Features
igor.toronyilalic
There aren’t many composers or musicians who can say that they changed society. And by that I mean really changed it. Few have ever come close to materially or politically transforming their surroundings in any truly meaningful way. There are many who claim they have, or wish they had: Wagner or Beethoven in the 19th century, Barenboim most notably – but doubtfully – in our own. But there is only one musician who actually did: the conductor, Kurt Masur.Earlier today, at the German embassy, the Mayor of Leipzig and the Sheriff of the City of London formalised the Barbican’s partnership with Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A funny thing happened to the Broadway theatre as the summer drew to a close: every single play except one (The 39 Steps) closed in relatively quick succession, as if to remind showgoers that in New York's main commercial thoroughfare, the musical is king.That wouldn't constitute news were it not for the fact that in the theatre season just gone, it was the play that remained the talking point throughout a 2008/9 Broadway lineup that saw the unexpected presence of Chekhov, Ionesco, Beckett, Ayckbourn, and Schiller in the playhouses studded across Manhattan's West 40s and 50s. And that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Antonio Gades, who died on 20 July 2004 in Madrid aged 67, was a giant of modern flamenco, a magnetic dancer and theatrical director who gained an international audience for flamenco while guarding its unique and complex character. His dance films and flamenco theatre productions, notably Blood Wedding and Carmen, trod the difficult line between modern innovations and ancient traditions, pleasing millions around the world while also being acclaimed by flamenco's purist cognoscenti. He himself despised many of flamenco's modernisers, particularly at the showbusiness and pop-culture end, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
At this time of year people who love ballet divide into two tribes: those who are too sophisticated for The Nutcracker and those who will never been too sophisticated for The Nutcracker. The former will say that The Nutcracker is a children’s ballet. For the latter, Christmas would not be Christmas without hearing probably the most familiar and adored of Tchaikovsky’s music scores.One man has the means to both persuade the doubters and satiate the faithful - Sir Peter Wright, the creator of two great productions of The Nutcracker that this Christmas will be vying to brand the ballet’s magical Read more ...
Ismene Brown
THE choreographer George Balanchine died on April 30, 1983, aged 79, of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, a rare, if nowadays notorious, condition only discovered at his autopsy. What had been recognised long before his death, though, was that this man was one of the very greatest geniuses of the 20th century, a figure to be reckoned alongside Pablo Picasso in art and Igor Stravinsky in music.What he did for ballet was nothing less than complete reinvention, applying his mind energetically for almost 60 years to turning the conventional art he had learned in St Petersburg at the Mariinsky Theatre Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sir Frederick Ashton, Britain's unrivalled genius at creating ballets, had a simple attitude towards posterity. "You've heard his famous remark, 'Fuck posterity'?" says his nephew, Anthony Russell-Roberts, smiling but eyeing me apprehensively.Ashton's attitude to posterity has not at all pleased a hefty section of his admirers who, since his death in 1988, have consistently accused Russell-Roberts and the Royal Ballet (where he is administrative director) of neglecting Ashton's work. People for whom Ashton was, as the critic P W Manchester remarked, "our youth, and our growing up, and our Read more ...
Ismene Brown
One of the first, scathing reviews of Kenneth MacMillan's ballet Manon in 1974 nailed it exactly: "It is an appalling waste of lovely Antoinette Sibley who, as Manon, is reduced to a nasty little diamond-digger." In that sentence all the prevailing attitudes about ballet were summed up - the status of classical ballerinas as princesses on pedestals, the duty of ballet to polish their virtuous crowns, the horror of seeing this porcelain beauty smashed.That review, by the way, appeared not in The Lady but in the Communist daily, The Morning Star. But it was not the only slammer - for Manon, it Read more ...