Scotland
Thomas H. Green
The lockdown which began in March is now noticeably easing, although in the realm of gigs and festivals things are still nowhere near operative. Nonetheless, theartsdesk is responding to the changes by ceasing our many weeks of New Music Lockdown Specials and looking forward to an increasing amount of actual live events. This week, we can only offer one, alongside plenty of streamed entertainment, but it’s early days. Here’s to the future. Dive in!Supersonic presents SofasonicBirmingham’s Supersonic is one of the only shindigs in Britain’s jammed annual summer festival calendar that truly Read more ...
Svend McEwan-Brown
They say that you discover who your true friends are when you find yourself in direst need. East Neuk Festival, our success story on the Fife coast, which should have been happening this week, faced the deepest crisis in its 16-year history this spring when, due to the pandemic, 2020’s festival was cancelled. Three years of preparation went up in smoke, and we found the organisation exposed to all manner of risks and challenges. Overnight, 40 per cent of the projected income disappeared while we were still left with many of the costs and commitments. Boy, did we discover who our friends were! Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Singing in a choir can be terrific therapy for anxiety, depression or loneliness, but one of the cruellest effects of the coronavirus is the way it has restricted normal human interaction. The notion of social distancing might have been designed to sabotage the proximity and togetherness which is so much a part of collective singing.However, choir supremo Gareth Malone (now sporting a shaggy lockdown hairstyle) doesn’t give up easily, so he’s made the best of what technology has to offer to create an online facsimile of the choir-singing experience. He’s the first to admit that hooking up a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
From the biggest man band of all time to a rising Doncaster DJ, from the lofts of New York to the garage studios rooms of Scotland, the best of current musical lockdown life is here. Dive in!Take That/Robbie Williams: Meerkat Music ConcertThe big news this week is that the classic Take That line-up, minus Jason Orange, who left for good in 2012, will be reuniting for an at-home concert at 8.00 PM this Friday (29th May) via the Youtube channel of the price comparison website-related Compare the Meerkat. Supporting music therapy charity Nordoff Robbins and Crew Nation, a relief fund for workers Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
As Covid-19 puts a halt to live events around the world, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra has delivered its annual festival of new music, Tectonics, online, with a selection of recordings from past performances. Since everything from the past seven festivals has been recorded, curators Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell had a vast musical smorgasboard to select from, although that was narrowed slightly by what files were readily available during lockdown. The programme works like an actual live event, with a running order of videos made available throughout both days of the festival. Read more ...
Owen Richards
The UK-wide lockdown has thrown the cinematic release schedule into chaos. Some films are postponed indefinitely, while others have opted for direct digital releases. It’s not ideal for anyone, but in a strange way it may play to The Whalebone Box’s favour. Specialist arthouse streaming service MUBI has secured the exclusive rights, and their captive subscribers are the ideal audience for such a strange, hypnotic piece.Experimental artist and filmmaker Andrew Kötting has built a reputation for idiosyncratic documentaries, and The Whalebone Box is true to form. Essentially, the plot follows Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With everyone in lockdown, observing physical if not social distancing, a story about isolation can have a particular resonance. And there are few places in the UK that are as isolated as some parts of the Scottish Highlands. Ali Milles’s tartan gothic thriller, The Croft, is partly a study of the advantages and disadvantages of living in a remote location, and partly a more speculative and suggestive account of how family tragedy repeats itself down the generations. This staging, an Original Theatre production, was touring the UK until the lockdown happened, and this hastily filmed recording Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Run is the story of disgruntled 36-ish Finnie (Mark Stanley), a big, dour worker in a fish processing plant in the Aberdeenshire port of Fraserburgh – writer-director Scott Graham’s hometown. Long married to his onetime high-school sweetheart Katie (Amy Manson), and the father of twentyish Kid (Anders Hayward) and adolescent Stevie (Scott Murray), Finnie wants to get the hell out – or he thinks he does. At its core, Run is about being mature enough to recognize your glass is half full.The film completes Graham’s trilogy about ordinary people yearning to escape their constricted lives. Like Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There is something enjoyably spikey about Halsey, even when she is adhering to pop convention. At one stage she told the crowd how good they looked, before dryly adding it was praise they wouldn’t have heard before. These are brave words when playing to a Glasgow audience. She is a pop performer possessing an actual personality, one that has survived the step up to playing arenas, and when she spoke during the encore of how her fans had helped keep her alive during tough times, it came with a raw emotion rarely present in big gigs.The New Jersey native was also very much the show here. Her Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Critical and commercial success haven’t gone to the head of Lewis Capaldi. The 23-year-old opened his first of two sold-out nights at Glasgow’s 14,000-capacity enormodrome – booked when he was yet to release his debut album – with a video montage poking fun of his po-faced reaction to Billie Eilish beating him to Song of the Year at the Grammys in January.Coming mere weeks after his double win at the Brit Awards, the show had the feel of a triumphant homecoming – albeit one in for which the vanquishing hero was constantly rewarding the crowd with profanity-laden gratitude. Almost exactly Read more ...
David Nice
Fast is fine in Beethoven, so long as you find breathing-spaces, expressive lines and crisp articulation within it. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra's febrile new chief conductor, Maxim Emelyanychev, started the "Pastoral" Symphony last night with a brisk but detailed walk which was interesting in itself, especially given the level of commitment from the players, but a breathless rapidity saw diminishing returns even in a symphony which ought to be able to take it, the Seventh. There's clearly an excitement about what's going on in the new partnership, but is it enough?It should have been a joy Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Scotland was at the cutting edge of culture in 1988, when the Edinburgh International Festival hosted the UK premiere of Nixon in China in the Houston Grand Opera production at the cavernous Playhouse. John Adams’ first opera, documenting the historic meeting between Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung in 1972, was about as hot off the press as you can get, having been premiered in the USA only the year before, and came to Scotland with most of the original cast in the now iconic production directed by Peter Sellars.Over 30 years later, for Scottish Opera to mount its first production of Nixon is Read more ...