Features & Interviews
'How that music was created remains to me a complete mystery': John Tomlinson on fellow Lancastrian Harrison Birtwistle
Friday, 20 May 2022
It has been a difficult couple of years for us in the world of opera, losing several of our most respected and admired colleagues who have inspired us over several decades.
Clubbing with the Stones: Live at El Mocambo
Wednesday, 11 May 2022
In a little over two week’s time, the three remaining ones will kick-start their 60th year as The Rolling Stones by taking to the stage at a stadium on the edge of Madrid on June 1, around the same time that Elizabeth Windsor marks her own @70 jubilee across the UK.
'An invitation to stillness and reflection...
Saturday, 30 April 2022
The idea of recording an album with Tenebrae has been bubbling away for a number of years. Nigel Short and I first worked together in 2007 when I...
First Person: playwright Naomi Wallace on finally...
Saturday, 23 April 2022
The Breach is a coming of age story and an age-in-the-making story. The play takes place in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1990s, switching back...
First Person: composer Michael Price on...
Friday, 22 April 2022
There are lots of ways that we respond to great works of art – intellectually and emotionally, then visually, aurally and even by taste and smell,...
Extract: Catching Fire by Daniel Hahn
Laying bare the translator's quandaries, including the problem of gendered language |
First Person: playwright Chinonyerem Odimba on birthing her potent and timely new show
The musical 'Black Love' places the reality of racism centre-stage at the Kiln |
Extract: Where My Feet Fall - Going For A Walk in Twenty Stories
Writing in the year of lockdown, writers remember their paths and paces |
First Person: composer Mason Bates on the powers and perils of musical storytelling
From Beethoven to Pink Floyd and 'Liquid Interface', premiered in the UK on Wednesday |
Russians and friends play on for Ukraine
Who's doing what, with focus on a fundraiser from Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy |
‘Slava Ukraini!’: Russian musicians worldwide show solidarity
Ukrainian anthem performed in concerts everywhere is only the start of musical support |
First Person: Tim Walker on crossing over from critic to playwright
A longtime critic shifts gears to bring Gina Miller and Theresa May to the stage |
‘Let me be your main course’: composer Jimmy López on why new music needs time and space
Thoughts from a brilliant Peruvian, whose Piano Concerto is premiered on Wednesday |
First Person: Pavel Šporcl on Paganini and the Czech violin tradition
A Bohemian master on a virtuoso and his followers, whose music he has just recorded |
First Person: Femi Elufowoju Jr. on directing Verdi's 'Rigoletto'
A theatre director's take on his first opera as he rehearses in Leeds |
Best of 2021: Books
Our top fiction titles from this year |
Best of 2021: Theatre
As often as not, the wonder was that there was any theatre at all |
First Person: young composer Nicola Perikhanyan on a new immersive reality experience at London Wall
Multilayered work for clarinet is part of 'HARMONY' in the City |
First Person: Harpist Rachel Newton on creating music to accompany two well-loved books celebrating nature, poetry and magic
How a musical collective returned from COVID to the beloved Spell Songs project |
Antony Sher: 'I discovered I could be other people'
Remembering the brilliant actor knight who revealed himself both on stage and in pioneering performance diaries |
10 Questions for musician and DJ Pete Tong
On his latest EP and his musical life thus far |
theartsdesk at Tallinn's Black Nights Film Festival - still crazy after all these years
With its black carpet and audiences referred to as ‘wolves’, Black Nights is 25 |
Stephen Sondheim in memoriam - he gave us more to see
A master gone but in no way and never to be forgotten |
First Person: composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad on a musical love letter to the natural world
Dara McAnulty's 'Diary of a Young Naturalist' is the basis for a new song-cycle |
First Person: composer Conor Mitchell on challenging religious orthodoxy from a queer perspective in MASS
Finding the authentic gay 'me' in a new work premiered with the Ulster Orchestra tonight |
Remembering Henry Woolf, Harold Pinter's oldest friend
The school friend who commissioned, directed and acted in Pinter's first play |
Judith van Driel of the Dudok Quartet Amsterdam: 'the more we played Brahms, the more freedom we found'
On approaching the elusive and unreachable in four chamber masterpieces |
'A nun destroyed my tent': artist Kate Daudy talks about NFTs, refugees, and having her work thrown out with the trash
The artist's first 'Non-Fungible Token' goes live as part of a new online exhibition |
First Persons: Susan Bullock, Gerald Finley and Stephen Higgins on a 'Bluebeard's Castle' with a difference
How experience of dementia led to a unique take on Bartók's dark masterpiece |
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'How that music was created remains to me a complete my...
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Only 36 years later, Tom Cruise is back with his eagerly-awaited Top Gun sequel (it was delayed a couple of years by Covid), and there...