Features & Interviews
First Persons: composers Colin Alexander and Héloïse Werner on fantasy in guided improvisation
Wednesday, 17 April 2024
For tonight’s performance at Milton Court, the nuanced and delicate tones of strings, voices, harmonium and chamber organ will merge and mingle together to tell tales of a rain-speckled landscape, luck and misfortune, forgotten valour, daily creative rituals and memories slowly vanishing into flames.
First Person: Leeds Lieder Festival director and pianist Joseph Middleton on a beloved organisation back from the brink
Saturday, 13 April 2024
Everyone needs friends and everything is connected. As we throw the doors open on to the 2024 Leeds Lieder Festival I am struck by just how remarkable classical music can be for a community, particularly when it is looked after and invested in by its own community.
First Person: actor Paul Jesson on survival,...
Monday, 08 April 2024
In September 2022 I had an email from my American friend Richard Nelson: "Would you like me to write you a play?" Such an offer probably comes the...
First Person: author-turned-actor Lydia Higman on...
Thursday, 28 March 2024
I first read Anne Gunter’s story about five years ago, when I was in my first year of university at Oxford, little knowing it would over time lead to...
First person: playwright Paul Grellong on keeping...
Wednesday, 27 March 2024
I’m writing this in the lobby of the Menier Chocolate Factory a couple of hours before the first preview. I was last here in February for the start...
10 Questions for folk singer-songwriter Olivia Chaney - 'deeply personal songs that open out to the universal'
The Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter on 'Circus of Desire', her strongest album to date |
First Person: conductor Peter Whelan on coming full circle with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra
From watching Handel's 'Israel in Egypt' on TV to conducting it |
theartsdesk in Strasbourg: crossing the frontiers
'Lohengrin' marks a remarkable singer's arrival on Planet Wagner |
First Person: Laurence Cummings on his 25th and final year as Musical Director of the London Handel Festival
A blockbuster month begins tomorrow, mixing starry casts with new talent |
First Person: violinist Tom Greed on breaking down barriers in the presentation of chamber music
Unscary Schoenberg is on the bill of enterprising young musicians' latest new-look event |
First Person: Ten Years On - Flamenco guitarist Paco Peña pays tribute to his friend, the late, great Paco de Lucía
On the 10th anniversary of his death, memories of the prodigious musician who broadened the reach of flamenco into jazz and beyond |
First Person: pioneering juggler Sean Gandini reflects on how the spirit of Pina Bausch has infiltrated his work
As Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch's 'Nelken' comes to Sadler’s Wells, a tribute from across the art forms |
First Person: contralto Hilary Summers on going beyond her baroque and contemporary comfort zones
On recording 'Circus Dinogad', a wacky collaboration with distinguished Dutch colleagues |
Best of 2023: Books
As the year draws to a close, we look back at the best books we opened |
Best of 2023: Classical music concerts
No drop in orchestral high standards, and youth shines again |
Best of 2023: Theatre
The National Theatre fielded hit after hit, and smaller venues scored as well |
Best of 2023: Film
Kicking off the top choices of the year, theartsdesk's film critics cast their net wide |
theartsdesk in Ravenna - Riccardo Muti passes on a lifetime's operatic wisdom
Three unforgettable evenings with the most experienced living exponent of Italian opera |
Powell and Pressburger: The Composers
Two musicians, both largely forgotten, gave the duo's films much of their power |
Powell and Pressburger: A Celtic storm brewing
The Archers stepped up their wartime campaign against materialism with the mystical Scottish romance 'I Know Where I'm Going!' |
First Person: novelist Pip Adam on the sound of injustice
Author Pip Adam describes how her time working in prisons and interest in the jurisprudence of noise gave life to her recent sci-fi novel, 'Audition' |
Michael Powell: a happy time with Bartók’s Bluebeard
Fine performers in perfect balance with fantastical visuals for this profound one-act opera |
First Person: Natalia Franklin Pierce, Executive Director of Nonclassical, on 'creating a sense of belonging'
On bringing classical music to wider audiences - and appealing for help in a good cause |
Powell and Pressburger: In Prospero's Room
A magical day at Derek Jarman’s Dungeness cottage, dancing with the ghosts of Shakespeare, Powell and Pressburger |
Powell and Pressburger: the glueman cometh
A perverse village magus plays god with three wartime pilgrims in 'A Canterbury Tale', the Archers' strangest film |
theartsdesk at Wexford Festival Opera - four operas and a recital in one crazy day
Youth takes the comedy award in fringe delights alongside a well-done schlocky rarity |
Powell and Pressburger: Spy masters
Though less renowned, Powell and Pressburger’s wartime spy films put some of Alfred Hitchcock’s in the shade |
Powell and Pressburger: Battleships and Byron
The 1950s war films 'The Battle of the River Plate' and 'Ill Met By Moonlight' turned a clapped-out genre into art |
theartsdesk in Ukraine - Stankovych's 'Psalms of War' at the Lviv National Opera
A powerful new work written in blood from the inside |
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