India
Tom Birchenough
Respect and dignity, intolerance and hatred: the poles were set far apart in Stephen Fry: Out There. It’s good to have Fry the thoughtful presenter back – it’s been a long time since his The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive – on a subject close to his heart, how gay people are faring in various parts of the world. This first episode took us to Uganda and Los Angeles, while part two on Wednesday drops in on Brazil, Russia and India. Quite an itinerary for two hours of television – fitted in over two years, during gaps in Fry’s other commitments – and it’s to Fergus O’Brien’s directing Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In the 25 years she has spent taking photographs, Dayanita Singh has accumulated a huge body of evocative and memorable images. For instance, there’s the girl lying face down on a bed (main picture), dressed in what looks like her school uniform. She lies awkwardly, her legs stretched diagonally across to the edge of the mattress, presumably so that her shoes won’t dirty the sheets. Why didn’t she take her shoes off?Propped up on one arm on a bedspread decorated with leaping fish, in Zeiss Ikon (1996) (pictured right) a beautiful young woman gazes thoughtfully to camera. She would probably Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Darbar Festival, now in its eighth year, encompasses four days of talks, yoga, food, and music – swathes of it, morning, afternoon, and night, with each concert featuring two main sets.This year’s focus was on female musicians, and included a talk featuring the great Carnatic singer Sudha Ragunathan discussing her own experiences and the role of women in Indian music.Friday and Saturday evening’s concerts focused on Dhrupad, Hindustani and Carnatic music. Dhrupad is the oldest living form of Hindustani (north Indian) classical music, uninflected by Persian and Islamic influences, and with Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This is a key weekend for lovers of Indian classical music or the merely sonically adventurous – the Darbar Festival in the Southbank has some of the most extraordinary practioners of the art from both the Carnatic (South Indian) and Hindustani (North Indian) traditions.The most fascinating aspect may be the presence of some really ancient styles notably Dhrupad.One of the most extraordinary musical experiences I have ever had was seeing the Dagar Brothers in the early Eighties. A group of bohemians calling themselves the Guild of Transcultural Studies had turned the abandoned Cambodian Read more ...
David Nice
Concert programmes are designed to make the mind flexible with constant contrasts. More often, though, the great is the enemy of the good-ish. Last night an Elgar masterpiece was always going to overshadow its second-half predecessor, a hazily pleasant piece for strings and – novelty value – six harps by the colleague Elgar called “dear old Gran”, candidate for this Proms season's resuscitation attempt Granville Bantock. And earlier, Sibelius bopped a BBC commission on the head with supernatural noises that could have been conjured yesterday.Always beware – I’ve written it several times Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The fascination of the East has been a constant in classical music’s history, from the jangling sounds of the Janissary bands to Mozart’s Seraglio, Sheherazade’s dreamy tales to Britten’s seductive gamelan. Last night’s Prom gave the East a chance to answer back, setting Nishat Khan’s new Sitar Concerto in dialogue with Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony – a musical portrait of a landscape rather closer to home.Getting us into the mood, Holst’s short tone poem Indra was something of an oddity. Anyone expecting swirling Orientalist fantasy would have been disappointed by the rather anonymous Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It’s unspeakably bad for so many reasons that the injured Bolshoi Ballet director Sergei Filin cannot be in London to see his company perform, and one is that he can’t see his protegée Olga Smirnova revealing herself to us as destined to be one of the great ballerinas of this era. Smirnova was signed in 2011 by Filin from the Vaganova Academy in St Petersburg, the Mariinsky’s nursery, whose combination of regal style and gossamer delicacy is evident through every fibre of this miraculous young dancer’s movement.In La Bayadère last night she showed herself not only to possess as if by nature Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“My generation all were steeped in Bollywood.” Meera Syal, Wolverhampton born and bred, is recalling the cinematic influences of her youth. “It was our major link to India and was much more current than trying to make a phone call. You did feel that, though you were so far away, you were watching the same movies as your cousins.”We’ve moved on a bit since the 1970s. Bollywood is now much closer to the British cultural mainstream, helped along by entertainments as diverse as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams (co-written by Syal, pictured below) and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which Read more ...
tanika.gupta
It was over four years ago that I was commissioned by Michael Boyd, then artistic director of the RSC, to write a play which I had vaguely pitched to him as “a costume drama set in the nineteenth century with Asians running around in it”. And here we are, finally, about to open an epic and ambitious play set over the last 14 years of Queen Victoria’s reign. My initial inspiration came from an old black and white photograph taken in an ayah’s home in Aldgate in the 19th century. The picture of a group of Asian women sat around a table sewing and reading, wearing saris and Victorian dress Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I hadn’t been through Mumbai (although lots of people there still call it Bombay) for a while – I once Iived in a beach house here for several months in Juhu while working on a fairly insane project with, among others, Boy George, Bollywood playback goddess Asha Bhohle, and the brilliant film composer RD Burman called the West India Company. The whole thing was like Spinal Tap goes East – money was wasted, people went crazy, gangsters came round, the cook set fire to himself, everyone got dysentery. That story is for another time, perhaps.These days the city, and not just me, has calmed down Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Hariharan gives the appearance at least of being fabulously laid-back when I meet him in the lobby of one of Mumbai’s top five star hotels. Wearing a jaunty hat, he is recognised by a lot of passers-by, and when he orders a cappuccino HH is fashioned artfully from chocolate in the foam (see photo below right).Now 56, for the last 30-odd years he has been one of India’s best known and most innovative singers. He’s had the Hindi Bollywood hits, but also has recorded for films in the South of India “at least 800 Tamil songs”, as well as Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Bhojpuri and Telugu songs. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The cup of tea is a national institution that brings comfort and good cheer to millions. So is Victoria Wood. Blend them in a pot and you’ve got a pleasing brew called Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea. It might not have been so. When Wood last ventured out into the former Empire it was to visit all the places in the world named after Queen Victoria. The concept felt slightly stewed. Not here.Broken down into two distinct chapters, Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea spent the first hour explaining precisely where the humble cuppa came from. Put very reductively, its precious leaves were originally Read more ...