festivals
Ismene Brown
Istanbul, Turkey, 3-30 JuneThe 38th annual music festival in the jewelled city of culture-clash continues its strong classical showing with Radu Lupu and Lang Lang, the Borodin Quartet and Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. Equally attractive is the chance to hear a lively ethnic and folkloric music programme. www.iksv.org/english/Leipzig, Germany, 11-20 JuneThe 85th annual Bach Festival in his home town also features his two great champions Brahms and Schumann. The Gewandhaus Orchestra and Leipzig Ballet get involved in ballet to Bach by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, Philippe Read more ...
stephen.walsh
In general, I’m no particular fan of composers talking in public about their own music. My family suggests that this is because I’m hoping to get the job of talking about it myself. But the real reason is that, on the whole, composers don’t tell the truth about their work – and indeed why should they? Creative work is a mysterious and impenetrable process, and it’s a very modern, right-to-know sort of assumption that those who do it should also be able to explain it. Probably nobody is. But people naturally suppose that when the horse opens its mouth, the oracle will speak. I would say, on Read more ...
graeme.thomson
I’m just back – goodie bag gripped greedily in paw – from this morning’s launch of the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival, which runs in the Scottish capital from 16-27 June. Since breaking away from the over-crowded August festival calendar and establishing itself in an early summer slot, the EIFF has become a much more robust stand-alone event, and 2010 looks like throwing up another fine mix of international premieres, new works by established US directors, superior art-house flicks from renowned auteurs and several interesting-looking debuts from talented young British movie- Read more ...
kate.connolly
At a sprawling car plant in the suburbs of north-eastern Istanbul mechanics are busy repairing camshafts and dynamos, applying blow torches to the undercarriages of a range of luxury cars and retouching paintwork. Visitors to the building are met by signs reading: “Sheer Driving Pleasure” and “Check Your Engine”. Upstairs, away from the mechanical buzz, fine-tuning of a completely different kind is going on as the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra is taken through its paces by its vivacious Austrian conductor, Sasha Goetzel.The heat is on for the Borusan Phil, which practises in the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
To launch a music festival with the Arditti Quartet, as Bath has just almost done (a pair of dance events preceded them), is a bold enough gesture, if no bolder than for the Arditti to open up their Assembly Rooms concert with Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – a finisher if ever there was one. But for this particular group, late Beethoven might well seem like a kind of starting point. Beethoven was the first to write unplayable music for string quartet; and the Arditti have always specialised in the unplayable. Beethoven thrived on making life hard for his players; he apparently believed that Read more ...
bella.todd
Site-specific theatre spread from artists’ studios to police cells with the realisation that all the city (and a wee chunk of neighbouring Newhaven) is a stage. Dreamthinkspeak’s Before I Sleep (pictured below), a promenade Festival commission based on The Cherry Orchard, was staged in the derelict Co-op building on London Road. Four floors and 70,000 square feet of disused department store became the canvas for an extraordinary journey from aristocratic isolationism to mass consumerism via the developer’s axe (and several secret portals in cupboards and behind curtains through which the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Fairport Convention in the abstract seem romantic and timely. Their Sixties folk-rock is being rediscovered by many of our best emerging songwriters; the late Sandy Denny is still written about; and their most famous graduate, Richard Thompson next month curates Meltdown 2010. However, in the concrete, the Fairports are a somewhat more problematic proposition. Over 19 incarnations in 43 years, they have recorded almost 50 albums. To top it all they are loved by their fans with a level of detail normally reserved for sci-fi gatherings. This all makes getting your head around Fairport Read more ...
David Nice
Silence. Near-darkness. Oozy weeds of orchestral strings twist in the mind of Edward Fairfax Vere (John Mark Ainsley), remembering the tragic events of 1797 when he was Captain of the HMS Indomitable. From that awe-inspiring start through to one of the most upsetting of onstage murders, perhaps the greatest parade of major and minor chords in all opera and beyond to some kind of redemption, Michael Grandage's Glyndebourne production - his first in the operatic sphere - of Britten's grandest opera moves with a simplicity and grace which fit this tight little craft of an opera house very well Read more ...
neil.smith
This slot is always one of the trickiest to fill satisfactorily, though last year’s choice – Pixar’s delightful animation Up – was inspired. Coming on the same day as the film’s release date, alas, Robin’s rain-lashed, Ridley-less premiere felt like a non-event from the get-go, putting the festival on the back foot before it had even begun. Ground was made up the following day thanks to an out of competition showing of Oliver Stone’s belated Wall Street sequel, Money Never Sleeps, a film that, while rather undermined by its perverse determination to de-fang Michael Douglas’s rapacious Gordon Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the hottest tickets at this year's Brighton festival is Godfrey Reggio's 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi accompanied by live soundtrack performance from the Philip Glass Ensemble. Sold out for weeks beforehand, there are touts outside but most of the middle-aged Bohemian audience seem to have bought their tickets well in advance. The reason it's such a draw is that Koyaanisqatsi is a cult whose enthusiasts are multifarious.To the classical modernist it's a masterpiece of post-serialist synthesizer composition, meticulously synchronized to startling imagery. To the ecologically minded it's a Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Brian Eno’s on the phone. He’s been up all night. But he does want to talk to theartsdesk about his Afro-beat concert in Brighton as part of the Brighton Festival he is curating which this evening sees Seun Kuti - the son of Fela Kuti, who has basically inherited his legendary father’s band - and Tony Allen’s band on the same bill. Tony Allen was the drummer with Fela’s band and co-creator of the Afro-beat sound which seems to become more popular with each passing year (Fela died in 1997).Brian says that he became obsessed with Afro-beat in about 1972. “I thought at that time it was the most Read more ...
David Nice
Everything happens so quickly in India. It seems like only yesterday that homosexuality was legalised; and now Bombay has just hosted the first Kashish-Mumbai International Queer Film Festival. As one of its very literary organisers pointed out, his country used to be so open to all forms of worship and sensuality; it's the home of the Kama Sutra, after all. It was time to reclaim gay love, he said, and give Indians of all kinds the chance to learn about it through the farthest-reaching medium. And it worked - even if many younger folk had to tell their parents they were 'just off to see a Read more ...