festivals
matilda.battersby
It was the invasion of the collapsible chairs at this year’s Co-operative Cambridge Folk Festival. From above it appeared that an army of extremely well-equipped picnickers was staking its claim on the quarter of a mile surrounding the main stage using only fold-up chairs, checked blankets and pints of cider, occasionally lobbing colourful balloon missiles into the air. To call it civilised would be an understatement. It was quite simply extraordinary how far people had gone in pursuit of convenience. Those of us poor sods who sat on the floor could barely see for the sea of green canvas Read more ...
Joe Muggs
“Huxley! Electra!” called a plummy mummy to a couple of dawdling children. “Hurry up or you'll miss the BMX display!” Thursday night and Camp Bestival was, to a rather comical degree, looking like a playground for slightly funky middle-class families. Not that I was complaining – with an 18-month-old not so much in tow as leading the charge, I was extremely grateful for the regimented, relatively quiet campsite and the untold entertainments and comforts that CB provides. This was my first experience of a festival with said inquisitive toddler, and the experience of having to abide by his Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Terence Rattigan’s art of concealment is what makes The Deep Blue Sea so rich and true an observation of the way people behave. Being deprived of his concealing mask is the crucial idea of the interesting new play partnering it at Chichester to mark Rattigan's centenary: Nicholas Wright’s Rattigan’s Nijinsky, which incorporates an unproduced Rattigan TV script into a drama of why it was not produced.The two plays, acutely directed for Chichester by Philip Franks, make illuminating contrast, too, purely in theatrical method - Rattigan’s straight-up focus on people in a room and the things Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Longborough has its Mozart (this season a not wildly exciting Così fan tutte), and it has its Verdi (this year Falstaff). But its real heart is in Wagner, and in particular The Ring, now – in its third year – up to Siegfried. Wagnerites infest the car parks and the picnic lawns. The man who borrowed our corkscrew at supper time had seen six operas in one week at Bayreuth, and on his one night off had gone to Munich to see Rienzi, the longest Wagner night of the lot. Longborough is decidedly his kind of place.Removing one’s rose-tinted specs, it’s easy enough to find fault with this or that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I’m standing with my feet on peaks and my head in clouds, looking down steep Alps at the tiny chocolate-brown chalets of little Verbier way below on the green slopes. It’s ravishing up here on the top of Fontanet, and I tarry, gloating over the botanical riches around me of milky-blue gentians, royal-blue harebells, glistening edelweiss, dark little orchids and garnet-bright sedum, watching the trickling water of a brook, and replaying last night’s music in my head. And if you move quick you can do this yourself before next Sunday.There’s an Easyjet to Geneva several times a day, a train ride Read more ...
philip radcliffe
An opera a day keeps boredom at bay. There’s no danger of boredom in Buxton in mid-July. Set 1,000ft up in the Derbyshire hills, on the edge of the Peak District, and blessed with an Edwardian gem of an opera house, the old spa town is now well established with its own place on the festival map. And when the sun shines on it, as it did for most of the first day, it’s a picture.The Buxton Festival aims to keep you going from breakfast to bedtime (late) with nine operas, a programme of high-class music, a strong literary series bringing 30 well-known authors to flog their books, a touch of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The French national holiday of 14 July might be marked by parades and fly-pasts in Paris, but here on the Atlantic coast it’s the central date for Francofolies, the annual festival dedicated to French music. La Rochelle hosted its first Francofolies in 1985. Twenty-six years on, the festival remains the premier showcase for Francophone music. This year the bill took in David Guetta’s dance-floor cheesiness, Gotan Project's overhauled tango, actress Mélanie Laurent plugging her recent album and all points in between. A window like no other on the French mainstream, it also showcases up-and- Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's always interesting to see how revolutions in music get folded back into the fabric of the culture that fomented them. Dubstep, which changed club culture so dramatically in the mid-2000s, is now an intrinsic part of that culture from mainstream to margins, and the forms it takes as it beds into these various parts of the ecosystem are manifold. And Jazzsteppa – two Israelis named Gal and their trombones – turn their hands to a fair few of those forms.Watch video for "Investment Decision"
Hyper Nomads is on a label run by dance/dub veteran and ex-KLF producer Tony Thorpe. It is a Read more ...
david.cheal
Latitude: this four-day event in the attractive environs of Henham Park, near Southwold, is, as its slogan says, “more than just a music festival”. Quite so. But how to review such a groaning cultural smorgasbord? This year, rather than delivering an indigestible wodge of words, I thought I’d take a slightly different approach; thus my account of my four days in Suffolk is divided into thematic sections which correspond only roughly to the festival’s own creative categorisations. So here we go.
Latitude’s organisers are still struggling with the water thing. Although work has been Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The Hallé Orchestra, enlarged for the occasion with harps, anvils, horns and such, was in its place on the platform. Sir Mark Elder made his entrance like a surgeon about to embark on a complex and energy-draining heart bypass operation. And the lights went out. On purpose. A spotlight picked up a man in a white shirt with long hair mounting the platform and making his way to a small table, chair and reading lamp mid-stage. It was Richard Wagner – in the form of actor Roger Allam. Pure melodrama.Allam started to mutter, speak, declaim in that rich booming voice of his, articulating the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Tonight the doors open for the biggest classical music festival in the world, the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. To help you plan your summer visits and listening, theartsdesk's critics gently steer you with their own preferences from the 90 concerts on offer. You can also check the complete list of all Proms on another page. Recommendations are made by David Nice, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, Edward Seckerson, Alexandra Coghlan, Graham Rickson, Stephen Walsh and Ismene Brown. David Nice As I intimated when I reported on the press briefing, the prospectus looks more enticing this year Read more ...
natalie.wheen
Getting to Mull is an improbably romantic journey to classical music-making. One can easily understand why Mendelssohn was so affected by his experiences in Scotland – and Mull. On the three-hour train journey from Glasgow one sheds the habits of everyday life: the train winds through thickets of Forestry Commission plantations, which suddenly open out into wild panoramas of mountains and lochs, or a dramatic ruined castle against the skyline. Then the ferry from Oban passes the heavily fortified Duart Castle on its crag guarding the Sound of Mull, which later will be the scene of elegant Read more ...