Features
First Person: Katharina Kastening on directing slimline Bizet in a year rich in 'Carmen' productions
Katharina Kastening
Peter Brook's reimagining of Bizet's Carmen condenses the scale of the original into a more intimate theatrical experience. The score has been starkly cut, the orchestra reduced, and only four singing roles remain: Carmen, Don José, Escamillo and Micaëla. There are also three speaking roles: Zuniga, Lillas Pastia and Garcia (Carmen's husband). In Bizet's opera, Lillas Pastia is only briefly portrayed, and Brook incorporates Garcia, who does not appear in the opera, from the original story – Merimée's novella Carmen.As Brook uses Bizet's music, it is only natural to think of the original Read more ...
David Nice
Lilac time in Oslo, a mini heatwave in June 2023, a dazzling Sunday morning the day after the darkness transfigured of Concert Theatre DSCH, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra’s from-memory Shostakovich music-drama. Pekka Kuusisto and I decide not to enter the café where we’ve met but cross the road to the Royal Park and sit on a park bench talking for two hours.Kuusisto in conversation is exactly the inspirational, enthusiastic and galvanizing person you may have seen spellbind Proms audiences in a song-and-fiddle encore, transform a classic or cross supposed boundaries into folk music. I’ve Read more ...
The Henschel Quartet
We vividly remember the image of Martin Lovett, the cellist of the legendary Amadeus Quartet, bursting out laughing. He tells his favourite true travel story. After boarding a plane, the Amadeus Quartet has taken its seats and Martin is just about to strap his cello into the seat next to him when a fellow traveller approaches him. Oh no, marvels the inquisitive man, there's a whole string quartet on board. "How many are there in a string quartet?" comes the sudden question. Martin answers spontaneously and with deep conviction: "Five!".What a marvellous story, one we still like to tell Read more ...
Kris Nelson
LIFT 2024 is nearly here. It’s a festival that will take you on deep and personal journeys. We’ve got shows that will catch your breath, spark your mind and rev up your imagination. There’s adrenaline too. It’s international theatre for your gut. With three world premieres and a host of London debuts, this year’s LIFT takes on two themes. The Personal is Epic explores deeply personal stories of justice, migration, and protest, amplifying them to mythic proportions. Meanwhile Play the Future, Play the Past is a strand of shows that reframe history and imagine the future. We start the Read more ...
theartsdesk
As a human being of immense warmth, humour and erudition, Andrew Davis made it all too easy to forget what towering, incandescent performances he inspired. Now is a good time to recall those properly to mind, to listen to his huge discography, and to assess his proper place among the top conductors – again, as one of such versatility and range that, to adapt what Danny Meyer writes below, he might have been labelled a jack of all trades when he was a master of all.The range of tributes here reminds me both what an extraordinarily fine interpreter of operas he was – respected at Glyndebourne Read more ...
Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair is a writer, film-maker, and psychogeographer extraordinaire. He began his career in the poetic avant-garde of the Sixties and Seventies, alongisde the likes of Ed Dorn and J. H. Prynne, but his work resists easy categorisation at every turn. Reality shudders against and into its incarnation as fiction; documentary is riddled with the imagination’s brilliant glare; genre-bounds are ruinously questioned. Poetry, biography, film, essay: each form ghosts the next in restless disarray.He has written, for instance, a grotesque account of Thatcherism in Downriver (1991), walked within Read more ...
Colin Alexander and Héloïse Werner
For tonight’s performance at Milton Court, the nuanced and delicate tones of strings, voices, harmonium and chamber organ will merge and mingle together to tell tales of a rain-speckled landscape, luck and misfortune, forgotten valour, daily creative rituals and memories slowly vanishing into flames.The five composer-performers (we are to be joined by Kit Downes, Aidan O’Rourke and Alice Zawadzki) have each brought an image-driven work of their own to be reimagined by the whole group in a performance of guided improvisation dedicated to transforming these visions into seemingly living stories Read more ...
Joseph Middleton
Everyone needs friends and everything is connected. As we throw the doors open on to the 2024 Leeds Lieder Festival I am struck by just how remarkable classical music can be for a community, particularly when it is looked after and invested in by its own community.It was well documented that last year the Leeds Lieder Festival was dealt a blow by Arts Council England, when they rejected a Festival grant application for the first time in our decades long history. Ironically that Festival welcomed the highest number of first-time concert attendees and was praised in The Guardian for Read more ...
Paul Jesson
In September 2022 I had an email from my American friend Richard Nelson: "Would you like me to write you a play?" Such an offer probably comes the way of very few actors and I was bowled over by it. My astonished and grateful response was tempered with a little uncertainty.I didn't want it to be too much about my illness, and Richard assured me it would also be about many other things. He said, "I'll send you something." Two days later an attachment arrived which I thought would be a couple of pages of ideas or an outline. It was a 42-page script.Richard and I first met in 1990 at the RSC in Read more ...
Lydia Higman
I first read Anne Gunter’s story about five years ago, when I was in my first year of university at Oxford, little knowing it would over time lead to our play Gunter [seen first in Edinburgh and transferring 3-25 April to the Royal Court]. The classic account of her life is found in James Sharpe’s micro-history The Bewitching of Anne Gunter, which he wrote after unearthing the case in the late Nineties.The trial documentation for her case is stored at the National Archives in the Star Chamber stack (named after the star-spangled ceiling of the chamber where the councillors met). So I went to Read more ...
Paul Grellong
I’m writing this in the lobby of the Menier Chocolate Factory a couple of hours before the first preview. I was last here in February for the start of rehearsals. In the time since, I’ve made a handful of, one hopes, helpful adjustments to the script. I’ll let audiences be the judge of that.But having seen the excellent dress rehearsal, here’s one thing I know for certain: our director Dominic Dromgoole has steered this company through a process of careful, searching, and revelatory work to arrive at a place I find electric. As for everyone working on this show, to a person, I will be forever Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The British folk artist and singer songwriter Olivia Chaney released her third solo album this week, as we break out into springtime, and she’ll be touring sporadically around the UK over the next few months, with a showcase at London’s Union Chapel in June.Chaney is a singular singer and songwriter with a beautiful voice and the instrumental finesse honed at the Royal Academy of Music and Aldeburgh. She released her first EP in 2010 and 2013, the year she was nominated twice, for the Horizon Award and Best Original Song, at the BBC Folk Awards (and again for Folk Singer of the Year in 2019). Read more ...