theartsdesk com, first with arts reviews, news and interviews
Matt Wolf
Saturday, 11 July 2020
The cakes look great, but it's back to the recipe books in almost every other way for Love Sarah, a subpar film from director Eliza Schroeder about the struggles of a west...
Graham Rickson
Saturday, 11 July 2020
Horn player Sarah Willis joined the Berlin Philharmonic in 2001. She juggles her position with spells of teaching, interviewing soloists and conductors for the Berlin Philharmonic...
Peter Culshaw
Saturday, 11 July 2020
Peter Culshaw’s periodic global music radio update is back, quicker than usual as there is some catching up to do. There’s a focus on Ennio Morricone, who died this week - with...
David Nice
Saturday, 11 July 2020
So, arts people, you’ve had precisely two days to get your outdoor events ready, so where are they? Well, it seems that Glyndebourne had advance notice and will be holding its...
Owen Richards
Saturday, 11 July 2020
Scooby fans have waited over 50 years for a proper big screen adaptation of everyone’s favourite cowardly dog (sorry Cartoon Network’s Courage). The 2003 live-action version...
Graham Rickson
Friday, 10 July 2020
Coriún Aharonián: Una carta Ensemble Aventure, SWF-Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden/Zoltán Peskó (Wergo)Uruguayan composer Coriún Aharonián (1940-2017) was born in Montevideo...
Kathryn Reilly
Friday, 10 July 2020
National treasure Jarvis Cocker recently claimed in an interview with the New York Times that lyrics really aren’t that...
Thomas H Green
Friday, 10 July 2020
Lockdown’s easing and the record shops are opening here and there. So, to help vinyl junkies on their way, here’s 7000 words...
Joseph Walsh
Friday, 10 July 2020
Gavin O’Connor has made a career out of sturdy films that make grown men cry. His best was Warrior - a hulking,...
Florence Hallett
Friday, 10 July 2020
When Picasso left Barcelona for Paris in 1900, he took what by then was a well-trodden path for artists eager to be at the...
Rachel Halliburton
Friday, 10 July 2020
Helen McCrory is an actor who can inject a world of feeling into one syllable that many actors would struggle to muster in...
Adam Sweeting
Friday, 10 July 2020
Colombian director Franco Lolli’s debut feature Gente de Bien (2014) was a hit at several international film festivals, and...
Veronica Lee
Friday, 10 July 2020
Drive-ins are now firmly establishing themselves as the only method by which culture fans can see live arts in person for...
Joe Muggs
Friday, 10 July 2020
Given the collaborator list on this album, it should be a bit of a mess. Brit punks IDLES, Aussie woozy pop auteur Tame...
Theatre Lockdown Special 13: Early Lloyd Webber, vintage Rattigan, and a Dame or two in conversation
Matt Wolf
Thursday, 09 July 2020
Stop the presses! For the first time in nearly four months, The Arts Desk can point to the first of several live theatre...
David Nice
Thursday, 09 July 2020
What music would you choose to hear for your first live event after nearly four months of lockdown? For me, it would be Bach...
Jill Chuah Masters
Thursday, 09 July 2020
It’s hard to take The Old Guard seriously — it’s an action film about thousand-year-old immortal warriors. Pulpy flashbacks...
Adam Sweeting
Thursday, 09 July 2020
In the midst of our increasingly confrontational politics of race and gender, it was a timely move to make this series (on...
Guy Oddy
Thursday, 09 July 2020
Hot Shot 2020 has been billed as a rerub of Shaggy’s colossal turn of the century release Hot Shot. It’s not quite an...
disc of the day
Album: The Streets - None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive
A casually pulled together "mixtape" turns out to be some of Mike Skinner's finest work
tv
Mrs America, BBC Two review - how a conservative revolutionary scuppered the Equal Rights Amendment
Cate Blanchett as the Republican housewife superstar who battled the Seventies feminists
The Choir: Singing for Britain Finale, BBC Two review - stirring songs from a garden shed
Inspiring finale for Gareth Malone's Home Chorus project
The Battle of Britain, Channel 5 review - 80th anniversary of the RAF's finest hour
Behind the scenes of the air war that saved the nation
film
Scoob! review - mostly bark, little bite
Feature adaptation crams in a lot of references but not much substance
Finding The Way Back review - alcoholism on the rebound
Ben Affleck delivers a great comeback performance as a recovering alcoholic
new music
theartsdesk Radio Show 29 - Morricone, Moroccan psychedelia and Sudanese techno
New, re-released and just damn fine music from around the planet
Album: JARV IS – Beyond the Pale
An ongoing live experience because life is an ongoing live experience
theartsdesk on Vinyl 58: Joy Division, Alma, Prince, African Head Charge, Wargirl and much more
The most extensive, mostly monthly record reviews of all
classical
theartsdesk Q&A: horn player Sarah Willis
Midnight recording sessions and late-running buses; playing Mozart in Havana
Classical music/Opera direct to home 20 - more signs of musical life around the UK
Pavilion gala in the Buckinghamshire countryside, plus concerts live and recorded
Classical CDs Weekly: Coriún Aharonián, Beethoven, Humphrey Procter-Gregg
Uruguayan modernism, iconic piano concertos and violin sonatas from an influential Mancunian
opera
Classical music/Opera direct to home 19 – and two before a live audience
Finally, you can be in the room, or space, where it happens in two east London venues
The Opera Story: Episodes review - whimsical takes on lockdown life
Young London company offers snapshots of contemporary living
Classical music/Opera direct to home 17 - festive inventions
Celebrating a maverick conductor, two great artists in recital and home-grown ingenuity
theatre
The Deep Blue Sea, National Theatre at Home review - hauntingly elegiac portrayal of Rattigan's world
Helen McCrory is the broken, irreparable heart of this production
Theatre Lockdown Special 13: Early Lloyd Webber, vintage Rattigan, and a Dame or two in conversation
Medeas past and present conjoin across a characteristically eclectic theatre week
Les Blancs, National Theatre at Home review – triumphant revival of forgotten classic
NT archive recording of Lorraine Hansberry’s last play is absolutely compelling
dance
Dancing at Dusk: A Moment with Pina Bausch’s 'The Rite of Spring' review - an explosive African rite
Continents collide in a film documenting an inspired re-staging of a 20th-century masterpiece
'If they had been any closer my face would have misted up': filming 'Men at the Barre'
The director Richard Macer had exclusive access to the male stars of the Royal Ballet. He describes what he discovered
The Thread, Sadler's Wells Digital Stage review - Greek folk and contemporary unite
Russell Maliphant breathes fresh life into Hellenic tradition
comedy
Dom Joly / Daniel Sloss, Brent Cross reviews - UK's first drive-in comedy shows
The Drive-In Club makes a little bit of history
Desiree Burch, Soho Theatre On Demand review - fantastical storytelling
California comic on Burning Man, sex, race – and LSD
gaming
Rage 2 review – garish but great post-apocalyptic shooter
Challenge The Authority in this 'Mad Max on mushrooms' renegade romp
World War Z review - bloodthirsty fun with the zombie apocalypse
Chainsawing the brain-eaters as you battle against the tide of the undead
The Lego Movie 2 Videogame review - everything is not awesome
Few fresh ideas means this movie adaptation treads the same old ground
visual arts
The Golden Age of Modern Spanish Art, Colnaghi review - the sun shines in the City of Light
A celebration of little known Spanish painters as the London art world emerges again
Visual Arts Lockdown Special 4: half-way houses
Some galleries prepare to reopen, others remain closed; online still offers riches
Celia Paul: My Studio, Victoria Miro review - sublime isolation
One of the great painters of our time responds to life in lockdown
latest comments
Jess Payn's perceptive analysis of characters and...
Thank you Peter for a beautifully written and...
This was a fact-based, human drama, one of the...
Re Ms Lloyds' crooning v bepop: to add to the...
It’s fascinating to me that you have just used...
This performance is foretelling of Black Lives...
Just caught up with the Capture. The one thing...
Dear Tom, I was wondering if you know whether...