Features
Kieron Tyler
The music of Sibelius might speak of Finland, its unpopulated spaces, vast inland lakes, semi-Arctic climate and long, dark nights, but the annual Lost in Music festival brings together a bewildering array of Finnish bands and singers that range from rockabilly and ska to introspective folk and – of course, the national staple – heavy metal. It's hard to forget Lordi, the monster-costumed heavy-metal outfit that won the Eurovision song contest for Finland in 2006. But, as Sibelius might have agreed, an axe-wielding man in a latex mask is just one aspect of Finnish culture.It's true, though, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
McDonald's (the hamburger people) are rarely acknowledged for their contributions to the arts, but without them we may never have witnessed the meteoric rise of composer Eric Whitacre. When he was 14, he heard a casting call on the radio for a McDonald's TV ad, persuaded his mother to drive him into Reno, Nevada to join the throng of hopeful teenagers, and ended up making a brief appearance in the "McDonald’s Great Year" commercial.This didn’t propel him up the yellow brick road to Hollywood, but it did net him $10,000 in royalties, with which he bought an ESQ-1 synthesizer and a Drumulator Read more ...
sue.steward
The Celtic Tiger ran rampant through Ireland during the boom years of 1995-2007 when national institutions expanded their collections, galleries popped up and collectors, buyers and artists had a rare time. With literature, the new young Chick Lit writers made their mark, sometimes even outselling the serious contemporaries, and Seamus Heaney rightly got a Nobel Prize. With the crash, prices in Dublin’s major art auction houses fell by 50 per cent as the blinged-up property developers froze; if they did buy, they shifted from contemporary to reassuringly Irish "genre paintings" of peasants in Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Conductor and choral scholar Stephen Layton once said that he often wondered what happened to the little boy at his primary school who he thought sang better than he did. The discovering and nurturing of raw talent is an issue very close to his heart and he offers three heartfelt cheers for the work of TV's Gareth Malone in that regard. Stephen was one of the lucky ones - he won a series of scholarships which defined his future and took him from Winchester Cathedral via Eton to King's College Cambridge.
He is currently Director of Music at Trinity College, Cambridge and newly appointed as Read more ...
Sarah Kent
With the Frieze Art Fair now upon us, the only sane response for anyone interested in art is to leave London until the wretched event is over. Art fairs are for art what pimps are for virgins, to misquote Barnett Newman. The work, in other words, doesn’t stand a chance. And just as supermarkets don’t give shelf space to products for you to admire the packaging, art fairs don’t display work for you to look at and enjoy. In each case, the point is to purchase.So why should this matter when commercial galleries do it all the time? It’s a question of degree. In galleries, an artist’s work is Read more ...
sue.steward
The 2010 Brighton Photo Biennial has seen unprecedented numbers of visitors flock to the coast, and tonight will host a talk by one of the most original fine-art photographers working in Britain today. Wolfgang Tillmans will explore his unique and hugely influential approach to photography and the relationship between contemporary art and documentary and will undoubtedly cite his latest projects, the refreshing summer exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery and the recently launched, more audacious event at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.It’s easier to imagine a Tillmans show in the city’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Joan Sutherland’s was the voice of my childhood, the voice on the record-player when my mother, a coloratura soprano, practised her Lucia and Traviata. It was a clear and ravishingly carefree sound, as fluid as a stream bubbling in sunlight, effortlessly scintillating in the highest registers, a voice that almost sounded regretful as it descended to earth.I drank in her bel canto records (I too wanted to be a singer), and generations of trainee sopranos sped through their two-octave scales seeking that sweetness, that blitheness, and also that plummy lushness. Not for the teenaged me the Read more ...
kate.connolly
Just seconds into a performance by the Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil Teresa Carreño it is immediately clear what Sir Simon Rattle meant when he said, “I have seen the future of music.” The passion and physical and mental energy with which they play, along with the sheer joy they seem to glean from it, is enough to instill hope in even the staunchest cultural pessimist. At the Berliner Philharmonie last week, the orchestra - an even more youthful offshoot, or second generation, of the now world-famous Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra - took the city by storm with their vibrant execution of Beethoven Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Those teenage lovers Romeo and Juliet will be dying nightly on a stage near you in various guises for much of the autumn - not as Shakespeare’s play, but as ballets and operas based on it. Next week both Birmingham Royal Ballet and English National Ballet field two of the more famous versions on their autumn tours, while at the end of the month the Royal Opera stages a rare revival of Gounod’s opera.Shakespeare’s play was premiered in 1596 - not until 1776 did the first opera on it emerge, Romeo und Julie by Georg Benda, a near-contemporary of Haydn and Kapelmeister to the Duke of Gotha who Read more ...
mark.cousins
A documentary film I made recently, The First Movie, won the Prix Italia. Wim Wenders sent an email which said, “I loved it.” When I showed it at the prestigious Telluride Film Festival last month, nearly 1000 people turned up to see it, and many were in tears. How did all this happen? I’m not sure that I know. But, looking back, I can see a chain of decisions about the making of the film and the impulses behind it. Don’t all artworks have such a chain?
The first link was, perhaps, watching Dennis Hopper’s great film The Last Movie, which is about a Hollywood film crew intruding in the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Tony Curtis, who has died in Las Vegas at the age of 85, made an improbable leap from Bronx street kid - the erstwhile Bernie Schwarz, who was always getting beaten up - to Hollywood icon in the 1950s and early Sixties. That he was able to do so is a testament to his determination to be an actor on the G I Bill, Universal’s willingness to put raw hunks of beef like him and Rock Hudson (a fellow Navy man) under contract, and Bernie’s own belief in his facile charm.“I finessed myself," he told me in a 1991 interview at the Hotel Bel-Air that ended in an unexpected hug. “And these actors Read more ...
toby.young
"You do understand you'll have no editorial control? None. The BBC and Channel 4 are very clear about that. Control will rest solely with the broadcaster. There's absolutely no wiggle room." The speaker was Alan Hayling, editorial director of Renegade Pictures. We were sitting in Soho House and he was one of over 40 television producers who approached me last autumn with a view to making a documentary about my group's efforts to set up a Free School in west London.I liked the fact that Alan was so clear on this point. My biggest anxiety was that the documentary would make us look like a Read more ...