Featured Buzz
Argentine Film FestivalTuesday, 17 April 2012
A couple of years ago a retrospective season for the BFI sought to reflect the filmmaking renaissance across South America that started at the end of the 1990s, and simply hasn’t stopped. Freed from the shackles of dictatorship and economic hardship... Read more... |
2012 Olivier Awards: comedy sidelined as Matilda enters the record booksMonday, 16 April 2012
Matilda, the Royal Shakespeare Company-spawned musical about an extraordinary young girl, managed the extraordinary feat Sunday of snaring a record seven trophies at last night’s 36th Laurence Olivier Awards. Its rampaging hold over the black-tie... Read more... |
Just in From Scandinavia: Nordic Music Round-Up 4Monday, 16 April 2012
Two things are certain with music coming from the north: there will be some wonderful surprises and some of it will sound like nothing else on earth. It’s even more enticing when the two merge. Making the peculiar accessible is a uniquely... Read more... |
The best and worst national anthems? Time to award the medalsSunday, 15 April 2012
The onerous task of recording all 205 national anthems for playing at the Olympics medal ceremonies has fallen on the London Philharmonic Orchestra. An edited group of 36 players has recorded the anthems at the Abbey Road Studios in 60 gruelling... Read more... |
theASHtray: Bruce Chatwin, The Doors, and an Easter break in the West CountrySaturday, 14 April 2012
On the tip-off of an art-loving West Country amigo, Miss April and I took a day out of our Easter hols to visit the recently re-opened Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, in Exeter.We’d missed the exhibition of French and British... Read more... |
What Future for Classical Music Broadcasting?Friday, 13 April 2012
The annual conference of the Incorporated Society of Musicians may not sound like an event liable to stop traffic, but this year's gathering at LSO St Luke's (13 and 14 April) offered such treats as a conversation with Sir Colin Davis, a concert... Read more... |
Tamara Rojo, prima ballerina, becomes English National Ballet's directorThursday, 12 April 2012
Royal Ballet prima ballerina Tamara Rojo has been appointed the new artistic director of English National Ballet. Though the announcement was officially dated for tomorrow, the press release was issued by the company this morning and the news has... Read more... |
Captain Scott's Desert Island DiscsWednesday, 11 April 2012
Centenaries are sizeable business in 2012. It just so happens that the Olympics are coming to the United Kingdom for the third time in a year which finds us thinking very hard if being British still means what it did 100 years. Then, two momentous... Read more... |
France Remembers Claude FrançoisSunday, 08 April 2012
If you’re not French, there are probably two things you know about Claude François: that he wrote “My Way” and that he died from electrocution when fiddling with a lighting fixture while in the bath. In France, however, he’s been part of pop-... Read more... |
theASHtray: modern spies, Rwanda, and how to get ahead through shameless self-promotionSaturday, 07 April 2012
“If James Bond actually worked in MI6 today,” said “Anna”, “he’d spend a large amount of time behind a desk.” Fair enough, since he’d also be about 110. And besides, the days of the Oxbridge “tap” having gone the way of Bernard Lee, most of 007’s... Read more... |
YouTube hoaxer makes a very convincing MozartSaturday, 07 April 2012
Norman Lebrecht, the seasoned and ever-alert musical commentator, thinks he and his readers may have uncovered someone making a very good stab at being Mozart. Three pieces have been discovered on the internet DIY-video channel being played by a... Read more... |
Jim Marshall, the Amplifier KingFriday, 06 April 2012
If there was a holy trinity of rock'n'roll iconography, it would be guitars by Fender and Gibson, plugged into amplifiers bearing the unmistakeable Marshall logo. Merely to be seen using Marshall amps and loudspeakers became an obligatory badge of... Read more... |
