Features
Simon Halsey
I was greatly privileged to know Sir Michael Tippett and to chorus-master his recording of A Child of Our Time. In my childhood, the two giants of English composition were “Tippett and Britten” - in that order. Since their deaths, Britten has flourished internationally and Tippett has slipped back a bit in the public consciousness. I hope the new Tippett biography by Oliver Soden will help rectify this.As a teenager, I loved Tippett’s early works. My favourite LP was a Marriner/ASMF Argo disc of his string music. And I was knocked sideways by my first encounter with the opera King Priam Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We like to think of ourselves as a nation of eccentrics, but some take their patriotic duties more seriously than others. Al Alvarez – poet, critic, poker player, rock climber, old-school literary mensch, who has died at the age of 90 – took his first dip in the ponds on Hampstead Heath at 11. Sixty-five years later, he was still at it. Here’s a standard journal entry – for 31 January 2004: “The water was just above freezing, the wind howled, the rain stung my face when I swam on my back. I came out feeling wonderful.”Alvarez swam as he lived and wrote, on the assumption that there’s no Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hatari’s 10th placing in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest hasn’t done them any harm. Neither did ruffling the feathers of the European Broadcasting Union and host nation Israel with their stance on Palestine. Based on their performance in Hamburg at 2019’s Reeperbahn Festival, Iceland’s favourite BDSM-leaning popsters haven’t smoothed-off their rough edges.The more gruff of their two singers, Matthías Haraldsson, sounds like a Dalek were one of the wheeled monstrosities angrier than usual, and even more stentorian. Team this with co-frontman Klemens Hannigan’s somewhat sweeter tones and Read more ...
Nicky Spence
I’m a big fanboy of Czech music, Janáček and Martinů especially, but I’d never seen The Greek Passion before being cast as Manolios in Opera North’s new production, as it remains quite a rarity in the opera house. For those who don’t know the work, it tells of a group of refugees who arrive in a village as the residents there are preparing for their Easter Passion Play. Martinů explores the community’s reaction to this influx of new people and the conflicting emotions that their arrival engenders.Martinů (pictured left in his American exile in 1943, a a decade and a half before he Read more ...
Matthew Xia
I’m currently opening Amsterdam, my first production for Actors Touring Company since being appointed Artistic Director last year, at the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond and then in Plymouth early in 2020. And what better time to premiere a play for the Europe of the present, triggered by the Europe of the past. The themes it tackles are once again becoming increasingly urgent, so I very much see this as a statement of intent. I was born in East London in the 1980s but have never felt particularly English, though perhaps twice in my adult life I have felt British. Somehow I’ve Read more ...
David Nice
When you've found some of the best young musicians in the world, and they've found that they love working in the peaceful surroundings of a magical spot in North Norfolk, you don't let go. Tenor Ben Johnson and pianist Tom Primrose focused for a special-birthday Southrepps Music Festival on long-term visitors including BBC Young Musician of the Year 2014 Martin James Bartlett, award-winning guitarist Sean Shibe and violinist Benjamin Baker alongside a stunning newcomer and Bartlett's equal among more-than-promising pianists, Hungarian-born Daniel Lebhardt. With Britten's The Burning Fiery Read more ...
Adrian Evans
Over the weekend, exhibitions and installations have started to bubble-up on the riverside walkway in London. Still-life photography of mudlark finds and a "scented history" of Barking Creek outside the National Theatre. Artwork from a dozen national and international river cities at the Royal Docks. An installation of 550 jerry cans at the Oxo Tower. A 60-foot wooden Ship of Tolerance on the Thames (main image) by Millennium Bridge. These, alongside an outpouring of races, regattas, swims, waterfront festivals, theatre, dance, music, film, talks and walks makes up this year’s Totally Thames Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is how Steven Knight pictured Peaky Blinders when he first set about creating it. “I was very keen not to do a traditional British period drama, especially where it comes to depictions of working class people. Where the impulse is to say ‘it’s a shame, it’s a pity, isn’t it awful, wasn’t everything terrible for women’.“The Shelbys are a family that completely controlled their own destiny, and also coming from that background myself I wasn’t surrounded by people walking around saying ‘poor me, isn’t it terrible’. They were enjoying life and making the most of it, glamourising it, and that Read more ...
Royce Vavrek
It was during the 1997 Golden Globe Awards telecast that I first caught a glimpse of the film that would change my life completely. Midway through the ceremony was featured a short clip of a paralysed man telling a young woman, his wife, to go and find another man to make love to. She was to come back to him and tell him about her sexual encounter. “It will feel like we are together,” he says. “Love will keep me alive.” My 13-year-old brain exploded.They were Bess and Jan, the central characters in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Wave; the complexities of their narrative I would fully glean Read more ...
David Nice
Little has changed about Pärnu, with its concentric rings of eight-mile sandy beach and dunes, wooded gardens and wooden old town, in the five years I've been going there. It came as a bit of a shock to find that voters in the region favoured the far right, which now has an unwelcome white-supremacist father and son in an otherwise progressive parliament; but the town in July is full of Tallinn folk heading south to Estonia's "summer capital". It's still a calm background for the intense creative work of the music festival dominated by the Järvi family: Paavo, "Artistic Leader" with his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
We’ve all had the experience of wandering into a church, only to discover it filled unexpectedly with music: the choir rehearsing for Evensong, a local orchestra practising, a soprano and organist getting ready for a weekend wedding. This spirit of serendipity, of startling, incongruous beauty, is the essence of the Dordogne’s annual Itinéraire Baroque festival, which invites its audience to stray into the many small churches that cover the region, filling these dark, quiet Romanesque buildings with music and life.And this isn’t just any music. When pioneering harpsichordist and organist Ton Read more ...
David Nice
Anna Larsson's fellow Swedes can count themselves lucky that the worldwide first choice to sing Wagner's Erda and the midnight song in Mahler's Third Symphony has made so much of her Dalarna inheritance. In what's called a "Concert Barn" (Konsertlada) built on land bought next to the birthplace of her father, who lived in Vattnäs, a small settlement on Lake Orsa, and later moved to Stockholm, she has already established a working theatre serving a strong operatic tradition with her country's best fellow singers, and a nurturing of young musicians who include many outstanding players in this Read more ...