Features
Selina Cadell
"Vary the song, O London, change!" sings Tom Rakewell as he tires of the great metropolis. WH Auden and Chester Kallman's libretto for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress strikes a chord with me too. London has magnificent opera but, at the top end, it comes at a price. Not just for the audience but for the singers. Lavish sets and costumes force historical productions into revivals. Singers fly in, rehearse for a few days, and slot themselves into the existing blueprint. Mood over content can prevail.There is a case now for change.With the current trend for broadcasting productions in cinemas ( Read more ...
Jonathan Lewis
I was invalided out of the army in 1986. I’d been an army scholar through school and had a bursary at university. I went on to drama school then became an actor, and subsequently a writer and director. But I’ve always been passionately interested in how the military, and the people in it, are portrayed to the wider world.My first play Our Boys, about my experiences being invalided out of the military, was revived in the West End in 2012. One of my first big roles was as Sgt Chris McCleod for two series of ITV’s Soldier, Soldier. With awareness of PTSD being greater than ever, I thought it was Read more ...
Roman Rabinovich
I was recently in the UK for some solo recitals and to make my debut with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. One of the highlights of the trip was playing a similar programme in two very different settings: first on some magnificent period instruments and then a week later on a modern Steinway piano at Wigmore Hall. Having never before performed publicly on historical instruments, my recital at the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands Park in Surrey felt like a complete experiment. The experience had an indelible influence on the way I approached the repertoire at Wigmore a week later, and has Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Viennale is one of the best film festivals in the world and an indispensable part of Vienna’s cultural life. Yet this year’s edition was launched amid trying times. For one thing, whatever sanity-altering toxin is affecting voters the world over recently burst over the Austrian skies to leave that country with a likely coalition between right and far-right parties, not just bonded by anti-Islamic and anti-migration sentiment, but leaving anyone with an interest in cultural funding fearing the worst. More than that, the sudden death in July of the Viennale’s charismatic, fiercely Read more ...
Maria Milstein
I remember very well the first time I read Swann’s Way, the first part of Marcel Proust’s monumental masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu). I was struck not only by the depth and beauty of the novel, but also the crucial role that music played in the narrative. For those who haven’t read the novel, here is a brief summary of the part that particularly fascinated me, "Swann’s Love".Swann, one of the main characters in the novel, is a rich young man living in Paris who is connected with the highest Parisian aristocracy. At a musical soirée one evening he hears a Read more ...
Tom MacRae
I’d always wanted to write a musical, but I didn’t start actually trying until four years ago. Now four years on, my first show, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, is about to hit the West End – that’s four years to go from no show, no idea and no experience to opening at the Apollo Theatre. It’s utterly crazy, I still can’t believe it – and this is how it happened...Chance meetings made everything possible. The first was between me and Dan Gillespie Sells, my songwriting partner, when we met on a gay rights march in Piccadilly. Like me, he’d always wanted to write a musical, but had Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Annual lists of the richest, the most powerful, the movers and shakers, have an awful fascination: like gossip, we like to look and comment while feeling slightly morally compromised. But they also have a function as a snapshot of where we are at. This time it’s the turn of the art world’s most influential figures, as chosen by the magazine ArtReview, which each year creates a talking point for itself replete with embargoes and PR. After topping last year’s list the very busy Hans Ulrich Olbrist (picture below right), creative force at the Serpentine Galleries, finds himself at number Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Oliver Sacks was the neurologist – and historian of science, and naturalist – whose exceptionally elegant, clear and accessible prose has captivated that almost mythical creature, the general audience, through more than a dozen books as well as many essays. Who could resist his narratives of patients who had, to say the least, unusual brains: the subject of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the astonishing musical savants who could communicate only through music in Musicophilia, or Awakenings about brain-damaged people affected by the infamous “sleepy sickness” (encephalitis lethargica Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An encounter with Homer Flynn is disconcerting as the extent of his involvement in The Residents is unclear. He acknowledges that he speaks for the eyeball-headed quartet whose identities are unknown. As he talks, it's clear he has intimate knowledge of their creative process, their motivations and what they think. He discusses them as “they”. Occasionally the word “we” is used. But that could be taken as referring to being a part of The Cryptic Corporation, the outward-facing organisation which runs The Residents’ business affairs. Equally, the "we" could be acknowledging that he is one of Read more ...
Aaron Wright
Since its inception in 1997 Fierce, Birmingham’s International Festival of Live Art & Performance, has championed the work of performance makers not often seen in Britain. The pantheon of body artists under Mark Ball’s era as director included the likes of Franko B, Ron Athey and Kira O’Reilly. Under the helm of previous director duo Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison came experimental European choreographers and theatre-makers such as Eva Meyer-Keller, Kate McIntosh and Lundahl & Seitl. Many of these artists have made significant contributions to the art form but for some reason Read more ...
peter.quinn
Held auspiciously on the hundredth birthday of one of the giants of the music, composer and pianist Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982), the winners of this year's Parliamentary Jazz Awards were announced at a congenial ceremony at London’s newest live venue, PizzaExpress Live Holborn.MC’d by PizzaExpress’s debonair Music Manager, Ross Dines, this thirteenth edition of the annual awards – organised by the All Party Parliamentary Jazz Appreciation Group (APPJAG) – was the first to take place outside its spiritual home, the Houses of Parliament. Fuelled by pizza and Peroni (sponsors of the Read more ...
Elyse Dodgson
The autumn season of plays at the Royal Court leads with international work. B by Guillermo Calderón (from Chile), Bad Roads by Natal'ya Vorozhbit (from Ukraine) and Goats by Liwaa Yazji (from Syria) have a long history with our international department. We probably have to go back over a decade to look at the seeds of this work and the connections they have to one another and to each of us.THE ROAD TO BAD ROADIt is June 2008 and I am sitting around a table in Natal'ya Vorozhbit's new flat in Kiev with her mother Masha, her baby daughter Pasha and our co-collaborator and translator, Sasha Read more ...