Features
David Nice
On the itinerary of musical tourists around Europe, the opening of the Prague Spring Festival comes a close third to the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year's Day Concert and the Bayreuth experience. That said, Smetana's Má vlast (My Homeland) – the immoveable opener – is more of an acquired taste than Johann Strauss or Wagner.Too often Má vlast's six-tone poems have been served up as slabs of a national monument, with only two – Vltava (otherwise Germanised as Die Moldau) and From Bohemia's Woods and Fields – offering guaranteed bliss. This year Estonian Paavo Järvi gave the Czech Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Carla Lane, who has died at the age of 87, was the first from Liverpool. Before Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, long before Jimmy McGovern, hers was the loudest Liverpudlian voice on television portraying ordinary working people's lives. From The Liver Birds to Bread, from Butterflies to Solo, her comedies covered the waterfront of womanhood: husband-hunters, divorcees, matriarchal grandmothers, unhappy wives, mistresses.Later in her life she became at least as famous for her animal sanctuary in Sussex, situated on the grounds of a vast manor. When I visited her there in 2000, we talked in Read more ...
Professor Gareth Williams
Culture, said Aneurin Bevan, comes off the end of a pick. A hundred years ago there was no shortage of picks when a quarter of a million coalminers were employed in south Wales. By now the mines have gone but many of the choirs they created are still here, for the male voice choir is one of the distinctive emblems of Welsh identity.The south Wales coalfield is the longest continuous coalfield in Britain and its choral tradition is just as unbroken. It began when the first tramload of the best steam coal in the world trundled out of the Bute Colliery in Treherbert at the top of the Rhondda Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
We don’t hear much about composer Stanisław Moniuszko in the West, but in Poland he’s considered a key figure in the history of opera. Moniuszko’s statue stands at the entrance of the National Opera House in Warsaw, and inside he’s depicted by several busts and portraits. In the second week of May, the venue hosted not only the Ninth International Stanisław Moniuszko Vocal Competition but also – in its Moniuszko Auditorium – Straszny dwór (The Haunted Manor), one of his most famous works.Straszny dwór, as presented here in a vibrant new staging from David Pountney (picutred below), Read more ...
Alistair Beaton
It’s either serious or it’s funny. That’s a view I quite often encountered when working in Germany. A theatre professional there once advised me to remove all references to writing television comedy from my biography in the theatre programme.“Why?” I asked.“People will think you’re not a serious playwright.”“A serious playwright can’t write comedy?”“It’s a bit worse than that.”“How, exactly?”“Well, it’s not just that you’re writing comedy, it’s that you’re writing comedy for television.”“Is that bad?”“It’s not good.”“In what way is it not good?”“Television is Unterhaltung.”And there we had it Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Antonia Bird died in 2013 at the age of 62. The last television drama with her name on it was the first series of The Village, but the career which is celebrated in the BBC Four documentary Antonia Bird: From EastEnders to Hollywood were from a golden age of single drama. You always knew you were watching a film by Bird. She made a name with single-issue films with single-syllable titles.First off was Safe (1993) tackling homelessness, then Priest (1994), Jimmy McGovern’s portrait of the modern Catholic church. Next up was Face (1997) about gangsters with a conscience. In Care (2000) a man Read more ...
David Nice
What Auden called "the sexy airs of summer" arrived early in Göttingen this year. Frog action in the Botanical Gardens of the town's pioneering University may have been less clamorous than when I first came here in late rather than early May (the annual International Handel Festival usually begins whenever the Ascension Day holiday happens to be, so it's a moveable celebration). Otherwise everything in this green-girt and on this occasion sun-drenched dream town chimed well with the sensuous pastoral elements of two out of the three big Handel dramas of the first long weekend.The oratorio Read more ...
Charlene James
I knew that if I was going to write a play about female genital mutilation, I would have to try and understand why any mother or grandmother would make their child undergo such a brutal procedure. In my research, I read many articles and accounts of young women who were living with the emotional and physical consequences of FGM. I’d watched disturbing and devastating footage of young girls being cut, so it was difficult to comprehend how anyone could allow this act to happen, let alone celebrate it.But what I learned was that many of these mothers weren’t the villains I wrongly cast them as. Read more ...
Matthew Romain
A few days after two Taliban rockets had quivered in the Afghan skies above us, I found myself looking up at an altogether different set of heavens in the Sistine Chapel. Moments of reflection on this tour were, out of necessity, brief; our schedule, out of necessity, hectic. Contrasts were commonplace. Vatican City was our 191st country, and our two-year tour to play Hamlet to every nation in the world was rolling rapidly to its conclusion.A friendly priest who'd enjoyed our performance the night before had been showing us round, jumping queues and hopping barriers and peeking into closed- Read more ...
David Kettle
For a festival of wild, genre-colliding musical experimentation, Tectonics is almost starting to feel like part of the establishment. Which shows, if nothing else, that it must be getting somewhere with its boundary demolishing. The 2016 weekend over 7-8 May was its fourth outing in Glasgow – conductor Ilan Volkov founded it in Reykjavík in 2012, and since then it’s spread its all-embracing eclecticism worldwide to Tel Aviv, Adelaide, New York and beyond. And it feels like the event has settled nicely into its quirky, iconoclastic identity – and established a faithful and committed audience Read more ...
Susanna White
Last week a report was published by Directors UK laying out the cold facts of a trend that a lot of us knew had been going on for a long time - if you are a man you are six times more likely to make a feature film than a woman. The needle hasn’t moved for the last 10 years.What shocked industry insiders was the funnel effect on women’s careers. Unlike science and engineering which have had trouble attracting girls, 50 percent of the entry into film schools is female, and 49 percent of people entering the industry in vocational roles like runners or production assistants are women. What the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Compered by Jazzwise magazine’s gregarious editor-in-chief, Jon Newey, the winners of this year's Parliamentary Jazz Awards were announced last night in the Terrace Pavilion at the House of Commons.Now in their twelfth year, the Awards, organised by the All Party Parliamentary Jazz Appreciation Group (APPJAG) and sponsored by the music licensing company PPL, are one of the most important dates in the UK jazz calendar.In his opening speech, Newey cited both the ups and downs of the previous year, with the former including “more excellent young jazz musicians emerging and carving out spaces at Read more ...