Features
Marina Vaizey
The dazzling, controversial, fascinating exhibition In the Age of Giorgione at the Royal Academy inadvertently provides a striking example of an unavoidable and perhaps insoluble problem common to almost all exhibitions of painting – especially those with a high proportion of loans – in public museums and galleries.A significant number of the paintings on view, including several of the Giorgiones at the heart of the visual essay being presented, not to mention works by Dürer and Bellini, are visually vandalised. The image is disfigured and its proportions distorted by a horizontal dark shadow Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
With the death of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies from leukaemia at the age of 81, the UK has lost the most prolific composer of his generation, as well as one of the most passionate advocates for art music.Maxwell Davies, known universally as Max, wrote for every classical genre under the sun. Stevie’s Ferry to Hoy is played today by children and piano students the world over. With a simple melody of unaffected charm and satisfying rhythmic games playing just beneath the surface, the piece is as characteristically Max as the unrelenting orchestral churn of Worldes Blis, the gay and sentimental Read more ...
David Nice
"Just listen". That's an imperative, of course, but it can be a very fair and reasonable one if the tone is right. It was Claudio Abbado's encouragement to his Lucerne Festival Orchestra players to make chamber music writ large. It also sounds persuasive and not at all militant coming from the mouths of ENO chorus members as their plea to the dramatic changes proposed by Chief Executive Officer Cressida Pollock, appointed a year ago. But listening to all levels of the company is something she never did in the first place, which is why, with two petitions running respectively way above 5,000 Read more ...
Fran Robertson
Situated next to the beautiful Welsh Harp reservoir in North London, the West Hendon council estate was built in the 1960s to provide 680 homes to low income families. I first went there in November 2014. I had been following various housing stories around London and had heard about an estate where residents were fighting a multi-million pound regeneration which was forcing them out of their homes and where land valued at £12 million had been sold to developers for just £3.The day I went to the estate, representatives of the private developers, the architects and the council had set up a mini Read more ...
Guy Oddy
During the ‘80s there was no US rock band that hoisted its freak flag higher than the Butthole Surfers, and certainly none that put out albums of the stature of Locust Abortion Technician and Hairway to Steven in such quick succession. Evolving from sloppy, lo-fi southern friend punk into experimental drug orgy art event and finally into fire-spitting hardcore psychedelic rockers – before, somewhat inevitably, being killed off by signing to a major record label – they were a visceral reaction to Ronald Reagan’s USA.Even in a genre with a propensity to offend the squares, the Butthole Surfers Read more ...
David Farr
I’ve been working on two projects over the last four years and like buses they’ve arrived on British screens at the same time. On the surface they seem very different. My adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Night Manager is a huge epic sprawling espionage drama that spans six episodes and several years, moving from the Egypt of the Arab Spring to London, Spain, Turkey and beyond. My suspense movie The Ones Below, starring Clémence Poésy and David Morrissey, is 90 minutes long and set almost entirely in a house in north-east London. It’s claustrophobic and compressed, telling the unnerving tale Read more ...
Marshall Marcus
2016 began with the passing of Pierre Boulez, arguably the doyen of modernism in the field of classical music. Now, only a couple of months later, it is the turn of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a musician occupying a similar level of singular elevation but this time in what is often described (certainly inadequately in this case) as the "period instrument" movement.Harnoncourt was clearly an inspiration to generations of period instrument musicians, including generations like mine that came to the "movement" in the 1970s and '80s; he taught us not only about grammar and its expression, not simply Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I've never thought of myself as a Shostakovich fan, tending to regard what I know of his output as bleak and forbidding. Photographs of the stone-faced composer with the mortuary attendant's demeanour haven't helped.All this changed after a night out with the Oslo Philharmonic under the wizardly baton of Vasily Petrenko, who yields to none in his commitment to Shostakovich's work. Their performance of the composer's Fifth Symphony was a revelation (to me, at any rate) in its heart-stopping leaps between minimalist shivers of strings and catastrophic detonations of brass and percussion, its Read more ...
Anthony Weigh
In the icy early hours of 1 February 1918 a bizarre figure was seen wandering aimlessly along the platform of a railway station in Lyon. A solider. Lost. When asked his name he answered, “Anthelme Mangin”. Other than that he had no memory of who he was, of where he had been, of where he was going, or of what had happened to him prior to arriving on that station platform on that frigid February night.The story of Anthelme Mangin captivated France. For many he was the living embodiment of the unknown soldier buried beneath the Arc de Triomphe. A walking, talking memorial to the horrors of the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Brighton Festival 2016, which explodes into life again this year on Saturday May 7, has revealed its programme. Guest Director Laurie Anderson sent a short film in support of the occasion, while Chief Executive Andrew Comben, acknowledging this as the 50th edition of the Festival, added: “Every year since 1967 some of the greatest artists, performers and thinkers have come together with some of the most open-minded and enthusiastic audiences anywhere for a festival whose home is one of the most artistically rich and geographically blessed places in the country.”Indeed, the theme of this Read more ...
Graham Fuller
If there is a successor to the great Hollywood costume designer Edith Head, it is Sandy Powell, the British designer of six films directed by Martin Scorsese, three each by Todd Haynes and Neil Jordan, and others by the likes of Derek Jarman, Sally Potter, Stephen Frears and Julie Taymor. Powell’s recent Oscar nominations for designing the costumes for Haynes’s Carol and Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella raised her total to 12: her wins have come for Shakespeare in Love, Scorsese’s The Aviator, and Young Victoria.For all the fairytale flamboyance of Powell’s Cinderella gowns and tunics, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was 20 years ago that Mick Jagger suggested to Martin Scorsese that they should make a film "that spanned four decades of the world of music in New York City". The idea has finally come to fruition as Vinyl, HBO's new 10-part series that kicks off on Sky Atlantic on Monday 15 February.The two-hour pilot show is directed by Scorsese and co-written by Terence Winter, who has previously worked with the director on Boardwalk Empire and The Wolf of Wall Street. It's a riotous ride through 1973 New York, a city then awash in debt, crime and sleaze, but also a seething musical melting-pot of punk Read more ...