Features
Justine Elias.
The first word of The Iliad is “war”; the first word of The Odyssey is “man”. After that, the twists and turns of Homer’s epic poems veer in wildly different directions. It’s fitting, then, that cinematic adaptations are multi-faceted, too. From the dawn of the medium, Homer’s works have proved to be irresistible to adapters, who have given us everything from a four-minute silent fever dream of sex and horror to a seven-hour Italian miniseries that leaves nothing out, except the Greek language. Here are some of the notable efforts:
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Ibrahim Maalouf
There is a story hidden inside my trumpet.Not the kind of story people usually associate with innovation today. No laboratory. No startup. No investors. No software. No algorithm.Just a poor Lebanese peasant’s son, born in 1941 in the mountains above Beirut, listening to village brass bands trying – and failing – to play Arabic music.My father, Nassim Maalouf, grew up surrounded by European-style fanfares that had settled permanently across Lebanon during the colonial partition of the Middle East. Brass instruments arrived with soldiers, ceremonies, churches, and military traditions, before Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The Fez Festival of World Sacred Music has been peerless over the years in presenting world/global music acts in one magical place. Only WOMAD is a serious rival as a long-established global music fest.Fez is also special in another way, the city has miles of car-free winding alleys in the medina that make you feel like you are in a time machine spun back several centuries. It’s slightly easier not to get totally lost since GPS arrived but I still managed it several times.It has a reputation as one of the Islamic world’s great spiritual cities, you feel the energy of the Sufi saints in the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A recent OFCOM study found that over 90% of young people tune into video-sharing platform and streamers and only spend a quarter of their viewing time on broadcast TV. It’s a fair guess then that the majority of the content they are watching has been generated on smartphones, which makes the SMart festival particularly timely. A one-day celebration that ranges from no-budget DIY shorts to acclaimed features like Sean Baker’s Tangerine and Shin-Ching Tsou’s A Left-Handed Girl, it’s a clear demonstration that filmmakers are embracing bargain technology to create a new generation of Read more ...
Helen Charlston
“I’m a German Romantic at heart – there’s no better music.” I found myself saying this recently after performing Robert Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe. It was in response to a deceptively simple question from an audience member: why Schumann? Other composers are, of course, available (oh Schubert, where would we be without you…), but for the moment, at least. I am Schumann-obsessed.Written in his annus mirabilis of song, Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love) comes from a sudden flurry of creativity in 1840. 16 poems by Heinrich Heine chart a cycle of obsession: elation tipping into despair, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
“Guys, don’t grow old gracefully… it wouldn’t suit you,” The Who’s Pete Townshend told the Rolling Stones at their induction to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. They listened. Fast-forward some four decades to 2026, and the surviving Stones have eschewed any state of grace for a raucous, almost confrontational new album in Foreign Tongues that bubbles over with energy and purpose. It picks up where their studio comeback Hackney Diamonds left off and turns it all up a few notches.However, a word of warning: if the “loudness wars” of modern-day production get you down, you’ll need to Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Sweating in my lair, there’s no trip to the mecca this year. If the festival was on, I'd be there right now, but it’s a fallow year and Glastonbury Festival is keeping its head down. The Glastophilic chat rooms bubble with antsy longing. My house is prowled by ghosts of yesteryear. Finetime’s camera is dormant. The cows on the farm chew their cud in peace.Instead of taking it to the wire in the fields of dreams, scribbled later with the urgency of one possessed, sleepless and obsessed, I can only offer ruminations. Snapshots and snippets. Aided by a large box of mementos from the attic, I Read more ...
Mark Kidel
To celebrate Miles Davis’s 100th anniversary this week, Fontana have released a “ Deluxe Re-issue” of one of the jazz giant’s best-known recordings, the soundtrack for Louis Malle’s first film Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) 1958. This ranks as some of the most emblematic specially recorded film music: a classic that in its own way characterises Miles’s unique capacity for constant re-invention throughout a long and adventurous career.
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The new release is a neatly packaged two-CD combo, the original tracks supplemented Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Four storeys above Oxford Circus, the noise and bustle recedes to be replaced by a parallel universe of gleaming glass-fronted workspaces and discreet installations of modern art. The room where I am sitting looks towards the upper reaches of the grand neo-classical façade of the London Palladium, framed by a blue early evening spring sky. On the table in front of me, a chess board displays pieces representing landmarks from London and New York that include tastefully sculpted models of the London Eye and the Chrysler Building. On the wall next to the reception, a quote from Leonardo da Vinci Read more ...
Benjamin Baker
For me, New Zealand has always felt like both a centre and an edge. It is a place people travel to, rather than through. That sense of distance brings clarity and space to explore, but it can also mean that New Zealand’s creativity develops slightly out of view of the wider world.At the World’s Edge (AWE) Festival grew out of that tension. We launched in 2021 in the Queenstown Lakes region of New Zealand’s South Island with a simple idea: to bring people together through the intimacy of chamber music, and to create a space where New Zealand artists and composers could be heard alongside Read more ...
Guido Martin-Brandis
In preparing to direct Handel’s rarely staged Imeneo for Cambridge Handel Opera Company (CHOC), I have been fascinated to reflect on the periods of surging interest decline in the history of opera. Imeneo is Handel’s penultimate Italian opera, and as the genre waned in popularity in London, Handel needed to reinvent his business model and artistic outlook to be able to create and live. His solution was English Oratorio: unstaged concert works that were nevertheless still highly dramatic and narrative focussed, starting his final period of enormous creativity and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There were scattered moments of genuine excitement during the 98th Academy Awards, which saw One Battle After Another emerge with six Oscars, best picture and director amongst them, followed by the 16-times-nominated Sinners with four, including Michael B Jordan as best actor, and Frankenstein with three. It was hard not to thrill, for instance, at Sinners' Autumn Durald Arkapaw making history as the first woman ever to win for cinematography, a milestone she registered by having all the women in the audience stand: "I don't get here without you guys," she told the crowd. Or to be moved Read more ...