festivals
Peter Culshaw
In the days around WOMAD there have been plenty of media about how the “hostile environment” towards migrants has created all sorts of problems for artists attempting to get here from around the world. Certainly, we are being denied some of the hottest new acts - like the wild blue-haired Moonchild Sanelly from South Africa or the hottest new act from Nigeria, Chicoco Sounds. WOMAD have just signed a new 12-year deal at Charlton Park, however - and if you wanted to find the spiritual centre for the liberal, tolerant, positive globalism currently under threat, WOMAD would be a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gusting. It’s not a word I’ve ever given much thought. You hear it on weather forecasts but I’m not a farmer of a fisherman so when they say it’ll be windy “with possible gusting speeds of up to 45 miles per hour” my brain doesn’t really register what that means on the ground. Until now. Camp Bestival 2018 was eventually defined by gusting (that and, apparently, Mary “Irrelevant” Berry). It was the unstoppable gusting that finally cancelled the festival a day early, a sad development but I could understand why. And I could feel it too, for by the time we left all my senses deeply knew exactly Read more ...
David Nice
"They incessantly break down, destroy and fragment the mistrust that exists among people," wrote a Latvian journalist of a folklore group during the start of the Baltic countries' "singing revolution" against Soviet rule in 1988. This is the recent reality, a nonviolent uprising unique in history, behind the daunting facts and figures of Latvia's latest "Song and Dance Celebration". In 65 events over a week in Riga, having rehearsed for five years, 16,500 singers from 427 choirs and 18,174 dancers from 739 groups - including those in the post-war Latvian diaspora around the world - perform to Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Cornbury Festival holds a very special place in my heart. When the babies were young, we realised that if we were going to be up all night without sleep we might as well be sat in a field listening to music rather than staring out of the window at a dreary North London street. Luckily for us, we accidentally picked one of the most family-friendly festivals out there.Over the years Cornbury has gone from strength to strength, headlining musicians from Bryan Adams, Kaiser Chiefs and Seal to Tom Jones, Razorlight, Jools Holland, and Van Morrison. Thank abso-goodness then, that rather than Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Much as I love Strauss’s Ariadne in its final form, I have a sneaking nostalgia for the original version (attached to Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme), which had Zerbinetta and her companions popping up after the final love duet and gently letting out some of its gas. Even in Alan Privett’s sparkling new production for Longborough, the too protracted revised ending threatens to die on its feet, and is kept alive only by the fine singing of the two principals, Helena Dix and Jonathan Stoughton, neither of them exactly sprightly actors, and by superb orchestral Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The audience at the Buxton International Festival has a way of cutting to the essence of a production. “They’ll have a job getting all that cutlery out of the sand” commented one of my neighbours after the end of Act One, where in Stephen Medcalf’s staging, Idomeneo (Paul Nilon) has just gone full operatic Mad Scene: hurling chairs, and sweeping an entire dinner service into the piles of sand that comprise much of the set. We’ll come back to the sand later. More significant, perhaps, is the fact that at the opera’s climactic scene, as Idomeneo prepares to sacrifice his son Idamante ( Read more ...
David Nice
There is a tide in the best-planned festivals that comes in and out almost imperceptibly, bringing with it changes as the days move on. Put it down to the kind of perfect planning that discards any one rigid theme, and to forging long-term links with performers who don't just pop in for one concert. That in this case has been the work of East Neuk Festival mastermind Svend-Einar McEwan-Brown, who not only ensures artists of a uniquely high quality over the years, but also introduces themes and mini-residencies with impressive subtlety.In the two and a half days I was there this year, Bach, Read more ...
David Kettle
With – unusually – no visiting orchestra at this year’s St Magnus International Festival in far-flung Orkney (the fall-out from delayed funding confirmations, we’re assured), there was a danger that the annual midsummer event might have felt a little – well, quiet.Not a bit of it. In fact, if anything, this year’s festival felt more densely packed than ever – perhaps with events that were smaller in scale, admittedly, but they were no less ambitious and captivating for that. Famously founded by Orkney’s most famous musical resident – Peter Maxwell Davies, who died two years ago – all of 42 Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
The daily car ferry from Newhaven in Sussex to Dieppe in Normandy is an unlikely phenomenon. Neither port is very large; neither region very populous, and the journey sways you along for four contemplative hours. It enjoys the custom of truckers, school parties, and retired caravan-owners. But it also caters for art lovers with time on their hands.Since 2014, the maritime link has been celebrated by a festival of "contemporary creation". It’s not all about the boat, but in peak summer this year, there will be a group show on the waves. The full collection of exhibitions and events are within Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Daft Punk! Kendrick Lamar! The Kinks! Yes! We blew the lid off!What? No! There IS no Glastonbury Festival 2018, I hear you cry. You think that’s going to stop Caspar Gomez? Never! I need my fix. If they’re not going to have Glastonbury this year, I will. In my head. And it will be on Worthy Farm. I call Loki, Glastonbury’s bearded archiving anarchist and trickster, and arrange to camp there. You can’t just plot up, it’s a working farm. I quickly pull together a reconnoitre unit; one of my usual Pilton partners-in crime, Finetime, and GE (pronounced “Jee"), a youthful understudy. We clamber in Read more ...
Owen Richards
Despite the Welsh repute for singing, the Festival of Voice in Cardiff has always been more than just music. Indeed, on the Friday evening, Welsh/Cornish pop enigma Gwenno was appearing alongside the gloriously titled one woman show Lovecraft (Not the Sex Shop in Cardiff) and English, an interactive theatre experience on language in Britain.An apt subject for its audience, judging by the conversations flowing as we waited in the forgivable summer dusk. There’s a curiosity on the show’s content, with vague promises on building a contemporary Babel. English is a co-production between National Read more ...
David Nice
"Get those creatures off the stage, or I won't answer for what I'll do". The exclamation of the Prima Donna in the backstage prologue of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, about to share her grand opera with lower forms of theatrical life, seems to have been shared by a head teacher at the first Setúbal Music Festival in Portugal eight years ago, faced with the arrival of special-needs children to join his pupils. It was a sink-or-swim moment, but artistic director Ian Ritchie stood firm, and the festival has gone swimmingly ever since. All levels now work together without anything other Read more ...