First Person
alexandra.coghlan
For the first decade of its life, King’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols remained a local phenomenon, a “gift to the City of Cambridge”. But that all changed in 1928 with the first BBC Broadcast of the service. It wasn’t the first service to be broadcast from King’s Chapel, that honour goes to an Evensong in 1926, but it was the service that caught the imagination of a nation like none other before it.Yet the service arrived in the BBC schedules without fanfare. A quick glance through the Radio Times for December 1928 finds only a small notice of the programme at the bottom of a page, Read more ...
EV Crowe
It’s a strange time to be alive. Has it always felt like this? When else was there a time when so much felt to be at stake, and the ground moved beneath our feet with the continuous emergence of technologies that affect our everyday lives and our very being, where we know little of our interior selves and yet publish so much about our lives to strangers? We are the chosen generation, we are the people who will be witness to the most radical change in society the world has ever seen! We are fated and also incredibly special! I am special, I must be! And then I remember it has been like this Read more ...
Odaline de la Martinez
This year is the sixth London Festival of American Music, and I could not be more excited about it. From the first festival in 2006 – 10 years ago now – I had a very specific idea about what I wanted the London Festival of American Music to be like. At its heart the festival is designed to celebrate the contemporary American musical landscape, and to bring the best America has to offer to UK audiences.The American music scene has never been stronger – there is an amazing range of styles and works being produced all across the states. UK audiences, however, tend to be solely familiar with Read more ...
Harriet Walter
A part we have played is like a person we once met, grew to know, became intimately enmeshed with and finally moved away from. Some of these characters remain friends, others are like ex-lovers with whom we no longer have anything in common. All of them bring something out in us that will never go back in the box.In my new book, Brutus and Other Heroines, I write about the major Shakespeare characters I have played. This sometimes involved revisiting pieces I had written much earlier in my life and my career, and doing this was a bit like looking back through old diaries with a mixture of Read more ...
Marcus Davey
We've got a lot to celebrate in 2016: 50 years since the Roundhouse became an arts centre and 10 years of transforming young lives through creativity. In celebration of this momentous year we embarked on a journey of discovery to uncover the stories from train-enthusiast accounts of our humble beginnings to real-life high-wire love stories, from week-long raves in the 1990s to politically-charged spoken word in the 2000s. So many incredible stories have emerged from the walls of this beautiful building.In the 1960s freedom of expression and liberation had arrived in London. Skirts were Read more ...
Vladimir Shcherban
On 10 October 2016, World Mental Health Day, the team of Belarus Free Theatre came back together to start the final stages of production for Tomorrow I Was Always a Lion, a new theatre show based on Arnhild Lauveng’s autobiographical book. Arnhild Lauveng is a Norwegian writer and practicing psychologist. In the book she tells the story of her own recovery from the incurable condition of schizophrenia.Every production created by Belarus Free Theatre is dedicated to those people who challenge themselves and the circumstances they are living in. The story of BFT itself is a story of overcoming Read more ...
Jonny Steinberg
To begin writing a book is to start something over which you are going to lose control. As it comes to life, a book acquires its own quiddity, its own interior authority, and if the writer does not obey this authority she ruins the book. A Man of Good Hope tells the true story of Asad, a Somali refugee who embarks on an transcontinential journey to reach South Africa. About halfway through the writing, the book began demanding that I stick uncompromisingly to Asad's point of view as he was subjected to South Africa’s relentless, slow-drip violence.This was not what I wanted to hear. Asad’s Read more ...
Nico Muhly
Writing for two pianos is something that – until last year – I had not attempted. I was contacted by Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen, two pianists who have performed as a duo for many years, asking me to compose a duet for them to perform at the inaugural London Piano Festival. I met Charles back in 2014 when he performed my pieces A Hudson Cycle and Fast Stuff in New York. Time constraints led me to restructure and rewrite an existing piece in my portfolio, Fast Cycles, which I wrote for the late John Scott. Writing for two pianos was easy, as I know a Read more ...
Ed Vaizey
A couple of weeks ago, I held a debate in Parliament in which I called for the government to increase funding for the arts, museums and heritage. The Chancellor’s autumn statement, less than two months away, will be when I will know if my campaign has succeeded.For my whole six years as culture minister, from 2010 until the summer of 2016, funding was the biggest issue for debate. In 2010, big headline cuts drew the wrath of the sector. By 2015, I had persuaded the then Chancellor George Osborne to a standstill settlement. Almost better were the warm words he used about the importance of Read more ...
mark.kidel
When the French painter Fabienne Verdier told me she’d been invited to explore the relationship between painting and music at the world-famous Juilliard School in New York, I knew straight away that this unusual residency should be documented.Fabienne is an adventurer. In her early 20s, she had courageously embarked on a journey of discovery. She was one of the very first French art students to go on an exchange programme to China, only a few years after the end of the Cultural Revolution. She had a really difficult time there, as she looked for a traditional calligrapher with whom she could Read more ...
Steven Isserlis
All musicians have particular musical passions, composers, styles or genres to which they are irresistibly drawn. I have many – almost too many at times; but among the most enduring is my love for the music, writing and personality of Robert Schumann. Another important aspect of my musical life – another passion, in fact - is the work I get to do with young musicians.Writing (co-writing) this book has given me an opportunity to combine these passions/pleasures, by taking Schumann’s own invaluable advice for the young musicians of his day, and updating it in order to render it more accessible Read more ...
Veronika Szabo
On a sunny afternoon in April four young women pile themselves into a toilet at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. They lock the door. They have come here to make some intimate recordings. Awkward giggles develop into discussion and discussion turns into confession. They are talking about their bodies. Something is always too small or big, or not the right shape.You might ask, what happened when these women started opening up in front of each other and sharing memories about when they felt beautiful, embarrassed, sexy or ugly? When they admitted their guilty pleasures from the Read more ...