
Robert Beale
Adam Gorb’s The Path to Heaven, with libretto by Ben Kaye, is his longest work to date (almost two hours’ running time without interval) and on a story that could hardly be more tragic – the Holocaust. Its premiere at the Royal Northern College of Music was conducted by Mark Heron and given by members of Psappha with singers and musicians from the RNCM, directed by Stefan Janski.This was the culmination of a two-day festival of the music of Anthony Gilbert and Adam Gorb (pictured below), the first and present Heads of Composition of the RNCM respectively. It’s really a kind of opera Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In the early 20th century, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov spliced together images of people looking at things with a bowl of soup, a woman on a divan and an open casket. Each object represented a different emotional state – hunger, desire and grief – but each subject “looking” at the object was the exact same image, repeated. The cast-down eyes implied to be considering nourishment were the exact same eyes that appeared to stare in utter loss at death. And thus the idea of the movie star: a figure onto whom all projections are equally valid.The opening scene of Arthur Miller’s last play, Read more ...
David Nice
First palpable hit of the evening: a full orchestra in the pit under hyper-alert Opera North stalwart James Holmes, saxophones deliciously rampant. Second hit: they've got the miking of the voices right (very rare in West End shows). Third: the first ensemble number, "Another opening, another show", sends spirits soaring. What follows is very good, sometimes excellent, occasionally fresh and startling.Any sense of slight anticlimax may well the fault of a musical which, while stocked higher with hit songs than most (Cole Porter at his wickedly rhyming, melodically snaking best), has always Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Earlier this year, in May, Brighton hosted the Vinyl World Congress where Paul Pacifico, head of the Association of Independent Music, told the assembled that, “People pay for vinyl not because they have to but because they want to - they want a physical representation of their emotional connection with an artist." There was a general agreement that vinyl collectors and fans account for the majority of sales, but also that things are still stable and/or rising. Here at theartsdesk on Vinyl, we cover collectible artists of yesteryear (below are boxsets by Buffalo Springfield, Brian Eno, Read more ...