Buzz
David Nice
While bicentenary homages to Poland's greatest composer have already been flooding in, the big tide that leads up to the birthday on 1 March starts this evening. Artur Pizarro, fresh from personable interpretations of concertos by Ravel and Richard Strauss, launches his Chopin cycle at St John's Smith Square. You are advised to pick and mix with the Kings Place festival, kicking off tomorrow with chamber works and continuing on Friday with the first of Martino Tirimo's recitals on Friday.To make your options clearer, the Polish Cultural Institute has produced the snazzy little book Chopin Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Singers are always calling in sick. The merest puff of wind can blow a voice into A&E. The tiniest tickle in the throat can leave 2000 people jilted. They build instrumental musicians more robustly, especially brass players, so when David Pyatt told the London Symphony Orchestra, for whom he is co-principal horn, that he has an infected wisdom tooth, that's what he's got.Sadly it means that on Thursday evening at the Barbican he won't now be performing Strauss's glorious Second Horn Concerto. Composed in the depths of wartime in 1943, it's the piece with which Pyatt won the BBC Young Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The death of the late great American virtuoso Earl Wild a few weeks ago has had me poring over youtube trying to find a decent clip of him in his prime. You'd think there'd be a raft of footage of a man who spent three decades as a staff pianist for NBC, then ABC, all while building up a virtuoso concert career that saw him become one of the most respected pianists of the 20th century. There is some fizzy footage of him performing Chopin and MacDowell on the American variety and talk shows of the 1950s (which I wish would happen today; I'd pay good money to see Krystian Zimerman perform a Read more ...
sue.steward
That nebulous tag, Outsider Art, is stuck to self-taught artists inhabiting the margins of society and sometimes the norms of sanity, those unconnected to Art Institutions, and some who operate according to the whims of their internal visions. Tomorrow the ICA hosts what promises to be a wild and probably unruly debate on Outsider Art, with Outsider supporter Jarvis Cocker and maverick ex-Stuckist Billy Childish joining James Brett, the collector who founded the astonishingly popular Museum of Everything (closing Sunday), and David MacLagan. lecturer and psycho-therapist and author of the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As Jude Kelly put it today, the Southbank Centre’s Festival Brazil this summer is about a country "living its future now" (link here for the initial programme). That is certainly exciting for a city like London trying to live down its last decade (writes Josh Spero).
Kelly, the Southbank Centre’s artistic director, was keen to talk about the "ardent escapism" Brazilian culture manifests in its desire to forget its often tough reality. To this end, the livelier muses have been invoked: Ernesto Neto’s vibrant, delicate and organic art at the Hayward Gallery (19 June-5 September); the Campana Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu is an unlikely star. A 39-year-old blind singer and multi-instrumentalist from Elcho Island, a remote indigenous community off the coast of Australia’s Northern Territory, Gurrumul’s eponymous solo album was Britain’s best selling world music album of 2009.Now, in what has become standard practice for million-selling pop monsters like Lady Gaga's The Fame and Amy Winehouse's Back to Black but is surely a first for a record of sparse Aboriginal spirituals, a year after its initial release the album is to be reissued in expanded ' Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Life magazine has a terrific photographic portfolio up on its site of famous drunks and substance abusers - with quotes - including Dorothy Parker: "One more drink and I'll be under the host", Jack Kerouac: "I'm a Catholic and and I can't commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death" and Charles Baudelaire: "Always be drunk... get drunk militantly" and other literary types knocking back the booze including Ernest Hemingway, Dylan Thomas and Tennessee Williams. Link here.
Peter Culshaw
This week's birthday musicians include Gene Vincent singing "Be Bop A Lula" in his first TV appearance, Sergio Mendes with "Mas Que Nada", soul balladry from Roberta Flack, Carole King and a couple of composers - Alban Berg and Leopold Godowsky. Some seriously groovy videos, below.11 February 1935: Gene Vincent in what is probably his first ever TV appearance on a programme called Town Hall Party.
11 February 1941: Sergio Mendes sings Jorge Ben's song "Mas Que Nada", 40 years before the Black Eyed Peas remade it as a huge hit.
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13 February 1870: Leopold Read more ...
simon.tait
We’d almost blown the so-called Cultural Olympiad, and if the appointment of Ruth Mackenzie as artistic director had come a moment later than the turn of this year, we would have done. Not my opinion: this from Tony Hall of the Royal Opera House, and he chairs the board that appointed her. More than that, on Friday Hall was given a cross-bench seat in the House of Lords to thump the tub for the arts in 2012, and we’ll take notice then. Won’t we?The entire soap opera is eerily reminiscent of the events preceding Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture. That too was all set to be an Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Pop-up cinemas, like restaurants, shops and galleries, are, well, popping up all over the place these days, but one of the pioneers has been Secret Cinema. This outfit claims, grandly, to have been "revolutionising the traditional cinematic experience" ever since December 2007 and its Facebook page boasts over 26,000 fans. It would seem that the secret is out.Previous venues have ranged from the Royal Academy of Arts (Funny Face) to a disused railway tunnel in South London (Gus van Sant's skateboarding movie Paranoid Park) and the events aim to recreate the spirit of the movie being screened Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Orchestras and theatre companies rarely collaborate. The current revival of Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour enlists the services of the Southbank Sinfonia. Apart from that, concert musicians and actors steer clear of each other. You can see why. It costs a lot of money to employ an orchestra. And once you’ve put 70-plus musicians on a stage, there’s no much room for anyone else. Undaunted by pragmatism, next month brings a collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Philharmonia Orchestra. And 250 schoolchildren.The name of the joint venture is "Alike in Dignity Read more ...
josh.spero
Everything was green at 20 Hoxton Square this week as Kilimanjaro Magazine Edits opened: forget the environment, it was the plentiful absinthe imparting a verdant hue.The show features photos from Kilimanjaro, a self-described "vibrant printed space", and by common consent there was one heart-stopping beauty: Charlotte Rampling shot by Henry Roy, a Haitian expat. The photo catches Rampling in a distressed moment, looking away from the camera with a smear of bright pink lipstick providing the only colour. (The online version doesn't come close.)
Robi Rodriguez and J.H Engstrom were among the Read more ...