First Person
Judith Webster
Music resonates with everyone. It plays a powerful and evocative role in people’s lives; it punctuates our memories and changes our mood. We can all remember our first album and the songs our parents and grandparents listened to. One of the first ways that we teach very young children is through singing and nursery rhymes. From that point onwards music continues to soundtrack our lives.A recent survey by the IFPI shows that 54% of young people around the world describe themselves as music fanatics. Not only that – the increasing use of streaming sites means music is more accessible than it’s Read more ...
'These were the quartets that made us fall in love with the genre': Dudok Quartet Amsterdam on Haydn
Dudok Quartet Amsterdam
As a string quartet, it’s not easy to distinguish yourselves from others. There are so many string quartets playing the great repertoire, and the level of quartets has never been as high as it is now. Everybody is trying to be unique.We are all part of a very long string quartet tradition. We have so many examples of great string quartets, so many fantastic recordings, so many people that played the same pieces. If you really want to distinguish yourself as a string quartet, would it not it be clever to step away from the core repertoire, to look for other opportunities?We have been thinking Read more ...
Simon Stephens
Light Falls is the sixth play that I have written for the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester and the fourth that its outgoing Artistic Director, Sarah Frankcom, will direct.She directed On the Shore of the Wide World, Punk Rock and Blindsided. In many ways Light Falls marks a culmination of a collaboration that has informed my working life and a return to ideas I have been interrogating in that collaboration.I was born in Stockport and lived there until I went to university when I was 18. I live in London now and have done for 25 years. The relationship between the two places continues to Read more ...
Hannah Khalil
It all started in 2009 in the National Portrait Gallery. I’d had a meeting nearby so popped in to get a cuppa and stare at the beautiful rooftop view of London from their top-floor café, but a picture caught my eye. It was part of an exhibition of Victorian Women Explorers, a photograph of a woman with a rather severe face. The label said something like: "Gertrude Bell – Mountaineer, Explorer, Diplomat and Spy. Travelled widely through the Middle East, spoke every dialect of Arabic and Persian and was responsible for drawing the lines of what became modern Iraq. Founder of the Museum of Iraq Read more ...
Gabriela Montero
For as long as I can remember, there has been a continuous loop of original music playing in my mind. My father used to joke about my “tuyuyo” – a little bump I have on the back of my head – that it was my personal repository for music. My husband, less versed in Venezuelan colloquialisms, simply refers to it as “the iPod”.However mysterious its source, music is a constant soundtrack to my life. Since my mother first placed a toy piano in my crib when I was just seven months old, I have been playing original pieces of music with the same abandon and freedom I experience when talking or Read more ...
Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva
We’ve been friends for many years, since the mid-1990s when we were both studying at the Royal College of Music with the same inspirational piano teacher, Irina Zaritskaya. Our first duo performance was in 2001 at the Homecoming Festival in Moscow, when we realised we clicked musically. Things gradually developed from that point onwards with more festival appearances alongside our solo careers.Having both played at many festivals over the years, we found that one in particular really made its mark – Finghin Collins's New Ross Piano Festival. We first performed there in 2011 and loved the Read more ...
Simon Halsey
I was greatly privileged to know Sir Michael Tippett and to chorus-master his recording of A Child of Our Time. In my childhood, the two giants of English composition were “Tippett and Britten” - in that order. Since their deaths, Britten has flourished internationally and Tippett has slipped back a bit in the public consciousness. I hope the new Tippett biography by Oliver Soden will help rectify this.As a teenager, I loved Tippett’s early works. My favourite LP was a Marriner/ASMF Argo disc of his string music. And I was knocked sideways by my first encounter with the opera King Priam Read more ...
Adrian Evans
Over the weekend, exhibitions and installations have started to bubble-up on the riverside walkway in London. Still-life photography of mudlark finds and a "scented history" of Barking Creek outside the National Theatre. Artwork from a dozen national and international river cities at the Royal Docks. An installation of 550 jerry cans at the Oxo Tower. A 60-foot wooden Ship of Tolerance on the Thames (main image) by Millennium Bridge. These, alongside an outpouring of races, regattas, swims, waterfront festivals, theatre, dance, music, film, talks and walks makes up this year’s Totally Thames Read more ...
Ewa Banaszkiewicz and Mateusz Dymek
Spoiler alert: About sixty-four minutes into our debut feature film, one of the main female characters undresses for the camera. Alicja is being filmed by the other protagonist, a young American documentarian named Katie. As the sexually charged long take progresses, it becomes apparent that what started out as an erotic provocation (catering to Katie’s palpable attraction to her) gradually descends into Alicja’s traumatic memory of sexual abuse. Despite the disturbing situation unfolding in front of her, Katie continues recording, and we – as the audience watching through her lens – become Read more ...
Joseph Bullman
The Left Behind is a television drama marinated in real-world research. It tells the story of a young man unable to break free from his bullshit job, zero-hour existence, thrown out of his family home when the council decide that as a single man with no dependents he isn’t a housing priority. He is seduced by a far-right, anti-migrant explanation for his plight and eventually drawn into a sickening hate crime. But very unusually our film takes the perspective of the perpetrator of the hate crime. And this is why we felt we had to hear this side of the story.Last year we made Killed Read more ...
'A product not only of his era but also of his travels': Ian Page on Mozart's cosmopolitan education
Ian Page
When Mozart was an established composer living in Vienna during the final years of his short life, a young student seemingly came to him to seek his advice. The would-be young composer said that he was planning to write a symphony, and asked Mozart what advice he could give to him. Mozart replied that a symphony was a complex undertaking, and suggested that the youngster should first write a few keyboard sonatas and string quartets before undertaking an orchestral work. The student, however, was indignant. “But, Herr Mozart,” he allegedly retorted, “you were writing symphonies when you were Read more ...
Roger Wright
The composition course founded more than 25 years ago at Snape by composers Oliver Knussen and Colin Matthews is in full swing. The scene is the Britten Studio at Snape Maltings on the Suffolk coast. Like Colin, Olly's connections to Aldeburgh and Snape are deep and long lasting, including his Artistic Directorship of the Festival. Young composers are having their work tried out by an instrumental group, also being mentored by Olly. The ink is still wet on their scores.The scores have been given to Olly and Colin and the run through of a new piece begins. After less than a minute, Olly shouts Read more ...