religion
Jasper Rees
To begin at the end, this was an astonishing creation, a piece of street theatre of transcendental power which no one who was there at the death last night could or will ever forget. Those witnesses included what felt like the whole population of Port Talbot who filled the streets in their many thousands - 5000? Double it and then some - to witness one of their own drag a cross for two gruelling miles from the town centre to a traffic island on the sea shore, there to be crucified, there to achieve a genuine miracle: the resurrection of a condemned town. After this breathtaking act of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
It’s Holy Wednesday in Cuenca, and going round the corner into Cathedral Square I’m surrounded by hordes of guys in multicoloured mufti who look like the Ku Klux Klan, with unnecessarily pointy hoods. Twenty of them are carrying a heavy float with a large statue of Jesus on it. In Cuenca things are fairly austere, compared to other places where there’s a lot of self-whipping, or where, if you have sin on your conscience, you may end up banging nails into your hands, as in Mexico. Still there are alternative amusements – the Copa Del Rey final of Real Madrid v Barcelona is blaring out of bars Read more ...
David Nice
At the risk of sounding falsely pious, as this stunning film never is, Des hommes et des dieux, to give its differently emphasised French title, should be screened in every school and to every faith around the world. Xavier Beauvois sensitively takes us through the true-to-life decisions of seven Cistercian monks in the Algerian monastery of Tibhirine to stay and face not martyrdom but the life they have always known during the civil war between Islamic extremists and the government.Their deaths, which took place some time after their abduction in March 1996, are not the point; it's the way Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Born in Venezuela 48 years ago, de Frutos has never been the fairytale type, at least not overtly. His 20-year career of choreography has been a career of unstoppable fecundity, violent flamboyance, extreme, even grotesque exhibition, outrageous passion. To many he’s a shock jock of contemporary dance. To me he’s one of the two choreographers in Britain to whom I most look forward, pinned uneasily to the edge of my seat, waiting to be discomforted, disconcerted, left in turmoil and not sure what I believe any more.I thought Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez a grotesquely funny satire Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Some of you will know that Wagner and I haven't been seeing eye to eye of late. Last year's Tannhäuser I believed was the end of the road for the two of us. Not quite. With one of the most celebrated Wagner productions of the past two decades returning to the English National Opera last night - Nikolaus Lehnhoff's Parsifal - I decided to give him a final chance. My whole mind, body and soul was primed to repel it, yet I came out almost blubbing.The revelation didn't come immediately - nothing in Wagner comes immediately - though it didn't take long for the music to start having its Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
So Starbucks-like is its reach, so tarnished its modern legacy, it's easy to overlook just how brilliant the ideology of Christianity is. How seductively counterintuitive the idea of a God who was not just a man but a bum of a man must have seemed. Not until the Arab warrior Muhammed came to his calling was Christianity's first strategy seriously challenged. That winning early Christian message, which sought to seize hearts and minds through self-effacement, is what Elgar seems to seek to capture in The Kingdom. It was receiving a rare performance last night at the Barbican. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
UPDATE 2015: Four years ago, in January 2011, I wrote this article about the music critic and biographer Michael Kennedy's search for the missing portion of Elgar's life. It identified a Mrs Dora Nelson as the composer's mistress and mother of a lovechild, who might have influenced some legendarily enigmatic aspects of Elgar's compositional output. A new development opened when an Arts Desk reader contacted me, who had taken up Kennedy's and my requests for others to pick up this unsolved mystery. Andrew Baker's work has since identified - unlikely as it may seem - a second Mrs Nelson, who is Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s carefully sifted new releases include some quirky Americana and a piano filled with ping-pong balls. A Baroque specialist plays some ripe orchestral transcriptions and a neglected cello concerto gets a new ending. Six Danish symphonies blow the cobwebs away, and we’ve two discs of music by a 20th-century German master. There are songs from Vienna, and a cappella choral music from Russia. A contemporary English composer celebrates the town of his birth. The most soothing of requiem settings contrasts with an hour of Soviet ballet music, prompting memories of circuses and Sunday- Read more ...
hilary.whitney
It’s a fairly safe bet that when director Beeban Kidron made her first film, the documentary Carry Greenham Home (1983), she never envisaged that 20 years later she’d be directing a whopping great blockbuster about a Chardonnay-swigging young woman’s desperate quest to get a ring on her finger - Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). But then Kidron’s career trajectory has never been predictable.Her CV ricochets from the classic television series Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1990) to a documentary about the sculptor Antony Gormley to the film Wong Foo! Thanks for Everything! Julie Read more ...
howard.male
Once upon a time in the central West Bank, a child called Jesus was allegedly born to a virgin. Once upon an even earlier time, the Greek demigod Perseus was also allegedly born to a virgin, likewise the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli. You can probably see where I’m going with this. There have been countless holy figures from Mexico to China, from Mongolia to Korea, and on and on down the millennia, who have supposedly been born in this biology-denying manner. Within the macrocosm of the mythic it all makes perfect sense: obviously a supernatural being would come into being in a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It has been one of the most surprising hits this year in French cinemas - a mostly male film which poses deep and pertinent questions about religion or, more specifically, religions. Its ultimate theme is the price of Christian devotion. Of Gods and Men is set in, of all the uncinematic locations, a still, often silent Cistercian monastery in North Africa, from which it derives its muted aesthetic tone and extremely careful pace.The cast all give performances of great humanity and individualityAlthough it never specifically says as much until the end credits roll, the film is based on events Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Before Mozart, there was Pergolesi. The 18th century couldn't get enough of the Neapolitan prodigy. He was the first great tragic musical wünderkind of the Enlightenment, prefiguring what Mozart would become for the 19th century. Like Mozart, Pergolesi died prematurely aged just 26. Like Mozart, Pergolesi was a musical simplifier and distiller, a divine and revolutionary sieve. Like Mozart, Pergolesi's popularity spawned an industry dedicated to mythologising his life and misattributing the music of contemporaries to him. Yet we celebrate Pergolesi's 300th anniversary this year, quite unlike Read more ...