Scotland
Amy Liptrot
In the same way that some chase the thrills of extreme sport, extreme art fans can now take the challenge of visiting this small art festival, which is uncompromising in terms of location, climate and content. Orkney as a whole has natural beauty, a rich history and a thriving cultural life, with a disproportionate number of artists compared to the size of the population. The prestigious and high-brow St Magnus Festival of arts, held each midsummer, is patronised by composer and isles resident Peter Maxwell Davies.However the Orkney "mainland", the largest island of the group and home to most Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Such is the nature of the music industry these days that artists are anointed even before they’ve released a record. So it has been with Emeli Sandé, a medical student from the north-east of Scotland who has not only bagged this year's BRITs Critics' Choice Award (former winners: Adele, Florence Welch, Ellie Goulding) but is, apparently, Simon Cowell’s favourite songwriter. Stop! Come back...Sandé has written for everyone from Leona Lewis and Tinie Tempah to Susan Boyle and Cher Lloyd, but it’s her voice that you’ll recognise from Professor Green’s recent number one “Read all About It” (which Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Popular operatic love stories by Puccini, Wagner and Mozart dominate the regional scene in 2012, but key talents like producer Tim Albery in Leeds, Lothar Koenigs in Cardiff and David McVicar in Glasgow all promise significant stage experiences. Opera NorthHandel’s Giulio Cesare (NEW PRODUCTION), Leeds Grand Theatre 14 Jan-16 Feb 2012; Nottingham Theatre Royal 23 Feb; Salford Quays The Lowry 1 Mar; Newcastle Theatre Royal 9 Mar; Dublin Grand Canal Theatre 14 Mar. The epic love affair between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, dazzlingly composed for two outstanding female singers. Pamela Helen Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has been transformed with a £7.6 million facelift. As a first-timer I confess I don’t have a clue what it looked like before, but I am assured it was dark and gloomy and had the air of a building cast aside in favour of Edinburgh’s better attractions. Built in 1889 by Robert Rowand Anderson as the world’s first dedicated portrait gallery – paid for by the proprietor of The Scotsman, John Ritchie Findlay, and inspired in part by the Doge’s Palace in Venice – the SNPG had, in fact, shared over half the building with the Scottish Society of Antiquaries.The Read more ...
David Nice
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra's Glasgow concert tonight has had to be cancelled because of what my Scots godson, in far less extreme conditions down in the Borders, once described as "horrifying wind and rain". The programme? The Suite from Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden, about a northern people in the grip of extended bad winter weather until the icy heroine should be melted by the rays of love, and the second act of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, where admittedly it's in the first that ballerina snowflakes eventually get tossed around in a storm and the heroine heads off with her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Scotland’s Bill Wells is hard to pin down. Although ostensibly a jazz pianist, boundaries don’t concern him. He’s played with Aidan Moffat and Isobel Campbell. In 2009 he made the GOK album with Japan’s Tori Kudo (who records as Maher Shalal Hash Baz). Lemondale was made in Japan with a raft of collaborators that include Jim O’Rourke, Kudo and members of Tenniscoats.It’s a lovely album. Coherent, too. Especially considering that it was recorded in one day. Overall, Lemondale is filmic, edging towards Michel Legrand’s jazzier moments and even Francis Lai soundtracks. Equally, it’d be at home Read more ...
fisun.guner
George Shaw might have been the popular favourite, but it was Martin Boyce who carried the vote to win this year’s Turner Prize. The 44-year-old artist from Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, follows fast on the heels of two fellow Scots: Susan Philipsz won the prize in 2010 and Richard Wright in 2009. But neither seemed as much of a clear-cut choice as Boyce, for although the public vote wasn’t his, the critics were pretty much united in backing him.Boyce’s installation (main picture), which takes as its starting reference a series of sculptures by French Modernists Joel and Jan Martel, is Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The passing of Jackie Leven, who died last night from cancer, comes with a sense of real sadness. One of our most distinctive and original singer-songwriters, the Fifer maintained a doggedly low commercial profile throughout almost four decades spent weaving his rich, rather brave musical tapestry. With the abrasive, unclassifiable pre-punk band Doll By Doll and later as a solo artist, Leven often specialised in difficult subjects. A song on one of his recent solo records was called “The War Crimes of Ariel Sharon”, and his music was typically peopled by Serbian prostitutes, Earls Court Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I remain bemused when bands such as U2 or Coldplay announce they are “going experimental” and are greeted as if they might be. The correct response is: “No, you’re not, you’re as alternative as avocado in a prawn cocktail rather than lettuce.” So here we have U2 and Coldplay’s wet younger sibling supposedly stepping into the wild unknown for their sixth album. In reality this means having a tentative crack at sounding like an early Simple Minds album, albeit firmly filtered through the epic sonic template laid down by those aforementioned older brothers.Snow Patrol’s early history is a story Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Abi Morgan is on something of a multi-platform roll right now. Between writing the Beeb's enjoyably hokey The Hour and scripting The Iron Lady, the Margaret Thatcher biopic which will be hitting our screens shortly before Christmas with all the force of a jet-propelled handbag, comes a new play for the National Theatre of Scotland. An altogether more esoteric offering, 27 raises questions of faith, morality, memory and the role of science by examining the lives of a group of nuns.Mother Superior Miriam and the younger Sister Ursula (“Jackie to her JFK”) belong to a convent in a remote part of Read more ...
David Nice
He's just launched the last of seven phenomenally successful seasons as music director of a transfigured Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Subscriptions for the Edinburgh and Glasgow concerts have doubled, attendances soared, and Stéphane Denève is a popular figure not just in the musical world but also in Scotland's wider cultural scene, not least as measured by his special guest appearance in the Sunday Post's long-running cartoon series The Broons.The charm of his concert presentations to his Scottish chums belies a rigour and a seriousness in a preparation that marries intellect with Read more ...
josh.spero
The overwhelming impression given in television of urban Scotland in the Eighties is of a land where people had discovered neither vegetables nor lightbulbs. The Field of Blood on BBC One last night went no way towards correcting this: as tenebrous as you might expect for a mini-series about child-killing, everything was shadows.There was light in the offices of the daily paper the plucky, plump heroine Paddy Meehan (Jayd Johnson) worked in as a copyboy, but it only served to illuminate her unappealing colleagues: the boozy, sexist, obese, balding, stony-hearted, grandmother-selling Read more ...