Features
Sebastian Scotney
As a cultural destination, Salzburg really is hard to beat. Each year, a million and a half tourists descend on this compact city with its baroque architectural delights, and a population of just 150,000. The city of Mozart and of the Salzburger Festspiele was also once home to Paracelsus, Heinrich Biber, Stefan Zweig, Georg Trakl, and more recently – of course – The Sound of Music and Red Bull.The city’s setting and its skyline are breathtaking. One can marvel at the way buildings more than three centuries old were hewn into the sides of the rocky outcrops. There are churches everywhere; I Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Ask someone to pick their favourite moment from a film by Martin Scorsese, something defining.Many would cite De Niro’s memorable "you talkin’ to me?" challenge to his own leering, gun-toting reflection in Taxi Driver (1976); others, the same actor’s majestic, slow-motion dance around a boxing ring as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980), or his tragi-comic monologue at the end of that film; others the long tracking shot that follows Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill through the Copacabana in Goodfellas (1990).For me, the indelible scene comes earlier, in Mean Streets Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Nobody ever forgets The Red Shoes (1948) because it’s a movie that seems to change the way an audience experiences cinema. A story about a diverse group of individuals collaborating to make art, the film is itself a wonderful example of the process.With the help of the painter Hein Heckroth and the composer Brian Easland, both of whom won Oscars for their work on the film – not to mention Robert Helpmann’s almost Freudian choreography – Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger combined words and images and music and movement to produce a “total artwork” that illuminates the unconscious as well Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In the current reappraisal of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, what to make of the depiction of women in their key films, that striking tribe of Isoldes with chestnut hair and passionate natures?Powell (1905-90), a man of Kent whose love for his actors was apparently without limits, could be a dictatorial director who, by his own admission, used shock tactics on set to get what he wanted. Whereas Pressburger (1902-88) was a conservative Hungarian who preferred women to be silent partners: “anti-feminist” was Powell’s term for him.Yet between them, and factoring in the upheavals of the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Announcing “A Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger production” or, alternatively “A Production of the Archers”, an arrow thuds into the centre of a roundel. Whether in black and white or colour, that famous rubric not only conflates the auras of Robin Hood and the Royal Air Force, but issues a warning you’re about to get a shot in the eye. The critic Ian Christie, one of Powell and Pressburger’s earliest champions, wrote in “Arrows of Desire” (1985), his second book on the great writer-director-producer duo, that the logo (pictured below) was “a promise of ‘real film magic’ for forties Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Martin Scorsese walks onstage to a hero’s welcome, shoulders a little hunched, with a touch of sideways shuffle or hustle, taking acclaim in his stride at 80. He has sold out London’s 2,700-capacity Royal Festival Hall for the BFI’s biggest Screen Talk by far, and the queue for returns stretches into the street, to see a director as big as any star.Fellow director Edgar Wright is here to interview him for 60 minutes about his 27-film career, but barely gets beyond 1980’s Raging Bull in 90. The coked-up motormouth familiar in Scorsese cameos from his backseat rant at Travis Bickle to his Read more ...
David Lang
I wouldn’t say that I am super religious, but I am definitely religion-curious. It is a big part of my family background, and, to be honest, a big part of the history of my chosen field, Western classical music. For the past 1000 years, the church has been the most powerful commissioner of Western music, and its most active employer of musicians.Because of this, much of our foundational repertoire is explicitly on the subject of how music helps a listener get in the mood for a religious experience. And that is interesting to me.Music and religion are intertwined, not just because of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Dramatisations of real-life crime have become all the rage on TV, as screenwriter Neil McKay and producer Jeff Pope are well aware. Their history of morbid collaborations includes See No Evil: The Moors Murders, the saga of serial killers Fred and Rosemary West in Appropriate Adult, and, in Four Lives, the story of serial killer Stephen Port.Now, in The Reckoning, they’ve focused their energies on Jimmy Savile. It arrives on BBC One and iPlayer on Monday (9 October) with Steve Coogan in the leading role. The series was first announced by the BBC three years ago, but its long gestation has Read more ...
Sir David Pountney
Purcell came very early to me. When I was a chorister at St. John’s Cambridge “Jehova quam multi sunt” was a perennial favourite and we were thrilled by the evenings when George Guest brought in some string players to accompany Purcell’s verse anthems. These were special occasions. Then, since no management had the wit to invite me to direct Purcell, I finally engaged myself to direct The Fairy Queen at ENO.That was very directly the genesis of Masque of Might which is being given its world premiere by Opera North tomorrow.The Fairy Queen is like the other Purcell “masques” or “theatrical Read more ...
Edward Gardner
“If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.”“What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.”With these two quotations from Mahler, I already feel like putting my pen down. I had intended to write about my approach to the upcoming performance of his Second Symphony with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, but the more I thought about words, the more reductive my thoughts became.Journalists trying to unlock Claudio Abbado’s genius in interviews on Mahler were met a smile, nod, and just “schöne Musik”, “beautiful music”. As ever Read more ...
Carol Williams
I have always had a fascination with concert programmes. I did my Doctorate thesis on this subject. I remember vividly as a youngster attending many uninteresting programmes and thinking “there has to be more exciting, exhilarating, interesting music for the concert goer!” What type of repertoire makes audiences come back to solo organ concerts?The varied repertoire kept me alive and my studies at the Royal Academy of Music with David Sanger were priceless. I came from a musical family - Dad had an amazing ability to play the theatre organ, Mum the piano and Aunt Olwen played organ in church Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
François Truffaut said that there is no such thing as an anti-war film because cinema inevitably glorifies the horror of conflict. The premise was robustly challenged over the weekend at the Ukrainian Institute London’s fourth annual film festival, Side By Side, which screened a handful of films, documentary and narrative, feature-length and short, that compelled the audience to reflect deeply on war’s horrific nature.A recurring festival theme was a sense of filmmaking itself being overtaken by events in the wake of last year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine. In I Did Not Want to Make a War Read more ...