Features
kate.connolly
It is tempting to playfully twist the German language a little to come up with a word that best describes the avant garde German theatre and film director Christoph Schlingensief. A “Wachrüttler”, literally a shaker-upper or rouser, is probably the best title to describe a man who seemed to put every vein and sinew of his body into shaking German society awake. The loss of Schlingensief, who died of lung cancer last Saturday aged 49, has left a gaping hole in the German arts world. One of the most controversial characters of cultural life here, Schlingensief made an enduring impression even Read more ...
laura.thomas
The Leopard is being re-released by the BFI this week in a new digital restoration. Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great Sicilian novel was first seen in 1963 and went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Il Gattopardo, to give it its Italian name, charts the decline of the house of Salina, a once mighty clan of Sicilian nobles who watch their power slip away as Garibaldi drags 19th-century Italy toward unity and modernity. But alongside the political narrative, book and film give a starring role to another timeless Italian reality: food.Lampedusa’s novel Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The world music scene is hungry for new sensations - and Omar Souleyman, about to hit London and the Shambhala Festival, well deserves to be one of them. In the early 1980s the hunger for the exotic focused on anything that came from the parallel universes untouched by the pressures of commercialisation: polyphonic pygmy singing from Central Africa, ecstatic Sufi soul doctors from Pakistan, drone-drenched bagpipe players from Bulgaria or heart-invading praise singers from Mali. Souleyman is the singer in a small band that plays dabke music at weddings in Syria.As the global village has shrunk Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You’ve heard of the Curse of Frankenstein. You know all about the Curse of Hello! But you may not be aware of the deadliest hex of them all. It goes by the name of the Curse of Cruise and, you just never know, it may be about to strike again. Film-goers have nothing to fear personally, not even if they find themselves watching potent soporifics like Interview with the Vampire or Eyes Wide Shut. No, the only way in which the Curse can possibly affect you is if you’re a young actress, and only then if you’ve been cast as Tom Cruise’s leading lady. Cameron Diaz, we suggest you look away now. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
When it’s 33 degrees and rising, boarding a ferry in New York has to be a good plan. One of the newest and weirdest of the city’s watery destinations is Governors Island (no apostrophe - it was removed in 1783 when the British, who used it to house His Majesty’s Governors, surrendered it to New York state). It’s just 800 yards and 10 minutes away from Battery Park, with a terminal next to Staten Island’s, though the free ferry only runs on Fridays and weekends, when the island is open to the public. When the last ferry boat to New York leaves at seven - that is when there’s no evening concert Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Kerry Ellis amassed a legion of adoring fans when she went "green" playing Elphaba in Stephen Schwartz's smash-hit musical both in London and on Broadway. But her pre-eminence as a musical-theatre-diva-cum-rock-chick was secured earlier still when Brian May, the celebrated lead guitarist of Queen, asked her to play Meat in the Queen/ Ben Elton show We Will Rock You. May quickly recognised a symbiosis between them and their CD single Wicked in Rock sprung a rip-roaring reimagining of "Defying Gravity" with Brian May's amazing guitar riffs a key feature.
Now her debut album Anthems from Decca Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Bristolians were invited to make history last weekend. The city saw the opening of the Museum of Stokes Croft, a one-room cabinet of contemporary urban curiosities that includes fake neighbourhood relics and archaeological finds, an early Banksy T-shirt, a large, totemistic multi-coloured bear full of mirrored surfaces by street sculptor Jamie Gilman, a cheap plastic urn containing the ashes of “Bear” - a popular homeless street poet who died last year - evocative children’s drawings of local landmarks, quirky fragments of oral history, politically tinged poems, and a map of Bristol’s world- Read more ...
james.woodall
It had to happen. Until now, I've always resisted. But last Thursday, I had, finally, to tear open the plastic container to get to the protection inside. A nice man from Screen International gave me his before leaving - he'd have no use for it. He added that he wouldn't have handed it over had it been stamped with the festival rubric; you know, something that would make it a keepsake.Nice man, you've been had. As I unfurled the crinkly, wafer-thin, yellow kagoule, there it was, in black, on the back: "Festival del film Locarno with compliments of Pardo Boutique" ("Pardo" being Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“It isn’t a surprise to me, but it is a surprise to him that it isn’t a surprise to me.” On a Monday morning in the rehearsal room at Shakespeare’s Globe, actors and actresses are getting into character. “You’re acting panic,” clarifies the director, “and when you hear his voice it’s real panic.” Exactly how funny is The Merry Wives of Windsor in the 21st century?On the evidence of the Shakespeare’s Globe production, which opened two summers ago to huge acclaim and audiences to match (pictured below), very funny indeed. It is now returning to the Globe before heading off around the globe in Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Ever since I can remember, the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg has played a walk-on part in histories of Soviet music. If you find him in an index at all (probably under Vainberg or Vajnberg, and usually with the first name given him by a box-ticking Soviet border guard in 1939: Moisey, or even Moshe), you’ll usually end up reading one of those melancholy and unhelpful lists: “Shostakovich’s followers include...”Grove’s Dictionary concedes a short and somewhat misleading entry: “His works are often based on a programme, largely autobiographical in nature.” Boris Schwarz, in the standard, Read more ...
sue.steward
International photography festivals are rivalling rock festivals this summer - and rock festivals are featuring photographers. PhotoEspaña (PHE) Madrid beats the lot. Packed with surprise revelations, with central Madrid as the main stage, the fringe all around it, and the whole city involved in the Night of Photography PhotoMaratón, it’s a highly ambitious, even labyrinthine affair.Sixty-nine exhibitions by 379 photographers from 42 countries occupied the city’s elegant state institutions and museums, international cultural centres, a former water tower, and a bank or two. The latter are Read more ...
David Nice
You want to see Yuri Bashmet, arguably the greatest living viola player, but you can't because you've chosen to go to a recital by Yevgeny Kissin, one of the world's top pianists, on the same evening in another hall. Even the option of dashing from one half to another is complicated by timing and distance. No, this isn't Berlin, London or Vienna. It's just a typical dilemma in the 17-day life of the Verbier Festival, high in the major Alps of Switzerland's Valais region.The venues may not be pretty, but their surroundings are stupendous, and I don't think I've ever heard so many first-class Read more ...