Features
Ismene Brown
As any archaeologist knows, digging up a sarcophagus is a nailbiting business. How small are the chances that inside the shredded linen wrappings will lie a recognisable body with some vestiges of its former life upon it?Enough DNA and bone to reconstruct the person's age, state of health, status – perhaps even enough detail on the face to bring the dead features back to life and a guess at personality? Properly mummified, a human body can yield an extraordinary amount of living information after thousands of years. But ballets vanish far quicker.Stop performing a ballet for a decade and a Read more ...
First Person: Donatella Flick on why the conducting competition in her name is needed more than ever
Donatella Flick
What are the qualities that make a great conductor? It’s something that has been debated for years, brought into focus recently not least because of Cate Blanchett’s award-winning performance as fictional maestra Lydia Tár. Despite what you may think of the film, it has reignited debate about what it means to be a conductor today, and what qualities they should possess. For me, of course technique, gesture, and communication with the orchestra are obviously all vital – but what is needed in the end is magic, that something extra that makes you sit up in your seat and hang on to every Read more ...
Anna Clyne
Collaboration fuels a lot of my music – I love the interaction that takes me outside of my natural tendencies – it’s a source of inspiration and an opportunity to see my own music and creative process through a different lens.This past season I had the joy of collaborating with exceptional musicians as I’ve expanded my catalogue of concertos. These have included Glasslands for saxophonist Jess Gillam, Time and Tides for violinist Pekka Kuusisto, ATLAS for pianist Jeremy Denk, and Weathered for clarinetist Martin Fröst – the latter of which is a co-commission between the Concertgebouw Read more ...
theartsdesk
Sent by a surely reluctant BBC PR, an ardent choral singer and supporter of new music, last Tuesday’s email had a title to make one groan: “New Strategy for Classical Music Prioritises Quality, Agility and Impact”. Very W1A. But this was no laughing matter – ker-pow-ing out of the thicket of corporatespeak were two devastating punches to the solar plexus.The first, under “Future-Proofing BBC Ensembles”, told us that “a voluntary redundancy programme will open across salaried posts in the English Orchestras (BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra and BBC Philharmonic Orchestra), aiming Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As a critic, I’ve rarely felt compelled to mourn publicly about an artist. Mourning goes somewhere beyond the usual sense of loss and gratitude when someone's death has been announced. But it's the only word when the departed is one of the very few individuals - or their songs or books or pictures - who get in your bloodstream, who get into your optic nerves or your inner ear, who magnify and sharpen your experience of being alive.Lynn Seymour’s death last Wednesday undammed an outpouring of truly wrenching sadness from those whom this extraordinary ballerina injected with her poison - as the Read more ...
Harry Bicket
Of the many questions we asked ourselves during lockdown, I suspect that many of us looked at our lives and professions and asked, “Why?”.Perhaps a period of forced introspection is a positive thing if it helps clarify what is truly important and what isn’t. For musicians, whose work is by definition a communal event, it was a strange period; endless time to practise and study, but with apparently nothing to practise and study for. Many groups understandably decided to hunker down and reduce their activities and ambitions. The English Concert had a different concept: if our world was about to Read more ...
Andrew Mellor
“Silence,” Andrew Mellor contends, “is more prominent in the northernmost reaches of Europe.” Yet it is more like a texture or an apprehension of vacancy than a state of true soundlessness: sometimes “real and pure”, sometimes it “lingers despite the noise”.Against this muted backdrop, Mellor’s new book The Northern Silence - Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture follows the circuits of musical culture across Scandinavia, Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, tracing the attempts to fill the quiet, asking why “the arts, and classical music in particular, occupy a different position in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The 1997 release of Time Out of Mind was the resurrection of an artist who appeared to have wandered off the reservation some years before, lost in transit on his Never Ending Tour, trailed by an army of "Bobcats" who followed him for show after grinding show. “How can you stand it?” he once asked of a woman who told him she’d seen dozens of NET gigs.While set lists shifted like tidal sands from night to night, the performances ranged from the ragged and wildly unfamiliar to the singular and revelatory. After attending one of 1991’s woeful run of shows at Hammersmith Odeon during a bitter Read more ...
Helen Wallace
2023 is surely the year the performing arts reach peak "immersive", a word endangered by its own ubiquity. From Punchdrunk’s Burnt City to Danny Boyle’s The Matrix we are promised a swallowing-up by art. Kings Cross is the location for two visual and aural initiatives: David Hockney’s 3D Bigger & Closer at the Lightroom, and Sound Unwrapped at Kings Place, a year-long series of intimate, immersive events kindled by live performance.The roots of the series are two-fold: firstly, the generous offer (from German company d&baudiotechnik) of a 360 degree, 25-speaker Soundscape system Read more ...
Soraya Mafi
Anyone concerned about making the arts accessible regardless of where they live should be concerned by the recent announcement from Glyndebourne that it’s having to cease touring across England.That painful decision, and Welsh National Opera’s announcement that it can no longer visit Liverpool with immediate effect, are the inevitable result of Arts Council England’s baffling decision to cut funding to both companies while simultaneously talking of ‘”levelling up” and supporting the arts outside of London.Like many British opera singers, I was introduced to the art form by a touring company. Read more ...
Jonathan Freeman-Attwood
Why is it important for a music conservatoire to make recordings? What is the educational context? These are questions we have continued to reflect upon at the Royal Academy of Music – celebrating its bicentenary this year – since we took our first steps towards what has become an established and invigorating part of Academy life.Twenty five years ago, we made a conscious decision to equip young musicians with the particular skills required for "the studio". There was also the belief that giving students greater artistic agency would only yield exciting results, empowering them to take a Read more ...
theartsdesk
From Kafka’s spry sketches to Derek Owusu’s novel-poem, and Jaan Kross’s Estonian Wolf Hall to Katherine Rundell’s spirited biography of John Donne, our reviewers take the time to share their favourite books of 2022. Before his death, Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all of his papers. This included his short stories, novels (both finished and fragmentary), diaries, and his little-known foray into the visual arts. But now, collected extensively for the first time, we can find The Drawings (Yale University Press, £50) staring defiantly back at us. The fact that, if Kafka’s Read more ...