Interviews
Ismene Brown
Over this weekend the spaces of London's Royal Opera House will be transformed by strange sounds, vaguely operatic, vaguely foresty, thoroughly chilled. The ambient atmospheres will be made by Scanner, who calls himself a “cultural engineer” and has made sounds for morgues, dances, Philips wake-up lights and chill-out rooms in clubs, during an extraordinarily eclectic career that seems to exist somewhere on the very edge of technology.Scanner’s music studio is a laptop, an amplifier, a keyboard and five hard drives. His scores look like Rorschach blots of computer scribble or wildly exploding Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Green Man festival takes place this coming weekend at the Glanusk estate near Abergavenny in the rolling hills of the Brecon Beacons. What begun in 2003 as a glorified gig for the husband and wife duo It's Jo And Danny has become the very epitome of the 21st-century “boutique festival” - indeed is very possibly responsible for that concept itself.As well as reclaiming the rock festival from bovine crowds and sensory overload, the Green Man also provided a nexus for a rising scene of hirsute youngsters intent on mining musical source material outside the standard canons of rock and club Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the second part of this historic career overview interview with the unique British impresarios, Victor and Lilian Hochhauser talk about their razor-edged relations with Soviet apparatchiks and the pressures they came under to prevent artist defections. Victor (who is a very engaging raconteur) reveals the lengths the Russians tried to go to stop Pierre Boulez conducting Berg in the USSR - liver-busting ceremonial vodka sessions, and a solution of Lewis Carrollian ludicrousness. "I hated them," he says, "but we needed each other."Following on from last week's revelations about their Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When the words "commercial" and "art" come together - as they do with the Bolshoi season currently at the Royal Opera House - odds are the glue between them is a three-word phrase "Victor Hochhauser presents". Victor and Lilian Hochhauser are the impresarios behind most Russian ballet seasons UK-wide, and they have a reputation for solid box-office commercial taste, which is easily dismissed as the safe option. But they are in their eighties now, and conservatism is forgivable. In younger, bolder, Cold War days, these cultural buccaneers brought Britain Richter, Oistrakh, Rostropovich, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Julianne Moore (b. 1960) is a true rarity. It’s not just that her hair flames like no other star since Katharine Hepburn. Or that alone of her generation she seems impervious to middle age’s indignities. There’s something else. Having worked with dinosaurs in The Lost World and a cannibal in Hannibal, she is mainstream enough to be considered a genuine leading lady. But much of her most eye-catching work, often written for her by indie directors like Todd Haynes and Paul Thomas Anderson, is fiercely extreme in spirit. Pornography, incest, erotica of various hues – hers would be bargepole Read more ...
carole.woddis
Political playwright Howard Brenton (b. 1942) is always in the process of being "rediscovered". Yet at the same time he has been at the heart of British theatrical life for the past 40 years, since his debut in 1969 with Christie in Love. True, he has spent the odd decade out of the theatrical limelight - a few years ago, he "went out of fashion" in his own phrase – and then he just happened to pen some of the liveliest scripts on television with the BBC’s spy drama series, Spooks (2002-2005).Brenton’s play tally now amounts to 40 plays, either alone or often in collaboration – David Hare and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Choreography is a mystery art. How it happens - or indeed what happens - is as elusive to define as pinning down a brainstorm. There is no solid stuff, no rules, no pre-formed maxims, everything moves; the choreographer goes into a studio, finds some dancers, finds some music, finds some moves, finds some light and atmosphere - and this agglomeration of variables goes out on stage all too often to fall flat, a soufflé that didn't rise. It was insufficiently skilled, or its ingredients were stale, or it lacked the leavening of a compelling imagination or the flavour of real emotional Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Charles Mackerras has died at the age of 84. In tribute to one of the most highly respected and best-loved of conductors, theartsdesk republishes here an interview he gave on the eve of conducting Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera last October. Despite bouts of ill health, he found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No one understands escapism like Willy Russell. Either side of 1980, he wrote two plays about working-class Liverpool women in flight from a humdrum existence. In one a young hairdresser seeks fulfilment through a literary education with the Open University. In the other, a middle-aged housewife has an island-holiday romance. As films, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine earned Oscar nominations for, respectively, Julie Walters and Pauline Collins. As plays, they have barely been off the stage in productions all over the world. The Menier Chocolate Factory shrewdly revived the pair of them Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It has been said that Dan Treacy (b. 1960) is the TV Personalities in the same way that Mark E Smith is The Fall. Certainly he has been the sole consistent member since they appeared in 1978 with the single "14th Floor" and subsequent cult hit "Part Time Punks". The early Eighties incarnation of the band, which included "Slaughter" Joe Foster and Ed Ball (later of The Times) has a claim to laying down the blueprint for British indie.Treacy's recurring themes of childhood, Sixties culture, and lo-fi, punky psychedelia became scene staples as Creation kingpin Alan McGee has acknowledged. The Read more ...
rose.dennen
Los Campesinos! are revelling in deserved notoriety on both sides of the pond. Their first two albums, Hold on Now, Youngster and We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, saw Los Campesinos! lumped in with the twee-pop tag of bands like Bearsuit, Tiger Trap and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, but new release Romance is Boring sees the eight-piece delve into more lush and experimental realms. Their touch is more technical and their approach much more mature. It's as if all that parping and beeping on about love and romance was merely a way to get to the heart of the matter, a heart that is a lot Read more ...
fisun.guner
For his new show at Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger will be unveiling a first: a life-sized, three-dimensional "self-portrait". But it won't be a straightforward representation of the 50-year-old conceptual artist. It will, instead, be a representation of himself as the letter "I" in Times New Roman. His Vauxhall studio, in South London, is filled with pictures of "self-portraits" of the artist as a series of letters. It is also filled with the debris of current and recent projects: bits of string and deflating balloons; scrappy reproductions of Read more ...