festivals
bruce.dessau
It cannot be easy being a veteran pop star on tour. All you want to do are your lovely new songs and all your fans want to hear are your golden oldies. Two weeks ago Ringo Starr showed that he has clearly got to an age where he has decided to give the fans what they want and last night in a sun-kissed field in Kent three more icons embraced their past and bathed in the golden glow of nostalgia.The Hop Farm Festival, now in its fourth year, is a bit of a new kid on the festival block but it seemed to get everything right by concentrating largely on the music. Last night's show was not Read more ...
sarvenaz.sheybany
In its second year under creative director David Ansen and in its new home at the LA Live complex, the Los Angeles Film Festival seems to have recovered from the slightly rocky start of its downtown debut last year. While one or two of the several hundred volunteers still seemed to be in it for the free T-shirt, most were clearly film enthusiasts themselves, eager to swap tips with patrons about screenings and potential sleeper hits.The primary venue itself, the luxurious Regal theatre complex in downtown Los Angeles, remains an odd choice for this sort of arts event. Its location in an Read more ...
bella.todd
The remarkable thing about Caryl Churchill, Max Stafford-Clark has said, is that she is "completely new, every time she comes out of the box". Watching the first act to his revival of her most celebrated work, which Stafford-Clark revisits for Chichester Festival 29 years after he directed its Royal Court premiere, you feel Top Girls isn’t so much being lifted fresh from that box as bursting through the lid.A surreal yet psychologically spot-on set-up for the scenes of Eighties professional and domestic life to come, its extraordinary opening scene conflates centuries, continents, life Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Thursday 23 JuneHaven’t left yet but someone sends me an email saying, "Not going to Glastonbury this year and feeling rather smug about it." What are they feeling smug about? The fact that they’re going to have a forgettable, normal weekend while this extraordinary event is going on? It is, of course, to do with ideas of rain. A lot of the pre-Glastonbury coverage focuses endlessly on rain and mud, as if home comforts are everything. When did comfort become the big cultural draw?Possibly when the average age of music journalists went from 27 to 45, or possibly when we began our techno- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The history of maths and music is the history of early Greek philosophy, medieval astronomy, of the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the two World Wars. While mathematics at its purest may be an abstraction, the quest for its proofs is deeply and definingly human, charged with biological, theological and even political motive. Whether through performance or discussions about music, this year’s Cheltenham Music Festival (which begins this week) explores the mathematical processes that have both shaped and echoed the history of Western Europe and its art, tracing musical development from the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The locals are understandably proud of Folkestone; Everywhere Means Something to Someone is an idiosyncratic guidebook offering an insider’s view of the town that bears witness to the depth of people’s attachment to it. Put together for the Folkestone Triennial by the artists’ collective Strange Cargo, this compendium of facts, memories and musings makes for compulsive reading.Ghosts feature large among the 250 snippets of information alongside memories of childhood games, frequently involving dens built from rubbish dumped in wasteland. For the visitor they bring the town to life. We Read more ...
Russ Coffey
This site has never acknowledged a distinction between high and popular culture. Nor, it seems, does the city of Birmingham. Currently bidding for UK City of Culture 2013, it is also promoting itself as the "Home of (Heavy) Metal". This summer, at various locations across the Black Country, a four-month festival looks at the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and celebrates the people who inspired him to “bark at the moon”. Surrounded by guitars, leather and fans' metalobilia in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, theartsdesk caught up with Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi to find out what it’s all Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Yesterday afternoon's final concert at the Aldeburgh Festival saw an astonishing world premiere. A major new double concerto from a 102-year-old Elliott Carter. Imagine Schubert premiering a song cycle in 1900, or Van Gogh unveiling a self-portrait in 1956. Gob-smacking stuff. So what sort of music does a man born before Benjamin Britten have to offer 2011? Music of an amazingly energetic bent, it transpires. Conversations for piano and percussion reveals a composer who, at least in musical thought, hasn't slowed down one bit. From the off, fantastically industrious ideas are Read more ...
Mark Kidel
While Michael Eavis’s fields were colonised by the solstice hordes, transforming a tranquil farmstead into a vibrant (and muddy) drop city, a very different and much smaller crowd assembled in the enchanting grounds of Dartington Hall in south Devon, for the second edition of Home, "a Festival with Acoustic Music at its Heart".Now spread over Friday and Saturday, Home offers a family-friendly, laid-back and warmly intimate alternative to the star-heavy events of the summer season. Small, in this case, is definitely the measure of beauty: the largest stages have an audience of 400 each and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Spitalfields Summer Music Festival is now finished for another year, but bid farewell to its audiences in fitting style with We Are Shadows – a new community opera devised by composer John Barber and librettist Hazel Gould. Bringing together over 200 local participants, whether as singers and performers or working behind the scenes to usher this two-year project to fruition, it’s a show that celebrates not only the talents of the Spitalfields community, but also that most universal of London icons: the rat.Inspired in part by Hans Christian Andersen’s nightmarish fable The Shadow, Gould and Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This is where the delirium kicks in. Tired but happy, the attendees started the third day of Sónar festival slightly boggled by how to pick and choose from the strange delights on offer. Saturday was when the true musical variety of the festival was displayed: straight-up hip hop to eye-popping South African tribal dance displays, balmy ambient revivalism to apocalyptic techno, heartbroken electronica to deranged prog rock: it was all on offer...If day one was a warm-up, and day two when the energy levels peaked, this was where we just got swept along in the sheer diversity of the festival Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Montréal natives The Arcade Fire sing in English. Yet 65 percent of the Québec city’s population have French as their first language. Les FrancoFolies de Montréal is Francophone Canada’s annual celebration of non-Anglo Saxon music. This year, big draws include French visitors Jeanne Moreau and Etienne Daho performing Jean Genet’s Le condamné à mort with musical accompaniment. Local legend Jean-Pierre Ferland is reprising his seminal 1970 set Jaune, the first Québec album to - controversially - fuse Franco sensibilities with rock dynamics. More than a festival, FrancoFolies is also cultural Read more ...