Features
Cordelia Lynn
As I write this, we've just had our final day in the rehearsal room and are going into tech onstage next week with my new play, which is also reopening the Donmar not only to live performance but follows major renovations at their home address.It’s a funny thing, but I can find it hard to describe what the play is "about" at this time. It has been unmade and remade, become something vividly new outside my own head, which is the process of making a play. If I go back to the initial impulse, it is about a young couple, roughly here, roughly now, and their relationship across roughly 10 Read more ...
theartsdesk
How do we mother “at the end of the world”? Among the ruins of late capitalism, climate catastrophe, and entrenched white state violence?Julietta Singh “admit[s] that at a conceptual level there is a crucial part of me that wants to throw in the towel on human life.” Yet, she adds, “motherhood complicates this conceptual willingness.” The Breaks, addressed to Singh’s daughter for her to read (at six years old) and re-read throughout her lifetime, meditates on the rupture between mother and child that will be necessary for her to inherit and transform this world: “I know it is not just me you Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s been eight years since the first K-Music landed in London, courtesy the Korean Cultural Centre UK, along with world, folk and jazz concert producers Serious. Since then it has brought an eclectic range of bands and musicians from Korea to the stages of the capital, whether that’s the sorrowful storytelling tradition of Pansori, the sonic attack of bands like Jambinai or Black String, the multi-disciplinary music and dance of Noreum Machi, the extraordinary sound of the gayageum – part harp, part oud, part theramin – under the hands of composer Kyungso Park – as well as jazz groups such Read more ...
theartsdesk
Few singers really change your life. Norman Bailey did that for me [writes David Nice of theartsdesk]. The occasion wasn't my first experience of a Wagner opera, but it was the first time I'd been to a performance of his great human comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, during the early 1980s on one of Scottish Opera's visits from Glasgow to the vast barn of Edinburgh's Playhouse.The central figure who slowly steps into the limelight is an operatic version of the real-life 16th century poet-philosopher and shoemaker Hans Sachs. Act Three changes from extrovert comedy and lyricism to Read more ...
theartsdesk
The bleakest time of all for live music during the Covid crisis came in the first four and a half months of this year. Re-emergence came too late for many of the big national opera companies – though the Royal Opera threw down a sensational gauntlet with Richard Jones's new production of Mozart's La clemenza di Tito – but the summer houses were under pressure to start delivering, beginning with Glyndebourne in mid-May.That their directors, CEOs, call them what you (or they) will, and their tirelessly hard-working teams managed to do so much for musicians starved of work makes them, surely, Read more ...
Christopher Haydon
Programming a theatre during a pandemic has been like trying to nail jelly to a set of constantly moving goalposts. Government indecision meant that reopening dates shifted repeatedly while the configuration of our auditorium kept changing as we tried to adapt to ever-evolving regulations around social distancing. Even our audience – once so familiar to us – became an unknown quantity. We put in place rigorous safety measures, but would that really provide enough reassurance to people who had spent more than a year sheltering at home? Would anyone want to come back?On top of all this, was an Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Dylan’s 1980s weren’t great in terms of critical acclaim. As an emerging new fan, I knew that first hand from the scathing reviews accorded Shot of Love by the British music press when it was released in the summer of 1981, it seemed about as welcome as a door-knocking Jehovah’s Witness first thing on a Sunday morning. Saved’s proselytising may have tipped the balance. “The hand is in the hand” Picasso once remarked – describing the most reliable marker of an artists’ skill – and the hands raised up in the album art for 1980’s Saved stuck out in the wider culture like Read more ...
Filippo Gorini
A past work of art either still speaks to us in the present, or it is dead. To try and understand a masterpiece, we tend to look at its past: we study it, analyse it, read biographies of the artist behind it and chronicles of its historical background. But it is even more interesting to see what happened to the work after it was finished. What did it mean to the following generations, and, more critically, what does it mean to us today? Is the flame that lit it still burning, or did the ashes die out?No other composer has influenced future generations in the same measure as Johann Sebastian Read more ...
David Pickard
As anyone who has been trying to steer an arts organisation through the pandemic will tell you, the greatest challenge has been uncertainty; learning to live with the unknown and the unexpected. When we planned this year’s Proms, I would have said the “safest” concerts were our two solo organ recitals, but we had to replace the organist in both cases – one had quarantine challenges; the other broke their arm. On the other hand, I might have expected problems getting an orchestra in from all over Europe (Mahler Chamber Orchestra) or being able to honour our commitment to bring Tristan Read more ...
Joseph Phibbs
The music Britten composed in his twenties occupies a special place in his output. Even among his detractors there are some who begrudgingly concede that this early period is somehow different: fresher, more extroverted and daring, perhaps less driven by serving a purpose (or “being useful”, in the composer’s words).As a Britten fan since my teens, I’ve always been captivated by the expressive depth, technical brilliance, and sheer beauty of practically all his music. His handling of the orchestra has, in particular, had a big influence on how I’ve approached my own works in this medium over Read more ...
theartsdesk
Five weeks have passed since the death of opera director Graham Vick from complications due to Covid-19, shocking even to those of us (un)prepared for the worst, and yet so many of us think about him every day. For the musicians, actors, dancers and stage crew he worked with, he's still among us, and he lives on in the hearts and minds of the ensemble he forged over years of developing his Birmingham Opera Company.A personal note on why I'm so stricken before I hand over to those who had far more creative experience of his vision. I first saw his productions when I was a student at Edinburgh Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
For many years, first as a punter then latterly as a reviewer, I have sat in the section of the Royal Albert Hall stalls near stage right, under the BBC Radio broadcast box, knowing that that is where they sit the composers being premiered at the Proms. This means, among other things, that you have to be discreet in voicing opinions about new pieces, and to avoid staring too pointedly.This week I will find the boot on the other foot as I make an appearance at the Proms as a composer, my new piece Birdchant featuring in the BBC Singers’ concert on 19 August. It is, needless to say, a lifetime Read more ...