Interviews
Jasper Rees
It’s not easy to see the pattern in Roger Michell’s career. More than most British directors, he has zigzagged between the stage and the screen. He was the one who first rehearsed such contemporary classics as Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg and Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange towards their premieres, he has regularly staged the works of Pinter, and yet he is also the director of Notting Hill.The most visible throughline has been his creative partnership with Hanif Kureishi, whose semi-autobiographical novel The Buddha of Suburbia he filmed as a lively television series in 1993. The relationship Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Bernard Cornwell's best-selling Sharpe series, set during the Napoleonic wars, transferred to television with huge success. This week, it’s the turn of his Saxon Stories to make the jump, as the BBC airs its lavish, eight-part drama The Last Kingdom, based on Cornwell's novels. Set against the backdrop of the Viking invasion of Britain and the birth of modern England, it follows the adventures of the impetuous, imperfect and complex hero Uhtred, born a Saxon, brought up a Dane.However, it could so easily have been otherwise. After gaining a history degree, Cornwell initially began a career in Read more ...
David Nice
“Whatever happened to Stephen Bishop?” is not a question likely to be asked by followers of legendary pianism. Born in San Pedro, Los Angeles on 17 October 1940, the young talent took his stepfather’s name as his career was launched at the age of 11. Later he honoured his own father’s Croatian "Kovacevich", by appending it to the “Bishop”. Now it’s plain Kovacevich carved in the pantheon of similar yet unique sensibilities like those of Arrau, Pollini, Richter and Zimerman, alongside masterly exponents of mostly different repertoire like Martha Argerich.On 2 November, in the hottest ticket on Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This year’s Olivier Awards saw the Young Vic trounce its South Bank neighbours, with Ivo van Hove’s revolutionary A View from the Bridge leading 11 nominations and four wins; the production opens on Broadway next week. It reflects an extraordinary period during which the theatre, originally an offshoot of the National, has grown to become one of Britain’s major creative powerhouses – all under the aegis of South African-born David Lan, artistic director since 2000.Following a £12.5 million revamp, the Young Vic now attracts daring experimental artists from Europe and beyond, both Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Kinks have turned 50 last and nagging talk of a reunion is still in the ether. In the absence of the real thing, there is a double-disc greatest hits album surfing the wave of latter-day Kinksmania. Meanwhile a kind of Kinks reunion stormed the West End in the shape of Sunny Afternoon, written by playwright Joe Penhall from an original story by Ray Davies.Taking the band’s glorious songbook as its soundtrack, the musical follows the Kinks from their first number one “You Really Got Me” through to the end of the 1960s when they were allowed back into America after a four-year ban caused by Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Director Sarah Gavron tends to make films with strong social content. Her TV movie This Little Life (2003) concerned a couple’s struggles after the premature birth of their son; her first feature film was an adaptation of Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane (2007) about two Bangladeshi sisters, one confined to an arranged marriage that takes her to London, the other eloping in a "love marriage" in Bangladesh. She followed that with a documentary, Village at the End of the World (2012), a year in the life of a remote Inuit fishing village in Greenland, whose 60 residents fear the closure of their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Light in You, Mercury Rev’s eighth studio album, is issued at the end of this week. It is their first for seven years, following 2008’s Snowflake Midnight. In the run up to its release, main-men and constants Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper (born Sean Mackowiak) took time to reflect on the new album, their attitudes to Mercury Rev's longevity – their debut album, Yerself Is Steam came out in 1991 – and their feelings about how music is heard and recorded.The Mercury Rev of 2015 is different to that of 2008. Although their sound is as affecting and ethereal as ever, and their songs as Read more ...
Heather Neill
Jane Lapotaire's distinguished career on stage and screen was cut short in 2000 when she collapsed in Paris with a massive brain haemorrhage. She was giving a Shakespeare masterclass at the time and now, 15 years later, at the age of 70, she is once again acting on stage in Shakespeare.She made the return to theatre in 2013 with an emotionally charged account of a small role, the mourning Duchess of Gloucester in the RSC's Richard II, starring David Tennant. As Greg Doran adds Henry V to his cycle of Histories – Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, were unveiled last year – she is relishing the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Composer, pianist, producer… Max Richter (b. 1966) is nothing if not prolific, not to mention unique. His traditional training, which included Edinburgh University, the Royal Academy as well as Florence, under composer Luciano Berio sits alongside a fascination with the otherwordly sounds of German electronica and American minimalism. As well as his solo work, which blends emotional depth and power with a refreshingly direct approach, he has collaborated on operas, ballets, theatre, film and television scores.In 2012, Richter released Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Laurent Garnier, 49, is a key figure in the development of French electronic dance music. A DJ at the Haçienda in Manchester just as house music began to explode in 1987, he went on to helm nights at the Rex Club in Paris in the Nineties. These became a vital hub around which French dance music coalesced. Garnier went on to be a successful producer and live performer, releasing multiple albums, many for his own F Communications label. He regularly drew links between jazz and techno, most famously with his millennial anthem “The Man With The Red Face”. A new, significantly updated edition of Read more ...
fisun.guner
Huge canvases, bold, expressive brushwork and a full-bodied, vibrant palette. Chantal Joffe’s figurative paintings are certainly striking and seductive. Citing American painter Alice Neel and American photographer Diane Arbus as two abiding influences, Joffe’s portraits are predominantly of women and children who often convey a sense of awkwardness and social unease. As well as portraits painted from personal and family photographs, her inspiration has also come from pornography and fashion magazines. She has exhibited widely and internationally, and in 2006 received the Charles Wollaston Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Peter Phillips founded the Tallis Scholars, a vocal group specializing in the sacred music of the Renaissance, in 1973 while still a student. He has been directing the ensemble ever since: it is about to perform its 2,000th concert.The Tallis Scholars continues to unearth, and to make the case for works by neglected composers. It has also developed a style and a sound, and there is a consistency of approach, as Phillips says: “Not aiming to change the Tallis Scholars' basic sound or method of performance according to the nationality or the exact period of the different repertoires being Read more ...