Features
Veronica Lee
On my previous trip to the Second City in 2009, the much-awaited Art Institute of Chicago extension wasn’t quite ready for visitors, but is now about to celebrate its first birthday, and it’s a treat. The Modern Wing adds 35 per cent more space to the Institute, bringing it up to a nice round one million square feet and making it America’s second biggest art museum after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was designed by Renzo Piano, whose new wing (another glass-and-steel box) will be unveiled at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art later this year; he’s clearly the go-to guy for Read more ...
luiza.sauma
Jews may or may not have built the pyramids, but we know for certain that they built Hollywood. The names of the men who founded MGM, 20th Century Fox and Paramount speak for themselves: Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B Mayer, Marcus Loew, Joseph Schenck, William Goetz, Adolph Zukor et al. It's no wonder, then, that Hollywood history overflows with Jewish filmmakers, actors and producers. But for all the Spielbergs, Allens, Hoffmans and Weinsteins, one corner of Jewish life has often escaped the cinema: the world of the Orthodox Jew.Some traditional religious sects such as the Amish in Pennsylvania ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's probably a bit early to start picking the best albums of 2010, but I would seriously consider a legal challenge if Diane Birch's Bible Belt isn't there or thereabouts when the votes are counted. Like a long-lost singer-songwriter classic, it accomplishes the trick of sounding instantly familiar, yet Birch herself doesn't sound quite like any other artist you've heard before. Her voice can be soft and supple, but it also has a raw, rasping quality that can saw through a song like "Choo Choo", with its vamping organ and garage-band guitars. By contrast, in the hymn-like "Forgiveness" she Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The charismatic St Petersburg-born Vasily Petrenko has really been turning things around at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra since he took over as principal conductor in 2005. With both standards and audiences on the up he has embarked upon his first major recording project – to record all 15 Shostakovich symphonies for the Naxos label. The two previous releases have received tremendous notices and in this exclusive podcast he talks about the project in general and the latest release - the war-torn Eighth Symphony - in particular.Listen to this episode
Buy Vasily Petrenko's Read more ...
andrew.hammond
At the Vatican, recently, the Pope attended a concert in his honour in the Sala Clementina. This is the great double-height room which stands at the entrance to the private papal apartments; it is where Pope John Paul II’s body lay in state almost exactly five years ago. I was one of about 150 guests, at least a third of whom were cardinals, bishops and other senior clerical figures. As we arrived there was the most ornate and intricate gavotte of seat-taking, lasting a good 40 minutes.While this eddied around us, one of the English critics and I (fortified by a clerical collar, not that that Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Rokia Traoré has always seemed most comfortable creating at trysting points, darting between different worlds without ever quite belonging to any one of them. The daughter of a Malian diplomat, as a child her favourite locations were airports, “this middle point between two places; the idea of leaving a place to go to another one was the most interesting part of my childhood”. As a musician, too, the singer and songwriter gets a creative kick out of being in transit, moving from Mozart to Billie Holiday, from folk to jazz, in order to escape what she calls the “kind of jail” of world music. Read more ...
james.woodall
First, the name. There’s no family link between the 57-year-old German composer and Hitler’s Doctor Death. This Goebbels cuts an impressive figure. Solidly built, with thick white hair and slightly cherubic features, and speaking fluent English, he’s above all accessible and unpretentious. Today, in Germany especially, but also abroad - in the States and Britain, where his renown is growing - the name Heiner Goebbels evokes not hatred but magical stage ambiences, lyrical and parodic song, strange music and hypnotic dance: new wonders from a new Germany.In our conversation, which takes place Read more ...
David Nice
Venezuela's joyful musical education programme known as El Sistema is the phenomenon of the age, the success story that many western countries now seek to replicate. And that's great. But Britain, for a start, might re-engage its own back-to-basics in music quicker by looking closer to home and seeing how Finland does it. In a small population, every child has free access to an instrument until secondary school. So there's clearly a link between the plethora of outstanding classically trained musicians constantly emerging from Finland and a primary-school opera based on the life of Vincent Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Within the space of a single year - 1979 - Barrie Keeffe wrote two scripts which together summed up the very essence of the East End on the eve of Thatcherism. The first, which barely needs introduction, was the now-classic The Long Good Friday. The other was Sus, an explosive play about a black man detained by two racist police officers on the night of the General Election. Sus has since been performed worldwide and a screen version receives its premiere at the East End Film Festival on Saturday, prior to release on 7 May - the day after a certain other election. Meanwhile, a new stage Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Fiona Shaw talks about the not inconsiderable demands of juggling Restoration comedy with German Expressionism. It almost doesn’t bear thinking about. Between shows at the National Theatre, where she’s been delighting audiences with her rollocking Lady Gay Spanker in London Assurance, she enthuses about her second foray into the challenging business of directing opera: Hans Werner Henze’s early gem Elegy for Young Lovers for English National Opera at the Young Vic. She enlightens us about this strange, dream-like opera-play, about the not-so-delicate balance of being a working actor and Read more ...
fisun.guner
During my two-day whistlestop tour of various galleries and arts venues across Glasgow, I’m afraid I didn’t spot one white bike. There are, apparently, 50 of them that punters are free to use for the two-week duration of the city’s second biennial International Festival of Visual Art. It’s a scheme that pays homage to the original Witte Fietsenplan (White Bike Plan) by radical Sixties Dutch movement Provos. Set up as a statement against consumerism, pollution and congestion, the action was predictably short-lived: most of the bikes were either stolen or trashed.But Glasgow is an optimistic Read more ...