Buzz
Peter Culshaw
Mark Radcliffe was on good form, saying how he had seen Donovan at the Whitley Bay Ice Rink (and nipped out to the car park to keep warm) and met Donovan’s manager, who when the singer retired asked if Donovan was going to bed. “Donovan doesn’t go to bed – he crashes,” said the manager. Donovan sang one of his hits, “Catch the Wind” – although I always preferred “Mellow Yellow” (can it really have been about how you can smoke banana skins to get high, as the received word in the schoolyard had it?).Chris Wood won both Folk Singer of the Year and Best Original Song with “Hollow Point”, his Read more ...
Ismene Brown
David Nice, one of our Arts Deskers, is in the exalted seat of Radio 3’s Building a Library tomorrow morning filtering recordings of Berlioz’s “dramatic symphony” Roméo et Juliette."As recommended on Radio 3's Building a Library" has come to be seen as one of the highest accolades for quality in the classical record sector - even though it depends wholly on the industry and viewpoint of a single critic. However, no other reviewing exercise anywhere is quite as exhaustive as this. Nice has listened to around 12 recordings of the Berlioz, though some are not available.
A regular on Building a Read more ...
David Nice
But not for long. The first ever National Theatre Live worldwide screening of a Donmar production came to a halt between great Jacobi's mad musings on archery and toasted cheese; later, pedalling back from Notting Hill against a furious wind, I guessed the reason for the blip. The weather had scuppered Lear's fate, off stage as well as on.Sitting in a packed Gate cinema, we heard a voice apologise to a presumably mortified Donmar audience (thinking about it, we guessed the actors must have been primed to expect technical glitches, and had given their consent to any potential interruptions Read more ...
Jasper Rees
He may have already taken the film to Cannes, but West Yorkshire represents a quirky step away from the regular festival beat for a man who in his mighty heyday once found it hard to set foot beyond the Brooklyn Bridge. Plotwise, film-goers in Bradford will be greeted in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger by the usual focus on marital disharmony and renewal through infidelity. Anthony Hopkins is married to Gemma Jones, whose daughter Naomi Watts is married to Josh Brolin, who has a thing for Freida Pinto while Watts finds herself falling for Antonio Banderas. Here’s a taster of what Bradford Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's here! HBO's Boardwalk Empire finally arrived last night, the big news on the opening day of the new Sky Atlantic channel. Already staggering under a burden of Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild awards, Boardwalk looks likely to enjoy a long and glittering career, with a second series already in production.With a $20m budget and Martin Scorsese in the director's chair, the pilot episode has been hailed as a TV milestone. The garishness and grotesquerie of Atlantic City at the start of the Prohibition era is vividly rendered, with its chorus girls, freak shows and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“When you write for film, the dialogue is like the voice, if you like, and I always consider that as part of the music,” said John Barry, who died on 30 January. “Certain orchestral textures have to match the texture of the scene. You deal with the lightness and darkness of the scene when you write music for cinema. The film is a part of the score, and you can't get away from that.A comprehensive list of soundtrack composers would run into several volumes, but among the elite handful which includes names like John Williams, Ennio Morricone or Maurice Jarre, John Barry stands as tall as any. Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps her greatest achievement on disc is a role she would never have attempted in the theatre, Wagner's Isolde. Supported by the great Carlos Kleiber, the sheer meaning and luminous tone colours Price brings to every line make this one of the glories of recorded history.Below, Margaret Price sings Wagner's Liebestod from Tristan und IsoldeAt the other end of the repertoire, Price excelled in Mozart. A distinguished voice coach I know singles out a radio broadcast of a Mozart mass as the most perfect piece of singing he's ever heard. The lyric quality could stretch from Susanna - on disc, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We were saddened by the absence of such artsdesk favourites as Spooks and Sherlock from the list of winners of last night's National Television Awards at the O2 Arena, who were all chosen by the public's votes. Of course, we share the national euphoria at the news of Bruce Forsyth's Special Recognition Award for his... er... interminable career. "This would be a good night to announce my retirement but I'm not bloody going to," the Strictly Come Dancing host told disappointed reporters. We would also send our congratulations to Top Entertainment Presenters Ant and Dec if we knew which one was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The summer 1976 hit “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” was Kiki Dee’s chart highlight. The duet with Elton John was inescapable, happy, upbeat, irresistible. A Number One, it peaked a chart run on his Rocket Records that began with her 1973 cover of Veronique Sansons’s “Amoureuse”. “I’ve Got the Music in Me” then hit the Top 20 in 1974. Kiki still plays live and records, but the treasure-filled and essential I’m Kiki Dee - The Fontana Years 1963-1968 – out this week – reveals her musical prehistory for the first time. There’s more to Kiki than the hits.Bradford-born Pauline Matthews signed with Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Of the other Best Picture Oscar nominees, David O Russell’s The Fighter has seven nominations, Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan six apiece, the animated Toy Story 3, directed by Lee Unkrich, has five, and two indies, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right and Debra Granik’s Winter's Bone, have four each.The King's Speech's growing momentum was indicated on Saturday when it unexpectedly won the Producers Guild of America’s top award. In the 21 previous years the PGA has awarded the prize, 14 of the winners (including the last three) have gone on to win the Best Read more ...
David Nice
Even at the time it seemed a little strange: the visionary Kathryn Hunter as an oddball Cleopatra in a production that hardly seemed up to the mark either of her performing standards or of her own fabulous Shakespeare staging, a Pericles which was one of the two best things I've ever seen at the Globe.But she'd been through a good few Antony and Cleopatras before she dropped the bomb yesterday that she was withdrawing from Michael Boyd's long-term company, of which she has been an "artistic associate" since 2008.
The press statement is brief and enigmatic. Boyd's and Hunter's "joint" Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thirty years after the original series came to the end of its 12-year history, Hawaii Five-0 is about to burst back onto British TV. The new-look Five-0 kicked off in September last year on the American CBS network, and will debut on Sky1/Sky1 HD in the UK in February.A pilot for a new Hawaii Five-0 was made in 1996, starring Gary Busey and Russell Wong, but it never aired. This time, the chemistry feels right and American audiences have been enthusiastic. The new version uses several of the same principal character names from the original, including of course Steve McGarrett (originally Read more ...