Features
Alban Gerhardt
With horror I heard on Wednesday that the proud cultural nation of Germany, which invests probably more money per capita in its concert, opera and theatre life than any other country in the world, had decided to close down what I as a German citizen am particularly proud of - precisely this rich cultural life.For months now venues have successfully complied with the tough but necessary rules of social distancing; orchestral musicians have managed amazingly well to perform with two metres distance between them and masks on their faces, and when musical life started again in mid-June, there was Read more ...
Owen Richards
After Bassam Tariq's feature debut These Birds Walk was released at SXSW 2013, things seemed to slow down. The documentary about a runaway boy in Pakistan garnered strong reviews, but soon Tariq was working in a New York butchers pondering his career. However, the film did catch the eye of someone: Hollywood star Riz Ahmed. The two began talking, and realised they shared the same interests in heritage and generational relationships. And thus, Mogul Mowgli was born.In the film, Ahmed plays Zed, a rapper on the brink of international success. During a flying visit to his family home in Read more ...
Chad Kelly
As musicians took tentative steps into the unfamiliar world of PPE, socially-distanced rehearsals and audiences watching from home on a computer screen, a common water-cooler question was, “What did you do during lockdown?”. I am grateful to the Baroque violinist Rachel Podger that part of my lockdown involved rediscovering and reimagining a piece of music that I thought I knew well: the Goldberg Variations, the popular name we ascribe to Bach’s fourth Clavierübung (“Keyboard Practice”).The work has a unique aura surrounding it, partly due to its immortalisation on screen, in books, and Read more ...
Daniel Saldaña Paris
Books lost, left in houses I never returned to; dictionaries mislaid during a move; seven boxes sold to a second-hand bookstore… The history of my library is the history of loss and an impossible collection, scattered around several countries, reconstructed little by little but forever incomplete.I don’t possess one of those personal libraries consisting of 20,000 volumes that writers of past generations could boast of by their early thirties. I live in a 68 square-metre apartment and that fact obliges me to be extremely selective in my curatorship. My parents have moved house dozens of Read more ...
Brian Elias
It is my very good fortune to be offered by Music@Malling what is, in effect, a retrospective of my work. The music that will be performed was written between 1969 and 2019, exactly half a century. Inevitably, such a survey makes me think about the path I have followed, and although it is not for me to judge my own work, it does make me think about what it is that I have attempted to achieve, and what I need to turn to in the future.I realise that although my music and its style has developed over the years, many features of my work and my own values have remained remarkably constant. For Read more ...
Nicky Spence
As patron for a community organisation, I see clearly how opera is the biggest collaboration going. Between stage, orchestra pit, school liaisons, chorus leaders, make-up bays and the magicians of the technical team, every cog is of equal importance. For the last 12 seasons, Blackheath Halls Community Opera has staged an opera each year, bringing together world class soloists and enthusiastic members of the local community who make up the orchestra and opera chorus. I really enjoy this further process of collaboration between professionals and members of the community.This takes an Read more ...
theartsdesk
Ophidiophobia is one of our most common fears, from the Greek for serpent ('Ophidia'). Writer and editor Erica Wright grew up in Tennessee with periodic interruptions from rattlesnakes, cottonmouths and copperheads, who were spotted slinking around and through the house her family moved to when she was five: "they were there first, had nature's version of squatters' rights." Instead of becoming accustomed to their silent presence, she developed a deep fear of these long-bodied, scaly creatures. Her book, Snake, is a reckoning with that fear: Wright seeks to understand how and why Read more ...
Gregory Batsleer
Choral music is one of the UK’s oldest and most-loved art forms. It has been at the centre of my life ever since I started singing in primary school and has grown to become a crucial part of my identity as both a musician and artist. I am a signed-up evangelist of choral music; I do not need convincing of its power. I strongly believe, however, that we have reached an important moment in our history in which we need to look seriously at who we are, what our future looks like and crucially dare to be bold about what we can become.Having had the privilege of leading choirs at the highest level Read more ...
Danny Driver
There’s an old saying that goes: if life deals you lemons, make lemonade. To say that the COVID-19 pandemic is a lemon would be a huge and trivial understatement – it has had a massive effect on people’s way of life across the globe, it has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and permanently scarred many more physically, psychologically and emotionally. In terms of livelihood, performing artists whose work involves close proximity and live audiences in theatres, concert halls and studios have been particularly badly affected, and it is clear that establishing a new modus operandi for the Read more ...
David Nice
One source of advance information told us to expect a reduced version of Bartók’s one-act Bluebeard’s Castle, among the 20th century’s most original and profound operatic masterpieces. Joining 19 other lucky invitees and some of the LSO brass upstairs at St Luke’s, I realized immediately that the sea of comfortably distanced musicians covering the entire floor space, from violins at the east end in front of a conferring Simon Rattle, Karen Cargill and Gerald Finley, to percussion below us at the west, could only mean the real, full thing: the largest gathering of players I’d seen in London Read more ...
John Gilhooly
It is hard to believe that it’s really happening! Despite a few bumps along the way, Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber, one of the greatest Lieder duos of our time, will open the 20/21 Wigmore Hall Season tomorrow night in a programme of Schubert and Berg. This is the first of 100 concerts between now and Christmas.It has taken a huge amount of work to get to this point and undoubtedly there will be many more challenges ahead as we navigate our way through the winter months. We have reached this point because of our generous audiences and their support over so many years. The only way that Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Music has never been more important than in these dark, dislocating and death-stalked days, fear and grief visiting us in ways once unimaginable. The lack of live music – the lack even of the possibility of live music in the near future – is an absence keenly felt. However much we love to listen in the isolation of our own headphones, nothing can ever replace the communal concert event.Many musicians have brought their art direct into our homes, but I suspect Mary Chapin Carpenter has touched more hearts than most with her series of Songs from Home which began on 18 March with “Edinburgh” and Read more ...