The career of Simon Russell Beale (b. 1961) needs little introduction. It took wing with the Royal Shakespeare Company but, give or take the odd foray into other buildings, including work with Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse and more recently with the Bridge Project, he has made the National Theatre his home. Of all the Hamlets seen in the past 20 years, his seems to be the one that more than any remains unforgettable in the collective memory. Meanwhile, anyone who saw him as a camp King Arthur in Spamalot may not have guessed that long before Russell Beale took acting seriously, he took Read more ...

Last September Luc Bondy watched his name speed around the world, if not for the most desirable reasons. His Tosca opened the season at the Met, a more grounded, less opulent replacement for one of the opera house’s many much loved productions by Franco Zeffirelli. As Bondy walked onstage to take his directorial bow, a chorus of boos crescendoed from the audience. They do that all the time in Milan, now and then in Paris, both cities where Bondy's work is known and accepted. But New York?Last September Luc Bondy watched his name speed around the world, if not for the most desirable reasons. Read more ...

On Tuesday Mikhail Baryshnikov, just turned 62, will dance again, an evergreen superstar as well as philanthropist. The occasion will be the opening of the Jerome Robbins Theater, his latest project in his Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York. In this second collection of conversations with him - read part 1 here - edited from interview transcripts from 1993, 1996, 1999 and 2004, Baryshnikov talks about his devotion to George Balanchine, global celebrity with ABT and beyond, and the voyage he took into modern dance, using his fame and fortune (and TV's Sex and the City) to give back as much as Read more ...

You don’t usually find ballerinas in Monument Valley. Cowboys, maybe, but not a pale, slender girl in a glistening golden tutu alighting like an exotic butterfly briefly on a silk-shod toe in the very same red dust that John Wayne rattled across in Stagecoach. The cover pictures for the Royal Opera House season brochures have fielded some spectacular pictures, but the new spring image is symbolic of the enduring nature of the dancer's will to survive. Sarah Lamb, the translucent blonde from the US, is back on pointe after a year when her career appeared to be over.Breaking her foot in a Manon Read more ...

A new play by David Greig opens at the Hampstead Theatre for the Royal Shakespeare Company next week. A theatre director as well as playwright, Greig (b. 1969) is one of the most prolific and artistically ambitious playwrights of his generation and a key figure in the current burgeoning of Scottish theatre. In addition to an extraordinarily diverse range of plays such as Europe (Traverse Theatre, 1994), The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (Tron Theatre, 1999) and Damascus (Edinburgh International Festival, 2009), his work includes Read more ...

The great dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov (b. 1948) marked his 62nd birthday last Wednesday. Even more than Nureyev, Baryshnikov entered the popular mind as something more than a matchless ballet dancer. With his popstar looks and magnetic attraction for women, he has been embraced the world over as a cultural icon of his era, a symbol of political freedom, a Soviet paragon turned go-getting American capitalist, an Oscar-nominated film star and a Tony-nominated stage actor, as well as an irresistible, airborne fantasy lover. In ballet Baryshnikov is the lodestar of male dancing, his videos and Read more ...

Marisa dos Reis Nunes (b. 1973) is an African-Portuguese singing superstar whose music has deep roots in fado, Portugal’s dark-blue, intensely poetic national music, but which over the course of five albums has gradually taken on inflections of jazz, blues and bossa nova. Born in Mozambique to an African mother and a Portuguese father, Mariza (like all good divas she has long since dispensed with meddlesome surname, converting along the way the soft S in her forename to a zippy Z) grew up in Lisbon, where she fell in love with fado (it translates as “fate”), the starkly melancholic strain of Read more ...

Antonio Pappano (b. 1959) enjoys the best of two opulent worlds. At the Royal Opera House in London (now his home city), he's well stuck in to his seventh season as music director, basking in popularity and plaudits previous incumbents could only have dreamt of. In Rome, he's director of the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, a post he took up in 2005. The orchestra, over 100 years old - the Accademia itself goes back to the 1580s - is based at an extraordinary Renzo Piano-designed structure, called the Auditorium Parco della Musica, a couple of kilometres north of the Read more ...

In the next few weeks the wider public will be introduced to the charms of Rolando Villazón (b. 1972). Anointed as a star of opera houses around the world in the last decade, the Mexican tenor is about to participate in ITV1's Popstar to Opera Star. As singing celebs from the world of pop music take on the big arias, Villazón has been cast as mentor, panellist and figleaf. It is all a very long way from Covent Garden.His label Deutsche Grammophon is taking advantage of the exponential hoik in profile to release Tenor, a new CD of operatic favourites, some culled from his back catalogue, Read more ...

Tim Lawrence is an author and academic, whose musical studies have led him from the dance scene of the 1990s to researching New York's disco scene – his Love Saves the Day was the first and remains the definitive history of the music, history and politics of disco – and then to the singular figure of Arthur Russell. A cellist, singer, songwriter, producer, composer and electronic artist, Russell existed both within and without disco and many other scenes in a period of cultural ferment in New York when many of the sounds that form the fabric of popular culture were being first created.Russell Read more ...

George Crumb (b.1929) is one of the great American experimental composers of the 20th century. His delicate scores are characterised by a child-like sense of wonder and an array of instrumentation that appears to have hitched a ride from outer space. Crumb first came to the fore in the 1960s with Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death (1968), Night of the Four Moons (1969), inspired by and composed during the Apollo 11 space flight, the savage string quartet Black Angels (1970) and Ancient Voices of Children (1970). In 1968 he won a Pulitzer for Echoes of Time and the Read more ...

Immediately following the death of radio DJ John Peel in 2004, it became clear very rapidly that there was no obvious heir apparent. With so many specialist shows on the station, nobody ran the full gamut of leftfield and underground music in the same way that Peel had. But if anyone comes close, it is Mary Anne Hobbs. Schooled in rock and indie journalism in the last great era of the weekly music press, the mid-1980s to early 1990s, and presenter on XFM and then Radio 1 of everything from extreme heavy metal to deep electronica, she certainly approaches Peel's eclecticism and dedication to Read more ...