Interviews
Russ Coffey
Normally we introduce these interviews with a few biographical details about the subject. With Yoko Ono, however, there hardly seems any point: she’s as much a part of late 20th-century history as an musician. But if the whole world knows who she is, her work is a different matter. John Lennon memorably described her as “the world's most famous unknown artist”. And despite recent critical success and an album out this week (Take Me to the Land of Hell), her reputation is still for being obscurely arty. Memorably, The Simpsons once affectionately sent her up as a woman who goes into Mo’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a song in the musical version of Legally Blonde, in which peroxide ditz Elle celebrates her impending good fortune. “Oh my god, oh my god, you guys,” she sings exultantly as she prepares to accept her beau’s proposal of marriage. Since leaving the role at the start of 2011, Sheridan Smith has continued hollering the words more or less non-stop. Oh my god Trevor Nunn just texted to offer her a part. Oh my god Dustin Hoffman just left a voicemail. Oh my god look who’s been cast as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Michael Grandage.Smith can make the rare claim to have won Olivier Read more ...
David Nice
This summer, the Royal Albert Hall became the centre of the Wagnerian universe. No one was going to ignore Bayreuth, where Frank Castorf‘s new Ring gave plenty of fuel for column inches; but somehow the singers and the orchestra seem to have got lost there among all the apparently uninterpretable stage paraphernalia. Here there was a unique context for the personenregie, the crucial relationships highlighted in Wagner’s many one-to-ones, as memorable as the spotlight on the music.Sir John Tomlinson, whose thoughts specifically about the Prom Parsifal in which he sang the role of Gurnemanz Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
She’s the Kansas mezzo-soprano whose ruby slippers have now taken her across the globe, singing in all the great opera houses, but who has never lost the common touch. She’s not a diva, she’s a “Yankee Diva” – a contemporary creature who would never dream of throwing a tantrum or cancelling at short notice. She's Joyce DiDonato.One half of an all-American coup at this year’s Last Night of the Proms, DiDonato’s English invasion only starts here. She’ll be returning to the Royal Opera House once again next year (following her hugely successful run in La donna del lago in 2013) to tackle Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Marin Alsop may be one of America’s leading conductors, with stints as music director of the Colorado, Eugene and Richmond symphony orchestras, not to mention positions at the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, and of course her current roles at the head of the Baltimore and São Paulo State Symphony orchestras, but apparently none of that is as important as the fact that she’s a woman.Taking up the baton as the first female conductor of the Last Night of the Proms, Alsop is once again in the spotlight for the gender-discussions that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Who is Terry Johnson? For a period of two decades between, say, 1982 and 2003, he was predominantly a playwright. He was sufficiently successful at it that for a period in 1995, three of his plays were on in the West End at once. But the plays have slowly dried up – the last was in 2006 – and nowadays he is very largely a director. His latest gig as a director is a 20th-anniversary revival of his play Hysteria!If the plays have stopped coming it’s because Johnson's enthusiasm for writing about deceased cultural icons has run out of steam. Much of his best work exhumes dead geniuses and/or Read more ...
David Benedict
Fingers on buzzers: which piece of music at this year’s Proms boasts a percussion section including glockenspiel, xylophone, five pitches of cowbells, car horn, taxi horn, anvils, revolving door noise, smashing glass, bubble-wrap-popping, pistol-shot and elastic band? OK, here’s a clue: it’s by Scott Bradley (1891-1977). Who? Bradley (pictured below) was the man who wrote the music for 113 of the 114 Hanna-Barbera/MGM Tom and Jerry cartoons and Tom and Jerry at MGM – a new, six-minute thrill-ride suite of his work – is part of John Wilson’s Hollywood Rhapsody Prom broadcast live on BBC Four Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Flames of Paris, given its London premiere by the Bolshoi Ballet this weekend, was Alexei Ratmansky's farewell present to the Moscow company which he directed from 2004 to 2008. In his final months at the Bolshoi he talked with me in his office about his approach to revising this landmark historical ballet, and the conditions inside the theatre that he would soon be leaving after a turbulent five years.He had been only 36 when he was invited - out of the blue - by the Bolshoi Theatre's general director Anatoly Iksanov to lead the great, but stagnating Moscow flagship into a new sense of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Johnny Marr’s second single as a solo artist, New Town Velocity, describes his youthful propulsion by pop music in grey late Seventies Manchester towards a bright, boundless future he duly reached with The Smiths. It surely also describes the renewed energy he’s drawn from being back in his home city after five years in Portland, Oregon. Manchester certainly inspired this year’s debut solo album The Messenger, with its resourcefully melodic rock rooted in local inspirations such as Magazine and his own past with The Smiths, so often disavowed till now.Born in Manchester in 1963, the teenage Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In a world of reality television show winners and interchangeable flash-in-the-pan singer-songwriter critical darlings, Frank Turner stands apart as the real deal. Over the past 18 months, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Turner had appeared as if from nowhere and his name was suddenly everywhere. But the groundwork for the songwriter’s considerable recent successes - a pre-show slot at the London Olympics Opening Ceremony (pictured below), a sell-out show at Wembley Arena, his latest album reaching the top of the iTunes Chart and number two on the Official UK Album Chart - has been Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the late Eighties one of the most sonically unhinged bands of all time came together in East London. Terminal Cheesecake caused few commercial waves but gathered a devoted coterie of fans for their unholy racket at pummelling concerts. Their sound was initially crunching riff-rock smeared with head-frying psychedelia and deranged electronic effects but throughout a career of five albums – Johnny Town-Mouse (1988), VCL (1989), Angels in Pigtails (1990), Pearlesque Kings of the Jewmost (1992) and King of All the Spaceheads (1994) – they gradually drifted into monstrous exercises in marijuana Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A lot has changed in the 10 years since Serge Dorny arrived at Lyon Opera. Attendance in a supposedly dying art form has risen to 96 per cent, and no charges of elitism or unfashionable nostalgia have deterred the 25 per cent of Lyon’s audiences who are now under 26 – Europe’s youngest opera-going crowd. But how has Dorny managed this, and at what cost? Is he really the Opera Whisperer or are his innovations just gimmickry, shiny bandages temporarily plugging a fatal wound?It’s a question that UK audiences will soon be able to answer for themselves as Dorny brings his latest and most Read more ...