Features
fisun.guner
Famous for its fast cars, casino, and stashing away Sir Philip Green’s gazillions, the principality of Monaco certainly isn’t a destination short on bling, nor a sense of faded, somewhat seedy glamour. So it probably isn’t high on anyone’s list for culture, least of all for contemporary art. But things are definitely on the turn: a new museum offering a genuinely challenging programme of international contemporary art has recently opened.Nouveau Musée Nationale de Monaco (NMNM) is housed in two elegant Belle Époque villas: Villa Sauber, currently showing an exhibition of work by British- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The show's curator Jane Pritchard revealed this wonderful kitchen story in a unique walk-round with theartsdesk this week. Her two-year hunt ranged from Diaghilev's passport to glorious Nijinsky costumes, from the Ballets Russes accounts book to astonishing Picasso stage cloths, from precious notated scores by Stravinsky to automated Constructivist art, from ballerinas' slippers and early colour film to Yves St Laurent fashions. There is even a remarkable case containing original manuscripts and typescripts of James Joyce's Ulysses and Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and T S Read more ...
edward.seckerson
"It is a curious tale. I have it written in faded ink, a woman's hand, governess to two children, long ago..." So begins Benjamin Britten's operatic re-imagining of Henry James's ghostly chiller The Turn of the Screw. Oscar Wilde called it "a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale" but how are we supposed to interpret it? In a remote country house, a governess fights to protect two children from menacing spirits. But are these spirits real or imagined?Are they figments of a fevered imagination? Did evil really occur at Bly before the governess's arrival and, if so, what? So many Read more ...
rachel.wagstaff
I remember walking into the Hawthorn Ridge cemetery, seeing a grave of a 20-year-old boy who died on 1 July, 1916, and knowing for the first time why Sebastian Faulks needed to write Birdsong, and why I desperately wanted it to live and breathe and be brought back to the public consciousness again.I first approached Sebastian four-and-a-half years ago. I got his email and asked him if he’d be interested in discussing it as a possibility. Sebastian sent a very gracious email back saying pretty much "Thanks, but no thanks" because he thought Working Title owned the theatrical rights. But he Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Amanda Roocroft was a star from the moment she graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music. At 25, Sir Georg Solti asked her to sing Pamina at the Salzburg Festival. She declined. It was too soon. Where would there be left to go? "Hurry slowly" would seem to have been her motto and now that she is playing - for the first time - a diva with 300 years of experience, the decisions she has made in her career are more than ever falling into perspective.The 300-year-old diva is, of course, the elusive and mysterious Emilia Marty in Janáček's extraordinary opera The Makropulos Case and Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Maybe I hadn’t been paying enough attention. It was only at last year’s Children in Need concert, broadcast on prime time which featured the great and the good of British pop that it finally sunk in just how huge Muse have become – they were there appearing with Sir Paul McCartney, Take That, Leona Lewis and Paolo Nutini. Weren’t Muse the alternative Radiohead-lite band from Devon who sing politically loaded and enjoyably paranoid lyrics against the system and all it stands for? In fact, Muse, while managing to retain something of their outsider status, were evidently bigger - at least, for Read more ...
natalie.wheen
For a creator of any kind, keeping control over what happens to their original work is essential. Their creativity is their livelihood, and their reputation is built on it. They protect it fiercely from other people copying it, altering it, selling it - anything in fact which devalues the work and damages the creators’ earning capacity from it.So it has come as a shock to the entire theatrical design community to find that the Royal Opera House appears to have drawn up a new contract for any new commission which will attack this core principle, which is the basis of English and European Read more ...
sam.bleakley
Sam Bleakley’s first book, Surfing Brilliant Corners, charts a decade of "extreme surf travel" with renowned photographer John Callahan. He is a jazz fanatic and surfer from Sennen, West Cornwall and a multiple European and British Longboard surfing champion. Surfing, Jazz, Geography and Ecology mix as he journeys to the likes of Mauritania, locked in political strife, where “landmines litter access to some of the best waves on the planet"; and Haiti, which "captures my heart and makes it race as if falling in love”.
As Bleakley puts it, “Framing surfing and travel through metaphors of jazz, Read more ...
james.woodall
Cambridge is in pre-term cocktail mood, almost. Its Film Festival slips in after Locarno and Venice, and as Toronto ends, and before Rome (increasingly important) and London (internationally a struggler) start. It tilts in the same direction as the aforementioned, with fully fledged art movies, provocative documentaries and work from a dozen language groups or so, though it's very small and many people might not know it exists.This year, it nearly didn't exist at all. No corks popped as it opened, arriving at its 30th birthday - yes, 30 years of festival films in a city far more famous for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Shortly before he died Merce Cunningham came to see the Trocks’ new parody of his work - he loved the dancing but hated the music. Pace the great man, for most of us watching it Wednesday night the entire thing is a miracle of comedic perception, from the three lanky fellows in strange unitards and weird hair, po-facedly hopping about the stage, to the two mad musicians in black at the side, bursting paper bags, gargling, shaving the microphone, and mooing gently.Patterns in Space, created with the assistance of former Cunningham dancer Meg Harper, is up to the splendid mark of all the Trocks Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
With his sublime renditions of Azerbaijan's classical music, Alim Qasimov is one of the world's great performers. On the eve of the singer's appearance at the Barbican’s Transcender Weekend of spiritual trance music, where he is performing this Sunday, theartsdesk recalls a trip to the old Soviet state to drink vodka, play chess and find out about this extraordinary singer."FIZULI!" Alim Qasimov shouts the word and seems to have taken leave of his senses as he mimes a martial art move in the street. I'm already distracted by the startling sight of young Baku beauties in mini-skirts and Read more ...
edward.seckerson
In the 1960s Des McAnuff played guitar and wrote songs to meet girls. Subsequently life became a little more complicated for the multi-talented writer/ director. His long-standing commitment to the Shakespeare Festival Theatre at the other Stratford - in Ontario, Canada - has won him many plaudits and he is now director emeritus of the La Jolla Playhouse in California where so many important projects have germinated, including his Tony Award-winning production of The Who's Tommy and the forthcoming musical adaptation of Doctor Zhivago with a score by Lucy Simon.
Zhivago opens in Sydney, Read more ...