Features
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 ...
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:
Image
L’ Read more ...
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 ...
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 ...
Cathi Unsworth
I got my contract to write Season of The Witch: The Book of Goth just as the first Covid lockdown began in March 2020. During that time of plague and alienation, I time-travelled back to the era I had pinpointed as the beginning of this suitably dark and prophetic musical subculture: the 1978-9 Winter of Discontent. I planned to chart the course of Goth's rise from the ashes of punk and the economic crisis that paved the way for Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government to take power on 4 May 1979. Then follow its course through the coming decade of Cold War, Miners' Strike, Read more ...
Jonathan Bank
I first became aware of the playwright Teresa Deevy, the Irish author of the Jermyn Street's imminent A Wife to James Whelan, while leafing through a production history of the Abbey Theatre through 1951 and finding her name six times between 1930 and 1936. She was among a handful of women writers who had multiple plays produced at Ireland's National Theatre.Born in 1894 in Waterford, Deevy lost her hearing at the age of 19, a result of Meniere’s disease, which ran in her family. She joined a deaf sister in London to learn how to lip-read and was captivated by the theatre, where she would Read more ...
Veronica Simpson
In the world of contemporary classical music, it takes confidence to launch your seasonal programme with an 18-year-old performer, and no hint of the repertoire. But Ryan Wang’s opening concert for the 2026 Bold Tendencies (BT) season filled every one of the 300 or so plastic bucket seats clustered around a gleaming Steinway grand. Inspired by this year’s Euphoria theme, Wang (pictured below) picked three pieces that most would have avoided for fear of overfamiliarity: Mozart’s Variations on “Ah vous dirais-je, Maman” (aka Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star); four Schubert Impromptus; and Read more ...
Bedouine
I watched a video online recently of a three-year-old girl being quizzed with questions about her mom (adorable). It was a Mother’s Day video set up by her father who was speaking just out of frame. Some of the questions were answered with precision. "What's your mom's name?" was met with her mother's actual name. When the stakes rose and it came time for her middle and last name, the answers provided were "mommy" and "mom", respectively. I delighted in this video for many reasons. Among them was that it was very relatable. It reminded me of how comfortable we get with the people closest 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.
Image
The new release is a neatly packaged two-CD combo, the original tracks supplemented Read more ...