Interviews
Jasper Rees
No soul singer has been associated with one hit in quite the same way. Percy Sledge, who died last week at the age of 74, recorded “When a Man Loves a Woman” in 1966 and launched himself as a tearful balladeer. Its simple chord structure, featuring a descending bassline familiar from Pachelbel and Bach, was the bedrock over which Sledge howled plaintively of a lost love. There were other hits, until his producers retired in 1974 just as soul music was going priapic, but the first cut was always the deepest.When I met Sledge in 1994 he had his first new album out in 20 years. He was a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Alice Coote (b.1968) is one of the world’s leading mezzo-sopranos. She grew up in Cheshire, born to two painters, Mark Coote and Mary Moss, and learned her craft at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the Royal Northern College of Music and the National Opera Studio. Her breakthrough came in 2000 when, within the time frame of a fortnight, she sang Ruggiero in Handel’s Alcina at the Edinburgh Festival, and Poppea in Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea at the ENO.Since then she has become a global star of opera, albeit one for whom concert recitals are equally important. She was forced Read more ...
kate.connolly
The Nobel prize-winning writer, playwright and artist Günter Grass was arguably the best-known German-language author of the second half of the 20th century. Kate Connolly met him in May 2010 in Istanbul where, after attending a series of literary events, Grass was forced to stay on for some days as volcanic ash closed European airports.Born in 1927 in the port city of Danzig in what is now Gdansk in Poland, he was among the hundreds of thousands of ethnic German refugees who settled in West Germany in 1945. His literary career started with his debut novel, The Tin Drum (1959), which remains Read more ...
Marianka Swain
From Singin’ in the Rain and Anything Goes to Hello, Dolly! and Mary Poppins, Olivier Award winner Stephen Mear has done more than any other British choreographer to usher classic musicals into the modern era. But adept as he is at razzle-dazzling ’em, there’s more to Mear, as recent excursions like City of Angels at Donmar Warehouse and Die Fledermaus for the Metropolitan Opera prove. His contribution to the lauded Gypsy revival, opening next week at the Savoy Theatre following a triumphant Chichester run, demonstrates the combination of emotional engagement and quick-witted Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
There is no mistaking the music of Unsuk Chin. Born in Korea and based in Berlin, Chin brings a range of cultural perspectives to her work. She often describes her music in terms of light and colour, and evokes dreamscapes when recalling her inspirations. Yet her music also has a strong gestural quality, her musical ideas are clear and definite, often subtle but never ambiguous.It is an approach that has won her many admirers and advocates, among them some of classical music’s biggest names, including Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gustavo Dudamel. And she has received numerous awards, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Marcus Coates (b. 1968) is an artist who specialises in projects that involve the natural world. Graduating from the Royal Academy School in the early Nineties, by the millennium he was attracting attention for filmed art events that were both eccentric and thought-provoking. These included Goshawk (1999), wherein Coates was suspended in a pine tree so that he might view the world as a bird of prey, the self-explanatory Sparrow Hawk Bait (1999), where he ran through a wood with his head covered in dead birds, and Indigenous British Mammals (2000), which saw him partially buried in wild Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Richard Nelson (b. 1950) is a leading figure in American theatre but also a consistent documentarian of his country’s liberal consciousness. His series of plays about the Apple Family, written between 2010 and 2013, have been critically acclaimed for their portrayal of the upstate New York clan’s gatherings on significant historical days. They are performed for the first time in the UK at the Brighton Festival in May.Nelson’s career, however, began in the mid-Seventies with his profile coming to wider attention the following decade as he worked alongside theatre directors such as Britain’s Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Platinum-selling singer Rebecca Ferguson has released two acclaimed albums, Heaven (2011) and Freedom (2013), though she broke through (in?) to the heart of the music-listening public on The X Factor (2010), when she came in runner-up behind Matt Cardle. Her voice oozes warmth and sincerity, and in only a few years she has acquired a passionate following. She’s also known for a troubled private life, which has become increasingly public. Last year she collapsed during a live episode of Loose Women; soon after she discovered she was pregnant; not long after that the baby’s father left her Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The world now knows him as Lord Crawley, stiff-backed in white tie and tails, regimental garb or, for relaxation, tweed. But before he became the face of Downton Abbey – and of bumbling institutional incompetence in Twenty Twelve and W1A – Hugh Bonneville could be seen in roles of considerable depth and range, including a moving Philip Larkin and a brutish husband in the BBC's Daniel Deronda.The evidence was The Cazalets (pictured below), a stately six-part tour of well-to-do town and country folk as Blighty prepares to stand alone against Hitler. It was broadcast all the way back Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There is everything of the quiet achiever about Dobrinka Tabakova. The softly-spoken Bulgarian-British composer was born in 1980 into a music-loving family of doctors, scientists and academics in the town of Plovdiv in Bulgaria and moved to England in 1991. She has garnered composition prizes from Amsterdam, London, New York, Neuchâtel, Vienna and Warsaw. She has been featured composer or composer-in-residence in Utrecht, Sigulda (Latvia), Lockenhaus (Austria), Dubrovnik, Berlin, Hong Kong and Oxford, and will have a major focus on her work this year at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival and at Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mark Stewart is the singer and a founding member of iconoclastic band The Pop Group, who reformed in 2010. He grew up in Bristol and, with The Pop Group, between 1978 and 1981, pioneered an abrasively different post-punk sound based on jazz, funk and hip hop, with a direct and vociferous political edge. Their output, especially their debut album Y and the single “We Are All Prostitutes”, remain hugely influential within alternative rock circles.When The Pop Group split Stewart went onto work with Adrian Sherwood, Tackhead and the On-U sound stable, creating crushingly heavy music that Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
New filmmakers often suffer an unhelpful onslaught of comparisons and labels. Yet Desiree Akhavan offers so many options as to deflect all of them – counter measures against the heat-seeking missiles of media stereotyping. She’s a bisexual, an Iranian-American, a second generation immigrant, a multi-hyphenate (actor-writer-director), a New Yorker with a line in neurotic anal-gazing worthy of Woody Allen, and she’s currently appearing in Girls alongside (and drawing comparisons with) the poster girl for the female zeitgeist, Lena Dunham. There’s so much there that she can only be wholly Read more ...