Buzz
Jasper Rees
There'll be no avoiding Chariots of Fire this summer. The Olympics being shortly upon us, Hampstead Theatre are soon to launch a stage verison of the Oscar-winning 1981 film. The success of Hugh Hudson's epic account of the British athletes at the 1924 Olympiad in Paris famously prompted scriptwriter Colin Welland to yell from the Academy Award podium, "The British are coming!" As the British film industry went on to collapse in on itself throughout the 1980s, it turns out he was largely wrong about that. But 30 years on, Chariots is having its moment again.There is a general air of doom in Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Launched to the press today with an hour-long presentation and Hitchcockian lunch, the British Film Institute proudly unveiled a fittingly hefty programme of screenings, events, exhibitions and publications celebrating the work of Alfred Hitchcock - inarguably Britain’s most iconic and influential film director. Hailing from London’s East End, Hitchcock worked in the British film industry for two decades before signing a deal with David O. Selznick and decamping to Hollywood, where he continued to go from strength to strength with films such as Psycho, Rear Window and Vertigo.The BFI’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Matilda, the Royal Shakespeare Company-spawned musical about an extraordinary young girl, managed the extraordinary feat Sunday of snaring a record seven trophies at last night’s 36th Laurence Olivier Awards. Its rampaging hold over the black-tie ceremony at the Royal Opera House came at the expense of such comic hopefuls as One Man, Two Guvnors and The Ladykillers, which had 10 nominations between them and emerged with no awards. Nor did the twice-nominated Noises Off.The lack of recognition for One Man must be particularly hard for its creators coming on the eve of the Richard Bean play’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The onerous task of recording all 205 national anthems for playing at the Olympics medal ceremonies has fallen on the London Philharmonic Orchestra. An edited group of 36 players has recorded the anthems at the Abbey Road Studios in 60 gruelling recording hours over six days. But which would try their patience most?The anthems - every one known in the world, good, bad and indifferent - have been arranged by British composer and cellist Phillip Sheppard, who did the British anthem arrangement for the Beijing Olympics closing ceremony. Judging from a selection below, he would be giving the LPO Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Royal Ballet prima ballerina Tamara Rojo has been appointed the new artistic director of English National Ballet. Though the announcement was officially dated for tomorrow, the press release was issued by the company this morning and the news has been widely sent out over the internet and social media since then.The ballerina had made clear in an interview with theartsdesk back in 2009, that her eye was set on a future job as a director when she stopped dancing, and on English National Ballet in particular, the touring company where she first showed herself as a shooting star 15 years ago. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Centenaries are sizeable business in 2012. It just so happens that the Olympics are coming to the United Kingdom for the third time in a year which finds us thinking very hard if being British still means what it did 100 years. Then, two momentous calamities singed themselves into the national psyche: the Titanic sank, and Captain Scott and his four companions failed to return from the South Pole.Adam Sweeting has already reported on the deluge of Titanica fanning across the television schedules from National Geographic docs to Drownton. The Scott industry is spreading itself more widely Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Norman Lebrecht, the seasoned and ever-alert musical commentator, thinks he and his readers may have uncovered someone making a very good stab at being Mozart. Three pieces have been discovered on the internet DIY-video channel being played by a pianist whose face can't be seen, all purporting to be new or obscure works by Mozart, Haydn and Mendelssohn.In a time when lost items are turning up quite regularly now - Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven pieces have recently been found in far-flung files and libraries - Lebrecht decided to take the "Ask the Audience" option, by putting the Mozart piece Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The organisation that channels public money to generate today's new classical music has been resoundingly condemned this week by all of Britain's most important composers. In an open letter, signed by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Colin Matthews, Nicola LeFanu, Julian Anderson and 250 more, the British contemporary music-making establishment accuses Sound and Music - set up by the Arts Council three years ago - of having alienated virtually all the composers it was set up to work with.The letter, published on Tuesday, accuses Sound and Music (SAM) in the frankest terms of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Fancy buying a new recording of Bach’s Cantatas? It’ll cost only slightly more than a regular CD. The only snag is it hasn’t been recorded yet, which is where you come in.Over the last few years Sir John Eliot Gardiner has been steadily releasing a complete set of Bach’s church cantatas recorded in 2000 with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in the conditions in which they would have been originally performed. The 27 double-disc release has been described by David Attenborough, who is known for listening to calming music in the jungle, as “the most extraordinary, ambitious and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Manchester’s Buzzcocks were first to hit the seven-inch racks with their Spiral Scratch EP, but south London’s Outsiders were the first punk-era band to make a do-it-yourself album. The Wimbledon trio’s Calling on Youth, released in May 1977, was self financed, recorded at home and manufactured independently. Thirty-five years on, it’s reissued on CD for the first time today.The Outsiders weren’t by-numbers punks, even though they regularly played Covent Garden hot-spot The Roxy. Frontman Adrian Borland was influenced by America’s Doors and Stooges, whose Iggy Pop was so moved by one of their Read more ...
theartsdesk
In how many categories is it possible for a show to be nominated for this year's Olivier Awards? Answer: 10. The producers of Matilda the Musical will be smiling from ear to ear after the nominations for next month’s awards were revealed, with the RSC’s Roald Dahl adaptation nominated in all 10. Tim Minchin is in the running for best score, and the four young actresses who share the lead are also nominated. In various categories Matilda will be up against Ghost the Musical at the Piccadilly Theatre and the National Theatre’s London Road, which have five and four nominations respectively.As Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In the final instalment of our exclusive Simone Felice video series, the singer and poet from New York's Catskill mountains takes us on a tour of three further locations that kept him sane, whilst, around him, life seemed like an extract from the book of Job. These are also the places that inspired his forthcoming album, released April 2. As ever Felice proves an amiable and charismatic guide, and his haunts are the sort of places to nourish the soul of anyone in need of contemplation. But Felice is not anyone and he has also written a piece of prose-cum-blank-verse to accompany it. And what Read more ...