Features
Peter Culshaw
You may have your favourite version of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and a front-runner in many lists will be William Christie’s version with Les Arts Florissants (Christie will be performing it again with them this Saturday at the Barbican). But easily the most memorable one I have ever heard was conducted by Teodor Currentzis. In Siberia.Currentzis, whose career trajectory seems to have been vertical, is someone who completely polarises critics. I met the conductor in a basement restaurant in Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia. We were only on the starter, borshch-like soup with unnamed Read more ...
sheila.johnston
The Nouvelle Vague was always a bit of an all-boys club, but Agnès Varda counts as a good deal more than the token female of the gang. Her name might come to mind less quickly than Godard, or Truffaut, or Chabrol, when the talk turns to the fiery young turks who transformed the face of French cinema (and of world cinema, come to that). But Varda's films, with their wicked humour, their razor intelligence and effortless panache, stand proud alongside those of her peers. And her status is sealed by the release this month of her latest movie, The Beaches of Agnès, and a box set (the first of two Read more ...
anne.billson
Your friends never learn. No matter how many times you tell them you don't look on going to the cinema as a social activity, they still insist on dragging you along with them. And even though you've told them a hundred times that, after a hard day's writing about Béla Tarr the only film you can even consider watching afterwards is District 9, they still call up and say things like, "Hey, let's go and see the latest Michael Haneke," or, "What do you say to Hunger?" or, "How about that new Iranian film?"The usual arguments ensue. They say, "But Mr McCritic gave it five stars and four smiley Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jan Ravens is probably best known for several series of Dead Ringers, broadcast first on Radio 4 then BBC2, when she voiced all the female characters from Kirsty Wark and Fiona Bruce to Ann Widdecombe and Nigella Lawson. Before that she was part of the Spitting Image team, appeared on Alexei Sayle's Stuff and in sitcoms No Frills and The Grimleys. She has also appeared in 2DTV and Alastair McGowan's Big Impression.She was a member of Cambridge Footlights and directed the The Cellar Tapes, the revue whose cast included Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Tony Slattery and Emma Thompson and which was Read more ...
robert.sandall
Reputations, it seems, can grow in ways that elude even their owners. When the original five members of Mott The Hoople finally decided to re-form, 35 years after they drifted apart, they booked two shows at the Hammersmith Apollo in October and crossed their fingers. According to their 70-year-old vocalist Ian Hunter, “we realised if we were ever going to do it, it was now or never, but we still thought we’d be lucky to fill the second night.”The response astonished them – and me. Two sold-out nights at the Apollo rapidly turned into five, with talk of an American tour to follow. A list of Read more ...
mark.hudson
In 1522, Jacopo Tebaldi, agent of Titian’s great patron Alfonso d’Este, paid a visit to the artist who had claimed to be too ill to work. "I have been to see Titian," he wrote to Alfonso, "who has no fever at all. He looks well, if somewhat exhausted, and I suspect that the girls whom he paints in different poses arouse his desires, which he then satisfies more than his limited strength permits. Though he denies it."The nature of Titian’s relationships with his models has exercised the imaginations of critics and historians from his day to this. For centuries it was simply assumed that Titian Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Two ballets are premiered this month with big scientific subjects and new commissioned scores. Birmingham Royal Ballet's David Bintley was inspired by Einstein's principle of relativity, with a Matthew Hindson score, while Mark Baldwin at Rambert Dance Company has been excited by Darwin, with a Julian Anderson score. How does science meet dance? Einstein+Birmingham Royal Ballet: e=mc2 by David Bintley ISMENE BROWN: How do you think science connects with dance?DAVID BINTLEY: Really I was looking for a subject to work on with the particular composer, Matthew Hindson. I came across Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a new British film coming soon called Dead Man Running. It features the rapper 50 Cent (aka Curtis “No Relation of the King of Pop” Jackson) as an American loan shark who, suffering in the financial downturn, visits these shores to lean somewhat heavily on a couple of defaulters. The film includes the obligatory flavourings for this sort of cheerful low-life caper: a dog track, and Danny Dyer. But in case you think you know exactly where you are with Dead Man Running, wait up. At the bottom of the press release it says this: “Produced by premiere league UK stars Ashley Cole and Rio Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Hélène Grimaud, the pianist whom Le Figaro dubbed “perhaps the most fascinating artist of our age”, apologises that her overalls smell of deer meat. She has, she explains, been feeding her wolves. While she goes back into the fenced compound with them, she suggests I stay outside. “They’re actually not as dangerous as you might think. But they are socially ambitious, and might attack if they sense you are weak". I feel weak, suddenly.I’m more than happy to stay outside the fence with her pet German shepherd, Eno (named after the “sonic landscaper” and U2 producer). As she hugs a younger wolf Read more ...
mark.hudson
In 1519 Titian was commissioned by Alfonso d’Este, the famously irascible Duke of Ferrara, to provide the first of three paintings for a study, the so-called camerino d’alabastro or alabaster room. If the following five years of delays and procrastination drove the duke almost to distraction, they produced what is arguably the most famous room in the history of Western art.When I first saw Bacchus and Ariadne it hung on its own screen in front of a huge doorway, linking two of the most important parts of the National Gallery. You could see it shining out from several rooms away, a jubilant Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The first in a series of podcasts in which the writer, broadcaster and former presenter of BBC Radio 3's Stage and Screen Edward Seckerson interviews the leading lights of opera and classical music. Here, the team behind English National Opera's new production of Puccini's Turandot which premieres next month.Listen to this episode.
A new production of the composer’s operatic swansong directed by young theatre director Rupert Goold, with German soprano Kirsten Blanck in her UK stage debut as the man-hating ‘ice princess’; Welsh tenor Gwyn Hughes Jones as the unknown prince whose death-defying Read more ...
tom.russell
To mark the release of Tom Russell's superb new album Blood and Candle Smoke this week, the cowboy singer-songwriter reports on his trip earlier this month to the Mexican city of Juarez, one of the most dangerous cities in the world, just over the border from where he lives in El Paso, Texas.
"Down below El Paso lies Juarez, / Mexico is different, like the travel poster says…" Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard, "Mexican Divorce"That was the summer of "birds falling out of trees," as the Apaches might say. Looming weirdness. I'm in a beat-up Juarez taxi cab, inching slowly away from the Plaza Read more ...