Classical Interviews
theartsdesk Q&A: Sir Charles MackerrasThursday, 22 October 2009
At 84 years of age, Sir Charles Mackerras is one of the best-respected and best-loved operatic conductors working in the world today. He conducts Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera tonight and, despite bouts of ill health, found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Composer Sir Peter Maxwell DaviesSaturday, 03 October 2009
There is no more extraordinary musical journey than that of Britain's leading living composer, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (b.1934). In the 1960s, he was Britain's Stravinsky, at the heart and head of the modernist musical rebellion, provoking audience walkouts, outraging the musical powers that be and occasionally even hitting the news headlines. Today, as a Knight of the realm and a Master of the Queen’s Music, he finds himself in the very bosom of the British establishment. Read more... |
Meeting Katherine JenkinsFriday, 04 September 2009
It’s pretty well understood that talent, good looks and hard work are not enough to guarantee you safe passage through the celebrity jungle nowadays. But for five years it looked as though they might be enough for Katherine Jenkins. Until recently the general view of Jenkins held that she was a nice, polite, touchingly naive, and unaffected young woman from Neath in South Wales, who just happened to be the most popular classically trained singer to emerge here in this century. Read more... |
Pages
inside classical music
latest in today
If you don't like sweary comics – Jonathan Pie uses the c-word liberally – then this may not be the show for you. In fact if you're a Tory, ditto...
Richard Gadd won an Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016 with...
Virtuosity and a wildly beating heart are compatible in Richard Jones’s finely calibrated production of Renaissance woman Sophie Treadwell’s ...
The first photograph was taken nearly 200 years ago in France by Joseph Niépce, and the first picture of a person was taken in Paris by Louis...
If ever more evidence were needed of Sir Mark Elder’s untiring zest for exploration and love of the thrill of live opera performance, it was this...
Music, when the singer’s voice dies away, vibrates in the memory. In the hypnotic new Irish horror film All You Need Is Death, those who...
As I sat down to write this review, the sun came out. It was a salutory reminder of the importance of context: where I’d previously thought “mmm,...
Record Store Day is tomorrow! At theartsdesk on Vinyl...
Teenage Ulzii (Battsooj Uurtsaikh in an elegantly restrained performance) is looking after his little sister and brother in Ulaanbaatar after...
The Book of Clarence comes lumbered with the charge of being the new Life of Brian, an irreverent spoof of the life...