Features
Peter Culshaw
Tom Russell is, certainly geographically, the last great American songwriter. His adobe ranch-house is perched as far west in Texas as you can go, near El Paso and just over the border from the Mexican town of Juarez. Russell approves of the saying, “If you can’t piss in your front porch, you are living too close to town”.Little known in the UK, the 56-year-old has put out 25 albums and built himself a formidable reputation as a songwriter in the States. He has made several records of cowboy music, but has also strayed way off beam with a “folk opera” called The Man from God Knows Where and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Acclaimed American conductor and Bernstein protégée Marin Alsop (b.1956) begins the Bernstein Project tomorrow at the South Bank Centre, a joyous year-long celebration of the legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990). She talks here about her formative friendship with the great man, about their swimming days when he was her teacher at Tanglewood, about his rivalry with Karajan and why she thinks his compositions changed the face of American 20th-century music.IGOR TORONYI-LALIC: Leonard Bernstein doesn't come off well in the three 20th-century musical anthologies I own. Read more ...
Lenny Henry
I never used to understand Shakespeare at school. We didn’t know it was sexy, we didn’t know it was violent, we didn’t know it was moving. We just thought it was this crap archaic stuff we had to read. Then I was taken to see Romeo and Juliet with Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey at the pictures. Extraordinary colours. Really fantastic movement and light. For a 14-year-old boy, it blew my mind.I got asked to do Shakespeare a lot throughout my career and I kept saying no. Jude Kelly asked me to do Iago in a reversed version of Othello. Trevor Nunn said, "It would be good experience." My gut Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Away We Go is the name of Sam Mendes's fifth film, released in Britain this week. But the title could also serve as the buccaneering mantra of a Cambridge-educated Englishman whose career continues to shed any whiff of his home country. On stage or screen, the director is continually drawn to stories culled from across the Atlantic, where he now lives. And why not? If you had directed a first film called American Beauty that would lead to five Oscars and America eating out of your hand, you, too, might well return for more. Mendes's output isn't merely a reflection of his taste, although that Read more ...
sheila.johnston
As graceful in his approach to death as he was in life, Patrick Swayze died yesterday at the age of 57. I met the actor in 1995 at a turning point in his career, just as the sexy lustre of Dirty Dancing and Ghost was beginning to wear thin. It would have been easy to mock Swayze as a crank for his New Age eccentricities, but his charm, his ingenuousness and his can-do ebullience - a determined energy that also distinguished him in his fight against pancreatic cancer - all proved irresistible. Here is a slightly edited version of that encounter.Before starting a film, Patrick Swayze likes to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It sounds like a joke. These two Jehovah’s Witnesses walk up a garden path. You could, suggests Ross Noble, write it and “give it to someone like Jim Davidson”. Only this one's a true story. A few years ago these two Jehovah’s Witnesses, a man and a woman, walked up Ross Noble’s garden path. For all his big black hair, thick Geordie accent and a face that says "I am a stand-up comic", they evidently had no idea whose door they'd knocked on. “They said, ‘Can we talk to you about God?’ And I said, ‘Go on then.’ We stood on the doorstep for an hour talking and then they came in. I said, ‘Do you Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Miss Marple is frequently described as “a little old lady”, but for all that she casts a giant shadow. Just ask any new actress invited to portray this most beloved of characters. When you play the spinster sleuth, you have massive shoes to fill. That has certainly been Julia McKenzie’s experience.The 68-year-old this week appeared for the first time in the part of Agatha Christie’s much-loved amateur detective. She took over the role from Geraldine McEwan, who retired last year after starring in twelve episodes as Miss Marple. McKenzie admits to jangling nerves beforehand. She was well aware Read more ...
james.rampton
Miss Marple is frequently described as “a little old lady”, but for all that she casts a giant shadow. Just ask any new actress invited to portray this most beloved of characters. When you play the spinster sleuth, you have massive shoes to fill. That has certainly been Julia McKenzie’s experienceThe 68-year-old this week appeared for the first time in the part of Agatha Christie’s much-loved amateur detective. She took over the role from Geraldine McEwan, who retired last year after starring in twelve episodes as Miss Marple. McKenzie admits to jangling nerves beforehand. She was well aware Read more ...
robert.sandall
After the untimely death of its founder, the composer Simon Jeffes 12 years ago, all bets were off as to the likely continuance of the Penguin Café Orchestra. I still remember conversations with various members of the Penguin ensemble in December 1997 at the wake in the house in Somerset where Jeffes spent his final days. The general view then seemed to be that without his presiding influence, the PCO’s music would only survive on record. “Simon stopped us sounding naff,” was cellist Helen Liebmann’s blunt conclusion.As a performing entity, the idiosyncratic Penguin formation – with its Read more ...
josh.spero
Surrounded by a heaving, drinking, swooning, sweating blanket of admirers and professional artworld partygoers, Ryan McGinley has come a long way from the caves he shot for his latest show, Moonmilk, which opened at Alison Jacques Gallery last night. He finds it hard to move without being papped or kissed or having a catalogue thrust into his hand for a dedication. He thought about Jonah and the whale when immersed in taking these pictures, so is it like being inside a whale now, at the opening, with churning crowds and this feeding frenzy? “Absolutely!”The relevance of the whale to his work Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The great Spanish lyric tenor Alfredo Kraus died ten years ago, on 10 September 1999, celebrated by opera epicures, but less well-known to mass consumers of the Three Tenors publicity phenomenon. In 1992, during an engagement at Covent Garden, he spoke frankly to me about the deep issues - and dark politics - he felt were raised when populism took over from taste. This interview was published in the Sunday Telegraph.When The Three Tenors got on stage together in Rome on the humid night of July 7, 1990, the world blinked with gratitude and then rushed to the shops to buy the video. Harmony Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When Carlos Acosta danced Spartacus with the Bolshoi Ballet in London in 2007, the man, the time and the place united the strands of a most extraordinary story in ballet, a story of peregrination, of dreadful reverses, of the pursuit of civilisation, of holding on to the best of human values in despairing times.This might, yes, describe Acosta’s own story (captivatingly told in his new memoir No Way Home, HarperPress) - but there is a more epic tale at issue here. It is the story of a dynasty of very great teachers and performers, the Messerers of Moscow.From Russia to Cuba, from London to Read more ...