Features
edward.seckerson
Craig Urquhart was Leonard Bernstein's personal assistant for the last five years of his life. In this touchingly frank interview he talks about the man he knew, the man he revered, the man who wanted to be all things to all people and who consistently pushed himself to the limit in the service of the music that drove him.
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The Bernstein Project is a 10-month celebration of Leonard Bernstein - one of the most charismatic men of the 20th century. A composer and conductor who wrote poetry and loved science; a pop icon revered by audiences, critics and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) may be the great idealiser of American smalltown life, but many of his paintings took their cues from Dickens, and they thus have an English tang. None more so than Merrie Christmas (pictured below), which Rockwell painted for the cover of 7 December 1929 edition of the Saturday Evening Post: Tony Weller, the philosophising coachman father of Mr Pickwick’s manservant Sam, is shown cracking his whip with one hand and doffing his holly-spiked hat with the other.Resplendent in a great blue coat, a red scarf and beige breeches and waistcoat, as fat-bellied if not as Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Craig Urquhart was Leonard Bernstein's personal assistant for the last five years of his life. In this touchingly frank interview with Edward Seckerson he talks about the man he knew, the man he revered, the man who wanted to be all things to all people and who consistently pushed himself to the limit in the service of the music that drove him.
The Bernstein Project is a ten-month celebration of Leonard Bernstein - one of the most charismatic men of the 20th century. A composer and conductor who wrote poetry and loved science; a pop icon revered by audiences, critics and musicians alike, and Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Jacques Audiard's A Prophet arrives in Britain laden with plaudits (Best Film at the London Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize in Cannes and a fistful of superlative reviews). Here, in the first of a series of illustrated masterclasses, in which leading directors introduce clips from their work, Audiard reveals the secrets of how he shot two of A Prophet's memorable scenes.Audiard has directed just five features in a 15-year career, but they are all provocative, unusual films that it's well worth catching up with (the others are See How They Fall, A Self-Made Hero, Read My Lips and The Beat That Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Amongst all the musical benefits for the victims of the Haiti earthquake, one club event which took place on Wednesday night in London stands out as a small, but powerful, beacon of hope. Not because it could rival Jay Z and U2 for levels of funds raised, but because it represented levels of commitment, self-motivation and unity among the capital's multi-ethnic youth subcultures that flies in the face of scare stories about gang violence, drugs, educational failure and all the rest of it. Raising well over £10,000 for Haitians, the entire event on Wednesday night at the club Den/Centro was Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Gilbert & Sullivan's audacious parody of Victorian melodrama, Ruddigore, is as spirited a piece of topsy-turvy confection as the celebrated Savoyards ever produced. It arrives at Opera North in a brand-new production directed by Jo Davies and conducted by John Wilson, whose loving restorations of MGM musicals proved such a sensation at last year's BBC Proms season. Edward Seckerson went behind the scenes to meet them both and his exclusive podcast whets the appetite for an evening of cunning disguises, dastardly deeds, and an abundance of cracking good tunes.Click here to listen to The Read more ...
hilary.whitney
"What is it about Schubert’s music that has such power 180 years on? It has nothing to do with who he slept with or what he had for breakfast – it’s the work," insists filmmaker Christopher Nupen, whose series of films about composers is currently showing on BBC Four. "If you’re dragged towards the quotidian and the sensational, you’ll be pulled away from that elusive essence in the work that nobody has ever succeeded in explaining, but which remains one of the highest expressions of the human mind.”Nupen is also emphatic that the films, which feature Bizet, Sibelius, Respighi, Paganini, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Nashville is much more than the Grand Ol’ Opry, big hairdos and rhinestones, and I was looking for something beyond the occasionally enjoyable kitsch. I was failing to make much sense of the place and fell back on a technique which I’ve often found produces results when somewhere unfamiliar – ask the musicians themselves who they most respect. One name kept coming up – Guy Clark, who it became obvious was a city legend, a songwriters’ songwriter. I turned up at Clark’s house at 11 in the morning, and he offered me a drink from an already open bottle of Bourbon. I asked him for an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In this era of spectacular divas from Russia, Latvia and Romania, it is often remarked that the Italian lyric soprano is a commodity in distressingly short supply. Hoping to rectify that sorry situation is Tuscany’s Maria Luigia Borsi, who will be making her London debut at the Wigmore Hall on Sunday, singing a luxuriant programme of Puccini, Catalani and Mascagni.“My favourite composer is Puccini,” says Borsi, “and I feel very good when I sing Puccini’s music. I was born in the south of Italy, near Rome, but I grew up in Tuscany not far from Pisa and Livorno. Perhaps for that reason I love Read more ...
michael.pennington
The Russians have always been good at writers' houses. The Soviets especially. When I first saw Tolstoy's house his blue smock was hanging behind the door, a manuscript was on his desk but the chair pushed back as if he'd nipped out for a moment and would be back. It was a frankly theatrical effect and the better for it. Like Tolstoy’s, Chekhov's two houses - one in Melikhovo near Moscow and the other in Yalta in the south - were well funded and maintained and imaginatively presented in those days. Only the last is true now.When I went to Melikhovo in 1997 it was in the hands of dedicated Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Don’t look down,” comes the exhortation from somewhere on the floor. "Look ahead." I am testing out a new bit of kit, a large wooden cylinder encased in a metal frame, suspended via ropes and pulleys from a high ceiling. The diameter is big enough for me to be able to stand up and walk. Or not. The inclination is to watch your feet as, like a hamster, you power the rotation of the drum. Trouble is if you look down you lose your balance. So I look ahead and take grandmother’s footsteps which are barely strong enough to get the thing moving at all. "Take bigger strides," comes more advice. But Read more ...