Features
Peter Culshaw
A bumper week for blues and soul artists including some staggeringly good vintage videos from Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin and Son House. Birthday composers are Stephen Sondheim, Michael Nyman and Bela Bartok. Then there’s Vivian Stanshall from the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band doing the “Intro and the Outro”. “Princess Anne on sousaphone. Adolf Hitler, looking very relaxed on vibes… Nice.”21 March 1943: Vivian Stanshall narrates “The Intro and the Outro” with the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. Featuring “the Count Basie Orchestra on triangle”. Simultaneously brilliant and stupid.
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simon.broughton
When I was asked 12 months ago by the BBC if I’d be interested in making a film on Henryk Górecki (in Poland) and Arvo Pärt (in Estonia) for their Sacred Music series, I said yes, almost immediately. I’d been very impressed by the first series and liked the idea pairing of two composers writing religious music in the communist Eastern Bloc who have become almost cult figures in our secular age. Górecki became the fastest-selling living classical composer when Nonesuch’s recording of his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, featuring soprano Dawn Upshaw, was championed by the just-launched Read more ...
peter.quinn
My first encounter with Arvo Pärt’s music is indelibly etched on my consciousness. My piano teacher – the late Susan Bradshaw – placed a piece in front of me which, from a visual point of view alone, was immediately intriguing. Consisting of just two pages, what was most striking about the music was its utter simplicity: there was no time signature; no changes of tempo, key or dynamics; no textural variation. Playing through this quiet piano miniature I was dumbstruck by its crystalline beauty. The piece was Pärt’s Für Alina. I was hooked.This was 25 years ago when I was an Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
If music writers love to place artists in genres, it is a more-than-usually fruitless task with Magnetic Fields, the brainchild of “composer, multi-instrumentalist and bubblegum purist” Stephin Merritt. Many people discovered Magnetic Fields (named after the surrealist André Breton’s novel Les Champs Magnetiques) with their 3-CD box set 69 Songs, which was released in 1999. The titles themselves suggested some of his musical playgrounds, such as “Punk Love”, “Love is Like Jazz” or “World Love”. Others referred sometimes obliquely to Billie Holliday, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Before Shutter Island - long, long before - there was The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. First released in 1920, Robert Wiene's hallucinogenic film descends, like that of Martin Scorsese who cites it as a major influence, into the creepy shadowlands between sanity and madness. This spring Caligari goes on national tour (details below) spruced up with a musical accompaniment by Minima, a four-strong rock group which specialises in supplying the sound for silents. The group consists of drums (Mick Frangou), bass (Andy Taylor), cello (Greg Hall) and guitar (Alex Hogg). Here, Hogg talks about Minima's Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The music world is reeling from the death of Charlie Gillett. He was not just an influential DJ who was instrumental in widening the listening habits of millions of listeners on his World Service and other radio shows, a journalist, writer and a key figure in promoting global music. He was also a beacon of decency and rare integrity in the music world who affected so many people. Heartfelt tributes have been pouring into his site with postings from complete strangers the other side of the world, to members of his family and even his post-man.I found out the shocking news when Caspar Llewellyn Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Business is booming for Australia's cinemas. 2008 was a record-breaking year at the box office, and international festivals run annually in the major cities. Yet, despite successes as diverse as Lantana, Wolf Creek, Muriel's Wedding and Priscilla Queen of the Desert, just 33 home-grown films were released last year – fewer even than in 1911. Three decades ago, the New Australian Cinema was one of the most exciting national movements in the world, thanks to work like Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mad Max and My Brilliant Career. Today Oz films are struggling. Could it be that - rather like the Read more ...
alice.vincent
At seven o'clock on a Friday night, with the first spring twilight of the year as a backdrop, Newcastle’s Civic Centre reverberated to a new composition for its Carillon bells. Mingling eerily with birdsong, it marked a rather different start to the weekend from the hoards of hen nights getting ready for a night on the Toon. This was the opening night of AV, the biennial international festival of electronic arts.The festival chose energy as its curatorial theme. It was a snug fit for a town associated as strongly with its foundations in industry, and more recently with economic hardship and Read more ...
ash.smyth
When the subversive graphic artist Sarnath Banerjee won a MacArthur grant he opted "to research the sexual landscape of contemporary Indian cities", embroiling himself in the aphrodisiac market of old Delhi and introducing the English reading public to the great Hindi word swarnadosh (erm, "nocturnal emissions"). Banerjee (b. 1972) is generally credited with having introduced the graphic novel to India. Incorrectly, as it happens; but with Corridor (2004) and The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (2007) – over and above his work as illustrator, publisher and film-maker – the Goldsmiths-trained Read more ...
edward.seckerson
On the eve of his brand-new staging of Janáček's Katya Kabanova for English National Opera, David Alden - the one-time "bad boy" of opera - talks about first-night riots, Britten and Donizetti triumphs, and the dramatic potency of Janáček. Live and uncut.
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David Nice
Britain's most communicative singing actor, lyric-dramatic tenor Philip Langridge has died at the age of 70. I offer a personal reminiscence, looking back on some of the greatest theatrical experiences of my life, and ask conductors Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Mark Elder, Edward Gardner and Vladimir Jurowski as well as director Richard Jones what Langridge's example has meant to them. List your top ten operatic performances: it's an exercise some critics are asked to undertake by rating-hungry newspapers, and a task many of us like to indulge in simply to remind ourselves what's truly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's appropriate, given that the Oscars remain the mother of all awards shows, that Sunday night's ceremony made a point of honouring both a mother from hell (Mo'Nique in Precious) and another from Inspirational Movie heaven (Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side). But it was clear there was one thespian earth-mother who reigned supreme as a long ceremony went on. And on. And on. That, of course, is Meryl Streep, now the most-nominated actress in Oscar history and a touchstone of sorts throughout the evening. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin may have been the night's nominal hosts, but Streep Read more ...