Features
Matt Wolf
The government may occupy shifting sands when it comes to handling Covid-19, but the arts thank heavens continue to step up to the plate with a dizzying array of online options. This week's output mixes a soul musical from 1970s Broadway alongside a major revival of a play by Alan Bennett whose enquiry into the psychological well-being of those in charge will doubtless resonate anew today.Not to be forgotten is a tiny west London venue that consistently punches above its weight, alongside a slice of something more radical coming soon to a continent near you. This quartet represents just the Read more ...
Paul Lewis
As an instrumentalist, you can sit down and play music and escape from the stress. It’s a privilege to be able to do something that takes you to a different place – you’re removed from everything that’s happening. When you stop, there are reminders all around, though: worry about the health of friends and family, and concern about when we’re going to play concerts again and what it’s going to be like when we do.I like a bit of structure to my day so that I don’t swim around in lots of time. I practise in the morning until lunchtime. The kids are learning online, so in the afternoon I help Read more ...
Ian Page
My latest recording with The Mozartists is the first in a seven-volume series [reviewed by Graham Rickson in his Classical CDs Weekly column] exploring the so-called “Sturm und Drang” (literally translated, “storm and stress”) movement that swept through music and other art forms between the early 1760s and the early 1780s. In its strictest sense this was an exclusively literary movement which developed in Germany during the 1770s, and which owes its name to the title of a play written in 1776 by Maximilian Klinger. Its general objectives were to frighten and perturb through the use of a Read more ...
David Nice
As more musicians emerge from lockdown to conduct, play and sing in audience-less venues - ongoing kudos to the Wigmore Hall for its weekday lunchtime concerts, a fixure for so many viewers and listeners - here are some more off-piste treasures, a past glory from the Royal Opera, a chance to vote for lockdown's musical heroes and what promises to be a compelling discussion on Samuel Beckett translated into opera.Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and Jurowski back in action Permission to return to their usual haunt was granted to these first-rate players and their brilliant chief conductor Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As we continue into a third month in lockdown, the arts continue to suggest ever-changing worlds beyond. The invaluable National Theatre at Home this week looks across the Thames to a smaller venue's large-scale Coriolanus, starring a certain superhero movie icon, whilst the equally cherished Graeae streams their lively musical theatre tribute to the late Ian Dury. Beauty and the Beast, from a Chichester ensemble of young people, reminds us of the durability of that tale as old as time, even as The Shows Must Go On continues to look beyond Andrew Lloyd Webber to other musical mainstays, this Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The death of Christo, aged 84, was announced on Sunday, marking the end of a visionary and flamboyant artistic career. Best known for huge, ephemeral projects like the Wrapped Reichstag which stood for two weeks in June 1995, the American artist believed completely in the value of art for art’s sake, his vast, technically and logistically mindboggling creations brought into being for no purpose beyond their own existence.Christo was born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff in communist Bulgaria in 1935, attending art school in Sofia before escaping to the west by bribing a customs officer when he Read more ...
Gabriel Prokofiev
For most people a turntable, or record player is used to play back old vinyls bought from a market or second hand store, or perhaps a carefully packaged reissue of a classic album. We gently place the needle at the beginning of the record and are careful not to scratch the vinyl when we turn it over. But for a turntablist or DJ it is a musical instrument, and they handle it with much greater confidence and familiarity. When two turntables are set up with a mixer a wealth of new musical worlds can be created.This relatively new musical tradition of turntablism has a fascinating and rich Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The live-ness of theatre seems further away with every passing week, but at least the art form itself lives on to tantalise and entertain, whetting the appetite until such day as we are sharing an auditorium once again. National Theatre at Home continues to lead from the front with a tantalising array of offerings, this week bringing to the fore the busy James Graham in his comparative creative infancy with This House. Throw in a trio of Broadway-related events to keep musical theatre mavens happy, and you've got a quartet worth multiple digital platform visits. Jerry Herman: You I Like Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Larry Kramer, who has died at the age of 84, was the Solzhenitsyn of AIDS who indomitably reported from the gay gulags of Manhattan’s quarantined wards and revolving-door hospices. “I felt very much like a journalist who realises that he has been given the story of his life,” he told me when I met him. “I don’t consider myself a writer. I don’t bring the question of art into it at all like most writers do. I’m a messenger. As with activism, you figure out your target and the best way of reaching that target.”His most celebrated work, The Normal Heart, was a polemic about the early years of Read more ...
Esther Yoo
COVID-19 hurls the artist into the unknown. June is the time of year where I, like many, look back on everything I have accomplished over the last two quarters and look forward to my plans and goals for the next six months. As my birthday happens to fall in mid June, it’s a particularly opportune moment for me to think about my personal timeline and envision how I want to commence a new year. For the first time ever, though, my reflection involuntarily focuses on everything I have not been able to accomplish this half-year and my spirits are not greatly lifted by the prospects for the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
At the start of March an obscure alt-metal outfit called Cegvera released a concept album titled The Sixth Glare. The physical album featured the headline “DISEASE” alongside a photograph of a woman in a protective facemask, and the sleeve notes expand on the idea that, if we don’t tend to our environment, an illness will arrive to which the world doesn’t have immunity. It opens with a cut called “Infection”. Looked at now, it’s bizarrely prescient. The Bristol-based, British-Mexican band were ahead of the notorious curve to come.In the three months since, hordes of musicians have thrown Read more ...
Richard Macer
“That’s Marcelino Sambé, he’s wonderful,” said the artistic administrator of the Royal Ballet as I followed her down one of the many corridors that weave throughout the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. “He’s a newly promoted Principal, a very special talent indeed!” I looked over my shoulder at the figure disappearing through some doors. I had been at The Royal Ballet for over a week making a documentary for BBC Four about a golden generation of male stars but as yet had not met any dancers.Access documentaries to institutions such as this take months of negotiation and it’s not uncommon Read more ...