Features
Ismene Brown
This week Scottish Ballet opens its new season with a ballet of genius that began life in the bath. The bath is a great place for inspiration. The Greek mathematician Archimedes discovered the law of hydrostatics in it. The choreographer Frederick Ashton also had one of his major lightbulb moments while having a soak, idly listening to the radio in 1947 when a new piece of music came on.“It was the most fascinating and perfect music for dancing,” he thought, but he’d missed the name of it so rang up the BBC, who told him it was from America and there was no English recording. After much toing Read more ...
barrie.rutter
Harold Brighouse was a star writer in his time. Today, he’s viewed as a one-play wonder. Everyone knows Hobson’s Choice, his tale of a Salford cobbler outfoxed by his daughters. A hit in New York before its London debut in 1916, the play has been studied by generations of schoolchildren and was made into a classic film by David Lean. But no one remembers much about Brighouse’s other writing. Yet he was prolific, with novels, journalism and 14 other plays to his name. I heard about one of them, The Game, a few years ago.It had fallen into such obscurity that even play publishers Samuel French Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Melody Moore is well named. Her parents must have had a sixth sense that she would be "melodious". This exciting young American soprano has been making waves on both sides of the Atlantic. She has established footholds at both San Francisco and Los Angeles Opera and in the 2008/9 season made her English National Opera debut in Jonathan Miller's new production of La bohème. She returns to the ENO this season as Marguerite in Des McAnuff's new staging of Gounod's Faust, a role which seems to define the direction in which her voice and career are taking her.
Hers is a lyric voice with Read more ...
alain.debotton
Judging from the success of interior design magazines and property shows, you might think that this country was now as comfortable with good contemporary architecture as it is with non-native food or music. But scratch beneath the metropolitan, London-centric focus, and you quickly discover that Britain remains a country deeply in love with the old and terrified of the new. Country hotels compete among themselves to tell us how ancient they are; holiday cottages vaunt that they were already in existence when Jane Austen was a girl. The draughty sash window shows no signs of retiring. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Amazingly, the Vale of Glamorgan Festival has been on the go for more than 40 years, and has got better and better as it has gone along. Until recently, any kind of mould-breaking musical enterprise was likely to collide with the entrenched interests of the Taffia, the Cardiff and County Club, the Welsh Arts Council and the Land of Song.John Metcalf, the festival’s founder and guiding spirit, has somehow managed to thread his way through this hostile territory, and established a festival which is today the pride, if not of Cardiff, at least of Llantwit Major, 20 miles away on the south Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 1913 a 25-old-year mathematician from Tamil Nadu sailed to England. He journeyed at the behest of a Cambridge professor who had been mesmerised by the display of untutored genius evident in the young Indian’s correspondence. Within four years the visitor had grown so depressed by his isolation that he attempted to throw himself under a train.Nearly a century on, the story of the collaboration between Srinivasa Ramanujan and G H Hardy began suddenly exciting the interest of storytellers. In 2007 there was a play premiered off Broadway by David Freeman called A First Class Man. Also in Read more ...
edward.seckerson
René Jacobs: singer, conductor, scholar, archivist, alchemist, teacher. In recent years he's been "rehabilitating" the Mozart operas for the Harmonia Mundi label, eradicating 19th-century retouchings and stylistic anomalies in order to restore these great works to their vibrant original colours. He and his handpicked performers have now arrived at Mozart's beloved Singspiel Die Zauberflöte and the results are quite revelatory.
Jacobs talks about his crusade on behalf of style, 18th century and otherwise. He talks about the hours of reading and researching, the endless detective work offering Read more ...
iris.brooks
The group Pingasan’k “calls for good spirits”. The name refers to “a bucket to put rice in, tied with the bark of a tree”. Regardless of rice or spirits, this band touched my heart. The gentle, haunting sounds come from the bamboo tube zithers (pratuon’k) made from giant mountain bamboo, which is only cut down when they see the moon. “We do not want our instrument to smell sweet or our insects will bite it,” explains leader Arthur Kanying.But the hypnotic groove of the music does sound sweet (Pingasan’k pictured right). Who would expect that these gentle sonic waves include pieces for Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As there's something of a forest theme this weekend on theartsdesk, with the Royal Opera House's If-A-Tree festival curated by Joanna McGregor with Scanner, and a report from this year's Borneo Rainforest World Music Festival, and here, a diary of an extraordinary trip I took in 2003 to sample the culture and music of the Pygmies deep in the heart of the Central African Republic.Day 1: The Beauty Contest
The Miss Bangui beauty contest takes place at the Palais de l'Assemblée, an edifice built by North Koreans, where the Central African Republic's parliament used to meet. Since democracy was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No woman has ever achieved a higher profile on the French horn than Sarah Willis. Why? It's not as if she is a renowned soloist. But she is the first and only woman to join the brass section of the world's most celebrated and widely followed orchestra. It will be no surprise if this Saturday the BBC cameras as usual pick her out from row upon row of Teutonic males in the second of the Berlin Philharmonic’s two Prom 2010 appearances. But in addition to her Berliner duties, this year Willis has stepped out from under the orchestra’s giant shadow for the first time.She has recorded a CD of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As befits a film set in Tuscany, Certified Copy is an international affair. It stars Juliette Binoche as a French gallery owner and William Shimell as an English art historian. Its Iranian director is Abbas Kiarostami. The dialogue is in three languages. It’s the latest of la bella Toscana’s many starring roles in what’s been - let's face it - a chequered sort of film career.The film is curious and gets curiouser. Shimell’s art historian, as he reveals in his opening lecture to a respectful audience, is a kind of prophet in his own land. He is presenting a new book on fakes and copies to a Read more ...
ash.smyth
Since winning the Symphony Orchestra of Sri Lanka Concerto Competition at the tender (and record-setting) age of 16, Tanya Ekanayaka has become one of Sri Lanka’s pre-eminent concert pianists. Last month she was the first from her country ever to appear in the long-running Pianists of the World series at St Martin-in-the-Fields, with a programme featuring Bach, Beethoven, Ravel and her own improvised composition, Adahas: of Wings of Roots.A Fellow of Trinity College London and Licentiate of both the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music ( Read more ...