Interviews
Thomas H. Green
Hank Marvin (b 1941) was born Brian Rankin in Newcastle. At 16 he and his school friend, fellow guitarist Bruce Welch, headed for London to seek their fortune as musicians. They quickly found work at the 2i’s Coffee Bar in Soho, a seminal British rock’n’roll haunt. The pair were soon hired as Cliff Richard’s backing group, initially known as The Drifters and, eventually, as The Shadows. As well as accompanying Cliff Richard on early hits, the Shadows fired out a series of era-defining instrumentals such as “Apache”, “FBI” and "Kon-Tiki”. Together these releases came to sum up Britain’s take Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In 2007 Annemarie Jacir made her debut feature, Salt of This Sea, the first film directed by a Palestinian woman director. Her follow-up, When I Saw You, is released this week in the UK, after festival acclaim that saw it receive prizes at Berlinale 2012 (the Netpac award for “Best Asian Film”) and “Best Arab Film” at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. The story of a boy coming of age in a refugee camp in Jordan in 1967, and his complex relationship with his mother and his surroundings, it was the Palestinian submission for the 2013 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Jacir's short films Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Jonathan Kent was an actor before he was a director. Indeed, he had not directed a single play when in his mid-40s he assumed control of the Almeida Theatre in 1990. By the time he and his co-artistic director Ian McDiarmid has left more than a decade later, they had enforced a vital shift in the ecology of London theatre. Kent lured big names to work for small paychecks: Diana Rigg and Ralph Fiennes were soon followed by the likes of Kevin Spacey, Juliette Binoche, Liam Neeson and Cate Blanchett. The theatre put down roots in the West End, invaded the old Gainsborough Studios and took up Read more ...
edward.seckerson
In February 2013 Corinne Winters created an absolute sensation in her operatic European debut when Peter Konwitschny’s starkly intense staging of Verdi’s La Traviata arrived at English National Opera. Vocally, physically, dramatically her Violetta (“the whore who gets all the best tunes”, according to Konwitschny) was so “complete”, so unanimously greeted by superlative reviews, that it marked a highly significant arrival on the international opera scene. According to the American-born Winters, 12 important contracts arose directly from that run of performances.In this podcast she discusses Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Howling Bells have come a long way in the 10 years since they settled on a name and direction for their musical project, both physically - the four-piece uprooted themselves from Sydney, Australia to their adopted hometown of London to record and promote their self-titled debut album - and philosophically. In 2006, their combination of heavy, gloomy guitars and toe-tapping melodies topped with songwriter Juanita Stein’s effortlessly cool vocals deservedly attracted the frenzied attention of the music press and Bella Union boss Simon Raymonde, but that attention died down after a series of Read more ...
David Nice
Everyone who heard it must have been charmed by South African soprano Pretty Yende’s Radio 4 chat in which she recounted what hooked her on opera. It was a coup de foudre, watching a British Airways ad on telly at home in Piet Retief, and the sound of those two female voices entwined in the Flower Duet from Delibes’ Lakmé.Quite a catchy tunesmith, that Delibes: for those of an older generation, like myself, it was Lakmé's Bell Song which parents remembered from old films, occasioning in my case a trip to Sutton Record Library to find it on The World of Joan Sutherland. I became infatuated Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Wim Vandekeybus (b. 1963) is the man behind Ultima Vez, a theatrical-choreographic powerhouse in Brussels. With his guidance they have sped to the forefront of European multi-media performance with such works as Monkey Sandwich, Oedipus/Bêt Noir, NieuwZwart and Booty Looting, each combining music, dance, visual arts and theatre in different ratios to startling effect.After leaving school Vandekeybus took psychology at Leuven University but, finding the discipline’s scientific rationality restrictive and wanting to apply it to more artistic areas, he left and worked with the designer- Read more ...
David Nice
She is now the world’s leading interpreter of Richard Strauss’s Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, the aristocratic thirtysomething once forced into marriage with a far from ideal husband and determined not to let it happen to the sweet girl who falls for her own much younger lover on first sight. As a happily married woman, Anne Schwanewilms has no need of 17-year-old boys, and in her vocal prime she can have no regrets about ageing beautifully, but she shares both the Marschallin’s wit, with a wicked line in impersonating certain conductors, and her natural charm.Schwanewilms first beguiled Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You'll recall the scene where the title comes true in Gregory’s Girl. Gregory, a gawky, puzzled teenager played by John Gordon Sinclair, has finally hooked up with a girl. They spend a long evening dreamily kissing and listing their favourite numbers. “A million and nine," suggests Susan, played by Clare Grogan, after a long last smooch on his doorstep. "How come you know all the good numbers?" says Gregory, and you can hear the witty and the quizzical mingling in his voice, as inextricable as jam stirred into rice pudding.The exchange captures all the sweetness and mystery of teenage Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Yinka Shonibare MBE makes work from a less entrenched position than his many decorations suggest. This Member of the British Empire (he adopted the initials as part of his name after receiving the honour in 2005) is naturally also a Royal Academician, an Honorary Fellow of Goldsmiths, and has an honorary doctorate from the RCA. Shonibare is one of the most celebrated artists around, a fixture as well received as the ship in a bottle which occupied the Fourth Plinth in 2010 and which now has a permanent home outside the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.Yet his ambitious new work for year’ Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The sophisticated and exquisitely crafted sound of The Hilliard Ensemble has, over the past four decades, become one of the most distinctive pleasures on the choral scene. One of the several pioneers of the medieval and Renaissance repertoire to emerge in the Seventies, The Hilliards have, nonetheless, made this music their own, their glistening sound offering a more contemporary aesthetic than that of historically-specialist period performances. Named after Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, they share that portraitist’s delicacy, urbanity and intense colouring. Today, they have a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson first burst onto the scene in 1998 with the chaotically romantic Show Me Love (original title Fucking Åmål), a story of a love affair between two teenage girls which shocks a small Swedish town. He followed that with commune comedy Together (2000) before eventually segueing into darker territory with films such as Lilya 4-Ever (2002), A Hole in My Heart (2004) and Mammoth (2009) which focussed on sex trafficking, amateur porn and the ills of globalisation respectively.His latest We Are the Best! revisits Show Me Love's shy-girl-wild-girl dynamic but Read more ...