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theartsdesk
“Cricket was very much part of my life from the day I was born,” Harold Pinter once said, only partly joking. “There was a general feeling about cricket. In the 1930s the whole of England loved cricket, I think – that was my impression as a child, anyway, when I was six months old.” Pinter started playing cricket for Gaieties CC in the mid-1960s. The club was the creation of music hall star Lupino Lane. Lane had a residency at the (long since demolished) Gaiety Theatre on The Strand, so when he started a cricket team he naturally named it Gaieties.One school holiday Pinter took his son Daniel Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Last night I was thinking, as I often do, of Britney, Kylie, Beyoncé, and less of Shakira, mainly because her name doesn’t end in y or e. The reason that my thoughts turned to Britney et al (incidentally we are delighted to have britneyspearsfans @BritneySpears4u site following theartsdesk on Twitter) was a list published this Saturday in the Telegraph of the best 100 songs of the Noughties.As it’s the end of the decade, so cash-poor media types can fill up acres of space not only with year best-of lists, but decade best-of lists. The Noughty Girls will, quite rightly, be all over them.It may Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Outside it’s snowing in the pale and spectral city of St Petersburg. Inside it’s 4.30 am and we’ve been drinking for several hours in a restaurant next to the Mariinsky Theatre when Valery Gergiev, for many the world’s greatest conductor and with a reputation as a wild man, suggests now would be the best time for an interview with him.(If you are Gergiev you don’t get thrown out of restaurants there – he even gets his own motorcade if he needs to get about the city in a hurry).As a website called Opera Chic put it, “he can make the Pastorale sound like John Williams and Richard Strauss sound Read more ...
theartsdesk
Welcome to the first professionally produced arts critical website in Britain, theartsdesk.com, a new space for reviews and features about all the arts from live to recorded. Attendance at live music, galleries, theatres and other arts events has never been higher, and even seems to be increasing, but print arts coverage is in decline. We want to reflect the health of the arts scene and the potential of the web with a new kind of coverage.theartsdesk.com will bring you arts writing and visuals of highest quality with the speed and scope of the net to reach out widely and dig down deeply. We Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Was he the prodigal son who abandoned Russia? Or the figure who did more than anyone to integrate Russian and European culture in the first half of the last century? As two major exhibitions open on the heritage of Sergei Diaghilev, celebrated impresario and “20th-century Medici”, for the first time Russians will have the chance to decide for themselves.It is the centenary of the first performances by the Ballets Russes in Paris, as well as the 80th anniversary of the death of the company’s no less legendary founder, and exhibitions marking his extraordinary creative achievements have been on Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Does Britain have too many film festivals? Not so very long ago, there were only two of these games around: the London Film Festival - which unveiled its full line-up this morning and begins on 14 October - and Edinburgh. Now, though, there are hundreds.The London London Film Festival website remains the behemoth in size and scope. Long a "festival of festivals", which selected the cream of films already unveiled on the international circuit, it has slowly built the clout to command its own major world premieres: this year there are 15.
With increased funding from Film London, it has also now Read more ...