Features
Jasper Rees
This week Stephen Frears's film about Florence Foster Jenkins opens. It will bring to the widest attention yet the story of a New York socialite who couldn’t sing and yet did sing, infamously, to a packed Carnegie Hall at the age of 76 in 1944. Meryl Streep plays her as only Meryl Streep can. But what of the man without whom her story would have been impossible? Nobody knows anything much about St Clair Bayfield (played by Hugh Grant, pictured below) beyond the skeletal facts: that he was her common-law husband and a not very successful character actor on Broadway. So who was he really? Read more ...
David Nice
Within the wounded, divided company of English National Opera – artists and administration still at loggerheads – the buzz is surprisingly positive. CEO Cressida Pollock does finally seem to be listening: union deputies from chorus and orchestra met the final candidates for the too-long-dormant role of Artistic Director. From what I gleaned last night after the final blazing performance of Brahms's A German Requiem under the best Music Director I've seen at ENO in my lifetime, Mark Wigglesworth, they liked what they'd heard from the new incumbent, Daniel Kramer.The 39-year-old American-born Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brighton Festival is a fantastic, exhilarating, leading annual celebration of the arts, with events taking place in venues both familiar and unusual across Brighton & Hove for three weeks every May. This year, the Festival celebrates 50 years of commissioning and producing innovative arts and culture with the experimental artist and musician Laurie Anderson, who is guest director.Enter this competition for a chance to win a fantastic break for two over the closing weekend of Brighton Festival (Friday 27-Sunday 29 May).The prize package includes:A two-night stay at Holiday Inn - Brighton Read more ...
peter.quinn
A diverse mix of musicians from the worlds of jazz, blues, soul and beyond were honoured at the third Jazz FM Awards on Tuesday night, which took place in the 1920s art-deco setting of London’s Bloomsbury Ballroom.Hosted by writer, actor and broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli, and produced by Serious, the ceremony featured performances from Kansas Smitty’s House Band, Liv Warfield, rising star singer/pianist Kandace Springs, and Hiatus Kaiyote. Guest presenters included Cerys Matthews, Nitin Sawhney, Soweto Kinch, plus Simon Bartholomew and Andrew Levy from the Brand New Heavies. Read more ...
Martin Longley
The name of the Savannah Music Festival might sound somewhat vague in these days of specialist events, but this is an (almost) three-week sonic orgy which treats all styles equally, blending classical beside bluegrass, jazz next to African, and country side-by-side with the blues. Multiple venues are used, some more than others. All of them are within easy walking distance, around the centre of this historically-attuned southern States city.Landing down in Georgia from New York City, as did your scribe, the transition is immense. Down here, the traffic actually waits for pedestrians at all of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Today marks 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare. To celebrate this and, indeed, put the two together, the Brighton Festival 2016 commissioned The Complete Deaths, a show based around the 74 deaths that take place onstage in the work of the most renowned playwright in history. It's a collaborative effort between physical theatre group Spymonkey and theatrical innovator Tim Crouch, both acclaimed Brighton talents. Here, digging deeper into this morbid, poignant, and sometimes unexpectedly comic subject matter, Tim Crouch reveals, exclusively for theartsdesk, his own Top 10 Deaths Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Prince Rogers Nelson was the most gloriously disruptive presence in popular culture from the very start to the very end. Everything about him was off kilter and wrong: it's not for nothing that the first major biography of him was called The Imp of the Perverse. His songs were full of deranged filth, skewed social comment with a conspiratarian edge, had a very individualist take on Jehovah's Witness spirituality and mysticism, and all manner of personal cyphers and in-jokes. He was a constantly self-creating work of art of the most esoteric and incomprehensible sort – yet for all that he Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Victoria Wood was a very private national treasure. Not for her the tawdry catwalk of Twitter nor the klaxon of the confessional memoir. She wasn't comfortable talking to journalists and when she found one whom she could just about trust, she stuck with them. That is how I found myself interviewing her many times over the years, and came to see past the carapace of jollity that was her performance persona. The first time I met her was, weirdly, for a supermarket magazine. She could barely believe it herself, having endured quite severe food issues over many years. Inevitably those came Read more ...
David Nice
A young nation with a small population and the most untarnished democratic credentials in Europe today can do certain things with festivals not so easy to imagine here. When Estonian Music Days, focused on native and contemporary music, took nature as its theme for 2016 – in this case posing a question in the title, "Green Sound?" – it could expect many of its 60 featured composers to respond to commissioning by making a direct link to the native ecology. And, lacking our centuries of patriarchal baggage, it could furnish a high quotient of women in music – composers, players, conductors – Read more ...
Samuel West
Everyone’s talked a lot about the E bit of EU recently. I want to talk about the U part.There’s a phrase in The Book of Common Prayer that even as an atheist I find inspiring. It's part of the marriage service, and it says that marriage was ordained "for the mutual help, society and comfort which the one ought to have of the other." It's a beautiful, nurturing idea. Help, society and comfort. We could all do with a bit of that.But the word that binds them, that makes them work, is mutual. What I want for myself I must be prepared to do for others. That's how it works in a marriage, and that's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Of all the dramas with the name Arnold Wesker attached to them, the most absorbing ran as long as The Mousetrap, but offstage rather than on. It was in the style of a remorselessly black farce, in which the little man as hero suffers an endless series of blows, reverses and pratfalls. Some are minor, some cataclysmic, but they all have one thing in common: they fail to deter their victim who, like one of those clown figures mounted on a toy rubber ball, always rolls back into the upright position.Written up as a play, it should be called Fashion Street, after the address in the East End where Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
International Dance Festival Birmingham (IDFB) is one of the unsung heroes not just of dance in Britain, but of festivals. It treats anyone within striking distance of the West Midlands to an exciting range of performers and public dance events over three weeks, and is cleverly scheduled in May – when lengthening days and bank holidays make us want to go out and have a good time, but it's not quite warm enough for camping. With IDFB 2016 opening in three weeks, on Sunday 1 May, theartsdesk casts an eye over the programme's highlights and finds out from festival founder and director David Read more ...