Features
theartsdesk
There are no awards, nor nominations. On the plus side there are no publicity chores either. And there is none of that contractual argy-bargy about billing. In this week’s Listed, there is no billing for the stars who show up on screen without prior warning. And it’s only the biggest stars can do this sort of thing: materialise in the narrative and give it a powerful shot in the arm. If properly deployed, the impact of uncredited cameo can be huge. Indeed, in the week the runners and riders for the Academy Awards have been posted, you could argue that the best performance of all – and perhaps Read more ...
Josiah Howard
Cher was the multi-platform performer of her day, a singer, TV personality, cabaret artist, and Oscar-winning actress. She came up as the initially teenage half of pop duo Sonny & Cher (pictured below left) in the mid-Sixties with her partner (and later husband) Sonny Bono, hitting the charts with megahit "I Got You, Babe". The pair went on to helm a successful TV show in the early Seventies but when they split up Cher was given her own self-titled variety show in 1975. New York journalist and writer Josiah Howard has focused on this in his new book Cher: Strong Enough. Below Howard tells Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With the passing of Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers yesterday, aged 74, rock’n’roll loses half of one of its greatest original pairings. With his brother Don he meshed the close harmonies of country acts such as the Louvin Brothers with the poppy rock’n’roll of fellow southern boy Buddy Holly, a close friend with whom they toured regularly.The Everlys had a spectacular run of hits between 1957 and 1962, songs such as “Bye Bye Love”, “Wake Up Little Susie” and “All I Have To Do Is Dream”. Among much else, their 1960 song “Cathy’s Clown” was the first single to simultaneously top the charts Read more ...
theartsdesk
With the end of 2013 nearly upon us it's time for a last look back before we step forward into the unknown. Yesterday our rundown of the year's finest films took you from a radiant romance to a bristling biopic, but the nature of such lists means that the best is yet to come and those that remain could hardly be more different. And so - our final five.5 Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino)Writer-director Quentin Tarantino proves once again he’s a master filmmaker with this double Oscar-winning revenge drama which reinvents the Western for a modern audience. The central cast are all Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The fledgling career of Michael Codron, who has been knighted in the New Year's Honours list at the age of 75, might have ended almost as soon as it began. He embarked on a career as a solo impresario in 1956 and had staged three shows, none of which prospered. Then he went to Cambridge and saw a promising undergraduate revue, written by Bamber Gascoigne. He decided to bring the improbably titled Share My Lettuce to London, recasting it with Kenneth Williams and the then unknown Maggie Smith.The only problem was that he hadn't any money. He went to a music publisher, who agreed to back the Read more ...
theartsdesk
2013 was the year that Thom Yorke, somewhat tautologically, referred to the music business as “a dying corpse”, and Justin Bieber's manager Scooter Braun claimed that same business “doesn't exist any more.” This was slightly odd, given that it was one of the liveliest years in recent memory, with mainstream and underground pulsating with debate over big issues and big releases, and – for all the technological and multimedia proliferation which prompted Yorke and Braun's hyperbole – the actual music itself being higher on the cultural agenda than for a long time.The most visible example of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Not a year in which big names came through, and many on the list below are actually quite introverted and low-key, but none the worse for that. Among numerous global musical gems this year were the following:The Fes Festival of World Sacred Music retained its high quality with scores of top notch acts, notably the wonderful Lebanese singer Abeer Nehme singing Aramaic music with incredible sweetness and purity. The video below gives some idea:The most extraordinary act of this year’s WOMAD was a modern folk group from Italy with the unwieldy name of Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, whose rootsy Read more ...
theartsdesk
There are some that will tell you that they don't make movies like they used to. But even if that's true, film is an art-form that continues to thrive by moving with the times - reflecting change, reinventing itself and each year we're supplied with no shortage of outstanding cinema from across the globe. It's a fact that makes compiling the traditional end-of-year list far from a chore, and more like greedily picking your way through a banquet.So why have us film bods at theartsdesk plumped for a top 13 this year? Well, 13 is the number of TAD's film critics that voted in our end-of-year Read more ...
fisun.guner
Not an exhaustive list, but, in no particular order, these are the shows I'm still left thinking about as the year draws to a close. The best have opened my eyes to new ways of thinking about an artist. A few are still on. Try not to miss. And do suggest your own favourites in the comments below. As you'll see, I've also nominated one "Disappointment of the year" and one "Most ill-conceived show of the year". Don't hesitate to suggest your own in these catagories too.1. Jake and Dinos Chapman: Come and See, Serpentine Sackler GalleryBehind that mask of tom-foolery, Jake and Dinos Chapman are Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What better way to celebrate Christmas than by contemplating this sublime altarpiece by the celebrated Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini? It hangs above a sidechapel in the church of San Zaccaria in Venice offering blissful relief from the noise and bustle of the narrow streets around San Marco. Listening with quiet concentration is one of the themes. Virgin and child sit on a raised throne absorbing the music played on a violin by an angel seated below them. With similarly downcast eyes, the saints standing on either side seem lost in thought.The saints are so immersed in reverie that, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was the fate of Benozzo Gozzoli (c 1422-1497) to be a contemporary of the immortals. A merry journeyman dauber, his talents were overshadowed in his lifetime and are overlooked now. He had a good start in life, working for both Fra Angelico and Ghiberti, but his beautiful frescoes are to be found tucked away in hill towns, innocently crumbling in wayside Tuscan chapels, or locked in the basements of the great museums. In the last 30 years of his life, Gozzoli painted a vast cycle of Old Testament scenes in Pisa's Camposanto. Allied firebombs destroyed all but the odd fragment. Art Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Russia is the largest country on earth, unimaginably vast. Its people naturally have a great attachment to their country – and its landscape – in spite of their turbulent history, and in the late 19th century painters portrayed with deep feeling their native environment, their feelings for the motherland perhaps intensified among the more sophisticated the more they had travelled and studied in Europe. One of their leaders was Ivan Shishkin,1832-1898, known as the patriarch of the forest, and head of the landscape school at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. Well-read and Read more ...