Features
simon.curtis
When Cranford was first shown in 2007 on a Sunday night and then repeated the following weekend, those first two showings got over 10 million people watching each week. You obviously pay attention to that. And because the first series wasn’t a straight adaptation of a finished book but based on a set of short stories by Elizabeth Gaskell, there was always the potential for more.When people first came to Cranford they found it surprising in a very obvious way. Unlike a Jane Austen adaptation, when you know how it’s going to end, or David Copperfield which I have directed for the BBC, the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The 22nd European Film Awards closed last night with Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon winning Best Director, Screenwriter and Film. Tahar Rahim was Best Actor for his breakthrough performance as a French-Algerian initiate into a prison’s brutal underworld in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, while the absent Kate Winslet won Best Actress for The Reader. Eric Cantona provided the night’s real star-power as he presented a visibly overcome Ken Loach with the Lifetime Achievement Award. But with The White Ribbon simply adding to its Cannes Palme d’Or success, and a quizzical Danny Boyle (pictured) Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The new album of Honduran singer Aurelio Martinez hasn’t got a title yet, or a record label, and will probably come out next year. But already there’s enough buzz about him and it for his UK debut to bring out the great and good from the world music scene. Editors, PRs, DJs, record company types, promoters and journalists were out in force on a rainy December night last Friday in the decidedly un-fiesta-like atmosphere of Islington’s Union Chapel.Some clues were provided in the middle of one of his more downbeat songs, “Lumala Lumaniga” - “The voice that quiets the silence” - about calling Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
What do you do when, on a bright December day in New York City, you have a sudden urge to read Tennyson’s "Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky?" You could get Google to flash up the eight stanzas, or if you’re feeling romantically old-school, you could go to Poets House (no apostrophe - "Some things must never be possessed but shared," said a founder and two-time poet laureate, the late Stanley Kunitz, who died at the age of 100 in 2006) and look it up.The new Poets House (entrance, pictured right) is a sumptuous space on River Terrace in Battery Park City, beside the Hudson River. It’s Read more ...
alice.vincent
Common assumptions about the folk scene in Newcastle would conjure up images of regulars at busker’s night in the pubs around Ouseburn valley. Not so far from the truth, perhaps. But a new project started by Will Lang, who happens to be a tutor at Newcastle Universit, is revitalising the North-East’s traditional association with the genre. PBS6, a supergroup - if you will - of young, exuberant musicians from backgrounds varying from jazz to Irish accordion mastery, are launching their new tour at the Sage in Gateshead tomorrow. Building on the likes of The Unthanks’ modern take on Geordie 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.Two releases are now available and in this exclusive podcast he talks to Edward Seckerson about the project in general and the symphonies in particular. The 11th “The Year 1905” makes extensive use of revolutionary songs and graphically portrays the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Bob Dylan has reminded us recently, The Christmas Album is one of those music industry traditions more likely to deserve an ignominious burial rather than praise. Fortunately, Thea Gilmore has galloped to the rescue with Strange Communion, an artfully shaped collection of songs that shines flickering light into the mystical roots of the Yuletide season."I don't call it a Christmas album, I call it a seasonal album," she warns, with almost lawyerly caution, though there's no denying that two of the songs do have "Christmas" in their title (she refers to it as "the C-word"). But what she had Read more ...
sheila.johnston
"I must apologise for talking ten to the dozen," begins Christian McKay with a confidential air. "I do it when I'm nervous. I'm a rookie - I've never done this before. The stars get media training, but I thought, ‘I'm a naturally gregarious person and I'd rather be an open book'." It can't last, one thinks ruefully. McKay has been clocking up column inches, airtime miles and acres of critical raves as a result of his turn in Me and Orson Welles, Richard Linklater's bittersweet romantic comedy set against the backdrop of Welles' revolutionary 1937 Broadway production of Julius Caesar."Me" is Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are gunshots outside in the street, a boy sits behind his front door desperate to get to ballet class, the two sides of his life colliding in front of his eyes - reality and dream. It’s a favela in Rio, one of the most dangerous cities in the world, a vast estate of poverty riddled with drug crime and addicted young lads with no future other than dealing, until they get shot or jailed. Ballet... well, what an irrelevance.This is the background from which, unbelievably, a fairytale became real. A boy, Irlan da Silva, escaped his certain destiny and this year became a professional ballet Read more ...
terry.friel
Rising spectacularly from the warm turquoise waters of Doha Bay, the building which is probably I.M. Pei’s final and perhaps his greatest work, the iconic Museum of Islamic Art, symbolises the cultural arms race among the Islamic Emirates strung out along the Gulf, on the flank of Big Brother Saudi Arabia.Pei, now 92, journeyed through the Muslim world in search of the inspiration to be able to reflect its artistic traditions. The result is an austere cubist design - the crowning level a minimalist limestone version of a woman’s veiled face that catches the changing light of the sun. On Doha’ Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Anne-Marie Duff doesn't really resemble Margot Fonteyn. Blonde, fresh-faced and blue-eyed, she has nothing of the exotic, olive, Latin complexion that Fonteyn inherited from her Brazilian grandfather. And she never learned ballet, even if, with her long, lean frame and elegant swan neck, she looks more like a dancer than the rather more compact Peggy Hookham of Reigate (as Fonteyn started out in life). But Duff is a tremendously versatile actress, "one of the best around," according to the director Otto Bathurst, who chose her to play the prima ballerina assoluta, in Margot, his biopic which Read more ...
edward.seckerson
English tenor Mark Padmore has enjoyed a career that has seen him grow from a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, through membership of The Sixteen and Hilliard ensembles, to becoming the international Evangelist of choice in performances of Bach’s Passions across the globe. He talks about the people who influenced him – William Christie and Philippe Herreweghe among them – and the prospect of Britten operas in waiting. Padmore is currently enjoying a year-long residency at the Wigmore Hall.Listen here
More information on Padmore's residency at Wigmore Hall