Spain
Peter Culshaw
I am far from the first - and in very good company - to worry about the over-commercialisation of flamenco. As far back as in 1922 Manuel de Falla and Federico Garcia Lorca, respectively Spain’s greatest composer and poet of the time, decided to organise a singing competition in Granada in which only singers from the villages were allowed to enter. The polished, preening urban stars of the Café Cantantes were ineligible. My resistance to the genre was partly to do with the Gypsy Kings, amusing enough when you first heard them, but irritating beyond words when heard for years in every Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s stunning, painfully sincere - if somewhat laborious - latest is a heartfelt paean to fatherhood, built around an agonising escalation of misery. It is bolstered by a mesmerising performance from Javier Bardem as a terminally ill man experiencing physical deterioration alongside spiritual elevation, who bridges the gap between this life and the next.Biutiful is set in Santa Coloma, a deprived district of Barcelona populated primarily by those on society’s fringes. Javier Bardem plays Uxbal, the father of two young children and one of the cogs in a criminal machine Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The up - which I’m sorry not to have reported on before it ended last night - was the Spanish puppetry troupe Teatro Corsario, who made their hour’s strut and fret upon the stage in the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room a pleasingly diverting wee horror tale, La Maldición de Poe (The Curse of Poe), filled with gory corpses and spectral lighting and awful bloodthirsty characters.Mashing up three Poe stories - The Black Cat, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and the ditty Annabel Lee - the little team of five came up with an impressively populated narrative where Edgar fell in love with sick Annabel Read more ...
David Nice
This was a programme born for marketing cliché: banish the winter blues by bathing in Latin American/Iberian warmth. And it turned out to be true, by virtue of an unexpected watershed. How did the BBC Symphony strings manage to be first among the London orchestras to slip into something truly sensual, whether tangoing with an Argentinian bandoneónist - "A what?" you may ask, and I'll tell you shortly - or dancing malagueñas with a Spanish pianist? Was it the after-effect of the John Wilson Hollywood treatment last Sunday, or just sheer joy in welcoming back the high, bright style of conductor Read more ...
fisun.guner
The unseen Dalí? Surely not. Anyone who ever popped into Dalí Universe, the now defunct gallery on the South Bank which was devoted to the flamboyant Surrealist's work, might well ask. Since there have been so many editions of his well-known sculptures, cast in prodigious numbers both during his lifetime and after his death in 1989, it seems only right and proper to raise a sceptical eyebrow: what more, indeed, is there to discover? And not just this. There’s a further thorny question of authenticity. The posthumous sculptures still manage to fetch a price, of course, because Dalí gave Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Any period drama that crops up on Sunday nights is now automatically billed as a potential replacement for Downton Abbey. Any Human Heart has duly been described thus, but isn't. Converted into a four-part series from William Boyd's 2002 novel, with a screenplay by Boyd himself, it's the story of the writer Logan Mountstuart, whose long life spanned the major events of the 20th century while bouncing around between various continents and relationships. In accordance with the timespan and the authorial notion that every individual becomes several different personalities en route to the grave, Read more ...
james.woodall
The sense of occasion around flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucía’s return to London was palpable. The Royal Festival Hall was heaving. Queues at the bars before the show and during the interval were three or four deep. Spanish was everywhere. And that was good to hear. Paco de Lucía is a hero in his country as much for interesting political reasons as he is for purely musical ones. London-based compatriot fans were not going to miss this.De Lucía emerged as a golden solo talent at the end of the 1960s from the many flamenco competitions that kept the art alive when the garbage put on for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Carlos Acosta is not just a superstar dancer with the Royal Ballet and around the world, he is an avid reader - and indeed writer. After writing his autobiography No Way Home, he has also scripted dance shows and is now writing a novel.Unsurprisingly, his thoughts and memories turn to his native Latin America - to the Chilean Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) and the Spaniard Carlos Ruiz Zafon (born 1964) - when he chooses what next to read, a marked contrast with the heroes of European ballet dramas such as Swan Lake, Giselle and the Chekov-inspired Winter Dreams that he dances this autumn at Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the first of a short summer series in which artists and performers tell theartsdesk about what they're reading, ballerina Tamara Rojo talks about the books she's taken with her on holiday, and what she's enjoyed reading. We run short extracts from two of them.Born in Canada of Spanish parents in 1975, Rojo came to the UK to join Scottish Ballet briefly, before becoming English National Ballet's star in the late 1990s. She joined the Royal Ballet in 2000, and since then has become a global star, as famous for her intelligence as for her supreme technical virtuosity and powers as a Read more ...
sue.steward
International photography festivals are rivalling rock festivals this summer - and rock festivals are featuring photographers. PhotoEspaña (PHE) Madrid beats the lot. Packed with surprise revelations, with central Madrid as the main stage, the fringe all around it, and the whole city involved in the Night of Photography PhotoMaratón, it’s a highly ambitious, even labyrinthine affair.Sixty-nine exhibitions by 379 photographers from 42 countries occupied the city’s elegant state institutions and museums, international cultural centres, a former water tower, and a bank or two. The latter are Read more ...
javier.defrutos
There is a moment when you see dancers at their absolute peak that notches a bit of history in your memory - you never forget when you see it happen. In my area of contemporary choreography you can’t measure it in those terms but you can with classical ballet, and a Don Quixote performance like I saw at the Bolshoi last night sets the bar. This level of performance is Olympic-sized, it erases everything else you have seen.Of course it’s the pair of them that this ballet is about, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, the two of them uniting their fabulous youth and abilities in a click with Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Confirmation today of the astonishing news from Russia - Nacho Duato will indeed become the new director of the Mikhailovsky Ballet, St Petersburg’s second company, from the New Year. The Spanish contemporary choreographer will be the first foreigner to lead a Russian ballet company for more than a century.The Mikhailovsky General Director, fruit tycoon Vladimir Kekhman, said at today's press conference in St Petersburg: "Engaging an internationally known choreographer in the prime of his strength and talents is incredibly significant not only for the Mikhailovsky Theatre, but for Russian Read more ...