Features
Peter Culshaw
"It's mostly very clipped and formal, but parts of it have been getting wonderfully wilder and wilder in the last few years." William Christie, whom I’ve met several times in the last decade, is describing his famous French garden in La Vendée, which has featured in many a glossy magazine. But he could also be describing himself.American-born Christie initially made an enviable reputation as a rather high-minded, even severe, director of Les Arts Florissants, one of the leading early music groups. They have been showered with international awards, particularly for their revivals of early Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Edward Seckerson talks to actor/singer Nigel Richards about his new album A Shining Truth - a handsome compendium of 14 hitherto unrecorded musical theatre songs by major talents as Howard Goodall, Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa, Conor Mitchell, Richard Taylor, and others no less significant. Musical Theatre aficionados will recall Nigel's unforgettable performance in the title role of Adam Guettel's masterpiece Floyd Collins at London's Bridewell Theatre and will know that few have done more to champion the cause of new writing than he has. This isn’t an album it’s a manifesto - and you Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Go on, admit it. You’ve done it too. Someone is talking in your vicinity and you’ve turned round to give them evils. It’s a manoeuvre I’ve been perfecting for years. The classic rebuke is in the speedy twist of the neck, a withering glance in the perpetrator’s general direction (but not, crucially, into their eyeballs: too confrontational) followed by the slow, affronted turn back to face the front. For one night only, the gesture says, you are singlehandedly ruining my life. I didn't pay more than I can afford to listen to you whisper through Beethoven/Shakespeare/”The Great Gig in the Sky Read more ...
ben.ferguson
Damien Hirst this week unveiled No Love Lost, Blue Paintings among the Old Masters at the Wallace Collection. Although an exhibition of 25 new paintings by Britain's most talked-about artist might seem a change of direction, Hirst takes a different view. The new works, created between 2006 and 2008, mark the artist's return both to hands-on production and a quieter life at home. Is it the recession? Or is he getting old?BEN FERGUSON: No Love Lost is a move away from your trademark plastic pieces. What has brought about this shift to painting?DAMIEN HIRST: I have always had a romance with Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“You’ve no idea how boring everything was before I met you.” As written by Nick Hornby and spoken by Carey Mulligan in An Education, these words of gratitude come after a moment of stillness in which Jenny, Mulligan’s character, reflects on her experience as a 16-year-old schoolgirl taken on a social joyride by a 35-ish hustler, David (Peter Sarsgaard). It’s Twickenham in the early Sixties, the age of austerity's not yet over, and they’re sitting in his Bristol outside her house at night. She tells him she sometimes thinks he’s the only person who’s done anything in “this whole stupid Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A century ago Sergei Diaghilev launched the Ballets Russes, the crucible where modern lyric and dance theatre was born. Picasso and Matisse jostled against Nijinsky, Debussy and Markova, Satie and Cocteau against Fokine, Stravinsky and Pavlova. Tomorrow the spirit of Diaghilev is invoked in the premiere at Sadler's Wells, London, of four new dances by today’s leading choreographers. Russell Maliphant: AfterLight ISMENE BROWN: What object or image would you say most captures for you the spirit of Diaghilev?RUSSELL MALIPHANT: I’ve worked with a lot of photographs of Nijinsky, but also Read more ...
edward.seckerson
theartsdesk.com presents The Seckerson Tapes, a series of live and uncut audio interviews from acclaimed broadcaster Edward Seckerson. We start with Jamie Bernstein - Leonard Bernstein's eldest daughter - who has been in London launching the year-long Bernstein Project at the South Bank. Seckerson, a long-standing Bernstein devotee and disciple, sat down for a frank and open discussion about exactly who her "dad" was.This is the uncut interview.
Jasper Rees
I Found My Horn is both an autobiography of sorts and a biography of sorts. It tells the story of those phases of my life, as a schoolboy and then again aged 40, when I happened to have a French horn in my hands. But it is also an account of the instrument's long and extremely colourful history. In the 20th century that history is inextricably connected to the name of Dennis Brain, probably the greatest soloist the instrument has ever known.Although he died in a car crash more than 50 years ago, since publication many people have written to me to say that Read more ...
josh.spero
The art world has never been unself-aware – its navel is deeper and more gazed-at than almost any other art form. So what happens when you bring artists unaware of the art world into the contemplated and contemplating fold? The Museum of Everything, a new space in Primrose Hill, north-west London, which opened this week, is devoted to Outsider Art and by extension to answering this question.James Brett is the founder of the Museum of Everything and a keen collector of art made by non-traditional artists; he rejects the term 'outsider art' as being too loose and inaccurate.He sees his artists Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The sealed invitation was from the man himself: no, not Andrew Lloyd Webber (who can, as we know, work in mysterious ways) but the Phantom. Nightly (and twice on Tuesdays and Saturdays) he vanishes from his underground lair deep in the bowels of the Paris Opera House (aka Her Majesty’s Theatre) leaving only his familiar half-mask as a symbolic reminder of his continuing omnipotence on stages throughout the world.For 23 years Phantom fans have been wondering what became of him after that “final” exit? Frederick “The Jackal” Forsyth, no less, raised hopes for a sequel with his novella The Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I am not that objective about Magma. For one thing, when I saw them as a 16-year-old in the Seventies the intensity of the band caused me to have an out-of-body experience, something that has happened neither before or since. It’s the kind of thing you remember. It’s hard to formulate balanced critical opinions when you are floating up near the ceiling, looking down on your body. I met the leader and creative visionary behind the band, Christian Vander, a couple of weeks before last night’s Barbican concert, which was billed as a Celestial Mass. As someone more expressive than me put it, “ Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Children’s theatre is rarely given serious attention by the critics and while it’s true that much of it doesn’t bear scrutiny, there are companies whose work could teach adult theatre a thing or two. Theatre-Rites is the trailblazer of those companies. For the past 14 years it has produced some extraordinarily ambitious work.Where most children's drama takes place in proscenium-arch theatres with interval ice creams on ready supply, Theatre-Rites produced Salt in a derelict salt factory in Essen. Its award-winning show, Mischief, is slightly more accessible: it is currently touring and can be Read more ...