Buzz
David Nice
Oh, those Bloomsberries: what fun they must have had at Charleston farmhouse snug under the Sussex downs - Vanessa and Clive Bell in menage with Duncan Grant, Lytton and Virginia popping in for tea... Well, maybe not, if you're allergic to the Bloomsbury school of charm. I used to be, but I've changed my mind after years of visits to the anything-goes Quentin Follies.Instigated nine years ago in memory of master craftsman and author Quentin Bell, one of Vanessa and Clive's two sons, by his textile-designer daughter Cressida, this annual summer jamboree has become a little less ad hoc and a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It wasn't memorialised in HD. But last night Ringo Starr turned 70 and welcomed Paul McCartney onstage at Radio City Music Hall in New York for a musical celebration. There was only one song they were going to perform, and a thousand mobile phone cameras were duly held aloft to capture it. The results have sprouted overnight on YouTube, and they all have the grainy shakycam quality of all that old footage from the Cavern Club. If you're of the Fabophiliac persuasion you'll no doubt be wanting to devour the lot. Which you can do right here on theartsdesk.This is the closest to the stage, so Read more ...
Jasper Rees
She starred in the original film, not to mention the low-rent sequel, as a counterfeit nun on the run from criminal psychopaths. She became involved in the stage version as a cheerleading producer. Now Whoopi Goldberg is getting back in the habit.
Sister Act the Musical, with a pastiche disco songbook by Alan Menken, has been entertaining audiences at the London Palladium for over a year now. In the autumn it moves out to accommodate the latest product of the BBC/Lloyd Webber talent-hunting industrial complex. But it will leave a whiff of cordite as it departs, with Goldberg taking over Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
One of the greatest pianists (and latterly conductors) of his generation, founder and artistic director of the Russian National Orchestra, Mikhail Pletnev, has been charged by Thai police with raping a 14-year-old boy, according to the BBC. Police also raided his Thai home in connection with a paedophile ring and found, say prosecutors, several "compromising" photographs with underage boys.Extraordinary. Echoes of conductor Robert King, who was convicted of sexually assaulting five minors a few years back, who is making his British comeback this year at the Wigmore Hall. Pletnev will no Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The BBC's cultural conscience has been pricked, it would seem, by the World Cup now reaching its endgame in South Africa. Either that or departments don't talk to one another. Singing for Life, Sunday night's documentary on BBC Four about the young singers who aspire to trade the township choir for the opera stage, also focused on Fikile Mvinjelwa, a Cape Town baritone who made it to the Met. Now Newsnight is reporting on another singer who has been on a comparable journey to stardom.Pauline Malufane is the poster girl of Isango Portobello, the theatre company which won an Olivier Award for Read more ...
theartsdesk
'If you get it right a play will always make a writer far more money than a movie will' - A useful financial tip from mega-successful playwright Willy Russell in his close-up interview with Jasper Rees on theartsdesk.
theartsdesk
One of theartsdesk's founder-writers, Mark Hudson, has been shortlisted in the biography category of the annual Spear’s Book Awards, for his book Titian, the Last Days. Hudson did not intend to write a conventional biography of the Venetian artist, but took Titian’s mysterious final paintings as its starting point – works so baffling in their subject matter and background that they involved him in far more factual research than he had originally anticipated when he began work in 2005."If you write about the art of the past, people assume you must be an art historian," says Hudson. "But an art Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last year I witnessed the miracle of music. Eight extremely old people, all of them suffering from dementia, sat in a circle, each with a percussion instrument in their lap. Among them were sprinkled three classical musicians - a violist, a cellist and an oboeist - who, improvising a hypnotic set of rhythmic tunes, attempted to coax the rest of the circle out of their hermetic worlds.A drum, for example, sat inert in the lap of an old man who no longer speaks. Slowly the beckoning rhythm, and a look of eager authority on the face of the viola player kneeling before him, prised him Read more ...
miss.kittykowalski
Well folks, it wasn’t glamorous, it wasn’t showbiz, it wasn’t all fun ‘n’ games. It was Glastonbury, in all its dirty, pungent and chaotic glory. But, despite all the pitfalls, The Strumpettes did it, and, somehow, did it in style.
First off, let me get the bellyachin' outta the way. Call us naïve if you want, but when we were told we would have “artists’ facilities” backstage, we kinda believed it – maybe ‘cause the alternative was too horrible to contemplate. We were expectin’ decent powder rooms, showers, maybe even somewhere to plug in our curling irons. Hell, this look don’t come Read more ...
fisun.guner
Two recently decommissioned fighter jets are in the incongruous setting of Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries. One plane, polished to a mirror sheen, lies belly-up, like an injured animal; the other hangs suspended from the ceiling, its matt surface stripped of its combat colours and stripes, painted instead with faint feather markings, bringing to mind a giant, trussed-up bird. Its stilled presence is both powerfully majestic and inert.
Harrier and Jaguar is the latest Duveen Galleries Sotheby's commission. It's Fiona Banner's most impressive work to date. The artist, who usually works with Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Afro-Cubism is the fruition of the World Circuit label's original intention for Buena Vista Social Club album, which was to have been a stellar collaboration of musicians from Mali and Cuba. In 1996, the African contingent of Bassekou Kouyate and Djeliomady Tounkara claimed they couldn't get visas and so the label used the studio time to record the Buena Vista album, and the Rueben Gonzalez one, and the Afro-Cuban All Stars' first album, a trio of classics. (Another story has it that the Africans were offered a better paying gig at home - if so, bad call, gents, as the Buena Vista album has Read more ...
David Nice
Bit of a tizzy in Cardiff after Welsh National Opera decided to push the boat out for its biggest show in years. Richard Jones's new production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg starring Bryn Terfel in his toughest challenge to date wowed most of us, and we hardly felt over-schmoozed in being well fed and watered in two separate functions during the long interval of this five-hour event.The South Wales Echo reports different sentiments in the form of grievances from smaller arts groups who felt WNO were fiddling while their own much smaller grants might well be going up in smoke. Read more ...