Interviews
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In a world of reality television show winners and interchangeable flash-in-the-pan singer-songwriter critical darlings, Frank Turner stands apart as the real deal. Over the past 18 months, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Turner had appeared as if from nowhere and his name was suddenly everywhere. But the groundwork for the songwriter’s considerable recent successes - a pre-show slot at the London Olympics Opening Ceremony (pictured below), a sell-out show at Wembley Arena, his latest album reaching the top of the iTunes Chart and number two on the Official UK Album Chart - has been Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the late Eighties one of the most sonically unhinged bands of all time came together in East London. Terminal Cheesecake caused few commercial waves but gathered a devoted coterie of fans for their unholy racket at pummelling concerts. Their sound was initially crunching riff-rock smeared with head-frying psychedelia and deranged electronic effects but throughout a career of five albums – Johnny Town-Mouse (1988), VCL (1989), Angels in Pigtails (1990), Pearlesque Kings of the Jewmost (1992) and King of All the Spaceheads (1994) – they gradually drifted into monstrous exercises in marijuana Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A lot has changed in the 10 years since Serge Dorny arrived at Lyon Opera. Attendance in a supposedly dying art form has risen to 96 per cent, and no charges of elitism or unfashionable nostalgia have deterred the 25 per cent of Lyon’s audiences who are now under 26 – Europe’s youngest opera-going crowd. But how has Dorny managed this, and at what cost? Is he really the Opera Whisperer or are his innovations just gimmickry, shiny bandages temporarily plugging a fatal wound?It’s a question that UK audiences will soon be able to answer for themselves as Dorny brings his latest and most Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Schoolchildren drowning under a frozen lake in their crashed bus is the image most people still associate with Atom Egoyan. The Sweet Hereafter (1997), which pivots on that scene (the ill-fated bus is pictured below), gained him Oscar nominations as director and screenwriter, and reinforced the breakthrough made by Exotica (1994), in which a man harbouring an awful secret you dread being revealed keeps coming back to a strip-club’s schoolgirl-costumed dancer.Egoyan’s most financially successful and worst-reviewed film was Chloe (2007), in which Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and Amanda Seyfried Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Woody Allen once joked that he would prefer to achieve immortality not through his work but through not dying. He is now 77 and the inevitable is a lot nearer than it was when he first realised, aged five, that this doesn’t go on forever. Fear of death has powered the furious productivity that in the early days yielded jokes by the yard, then the films appearing year upon year. In the interim the public image has calcified: the master comedian who would prefer to be a tragedian, the world-class worrier, the clarinet-tooting workaholic. But is that the real Woody Allen? This week a two-part Read more ...
Jasper Rees
By the time silence descends on the Royal Albert Hall at five o’clock in the afternoon for a performance that will end six hours later, Semyon Bychkov will have been rehearsing for 60 hours. It breaks down into four days of orchestra readings, with tutti and sectional sessions for each act, then two days of the singers and a pianist, followed by six days of everybody together. And all for one performance of Tristan und Isolde with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Bychkov has a long relationship with Tristan. He first conducted a concert performance of the second act in Turin, and the whole staged Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's four years almost to the day since The Duckworth Lewis Method released their first album, a whimsical batch of songs about the myths and mysteries of cricket. It earned them a kind of nichey notoriety among cricket fans and was an eccentric treat for devotees of the duo behind the project, The Divine Comedy's mastermind Neil Hannon and Thomas Walsh of Dublin-based pop band Pugwash.Their debut was released to coincide with 2009's Ashes series against the Australians. This summer the Australians are back, and so are The Duckworth Lewis Method - named, as you will doubtless already know, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It may have taken Sarah Connolly a decade or two, a detour to choral singing and a serious flirtation with jazz, but the British mezzo-soprano has most definitely arrived at full-blown National Treasure status. Perhaps it was her career-changing Xerxes in Nicholas Hytner’s 1998 Xerxes for English National Opera that marked the start of her reign, perhaps her 2005 Giulio Cesare for Glyndebourne. But either way a starring appearance at the Last Night of the Proms in 2009, a CBE the following year and a Royal Philharmonic Society Award just last month, all proclaim her the undisputed queen of Read more ...
John Harle
On Christmas Day last year, we lost Richard Rodney Bennett, a composer and performer who bridged the worlds of classical, jazz and film music with a suave nonchalance that came from inner confidence and a belief in hard work. He and I met for lunch in the summer of 2012 at The Fountain Restaurant in Fortnum & Mason. We were to discuss what music we'd like to record to finish Round Midnight, an album we'd started many years ago, and for me to interview him for the launch of Sospiro, a new record label.We had to walk from St James's Square up to Piccadilly – he was ailing so it was hard Read more ...
James Williams
Equal parts prodigiously talented musician, consistently funny comedian, auteur, theatre performer, free thinker and writer, Reggie Watts is nigh on impossible to pigeonhole. He is a hurricane of furious creativity operating completely in his own lane, hurtling full-speed towards Parts Unknown. Primarily known for his inimitable blend of improvisational music and comedy, each show he performs is completely original, never to be repeated.Utilizing a looping effects pedal and keyboard (and very little else) Watts creates on-the-fly songs in a variety of sublimely lampooned musical styles, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is no formula for creating a hit musical. If there were, the history of the West End and Broadway would not be haunted by the many ghosts of bygone disasters. Let us not list them here. The lack of a roadmap notwithstanding, the long-awaited version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is ticking all the right boxes.For a start, there’s the belt-and-braces title itself, much loved as a book but perhaps as widely known via two film versions from 1971 and 2005. It has a big-shot director in the form of Sam Mendes, and in David Greig a book-writer who knows how to entertain childen, having Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's the uniqueness of the Royal Ballet ballerina Leanne Benjamin that tomorrow night at Covent Garden, aged nearly 49, she will be playing a sex-mad teenager, and no one will have the slightest difficulty believing it. Then she'll retire. Not for her a soft swoop into long dresses and matronly gestures, easing decorously into the sunset, but an all-out assault on physical and emotional extremes that is typical of the career of this tiny stick of dynamite from the Australian outback.In a season full of goodbyes - Mara Galeazzi, Alina Cojocaru, Johan Kobborg and Tamara Rojo have all signed off Read more ...