A couple of years ago a retrospective season for the BFI sought to reflect the filmmaking renaissance across South America that started at the end of the 1990s, and simply hasn’t stopped. Freed from the shackles of dictatorship and economic hardship, a young generation of directors were producing some of the best films in the world. It was never going to be easy to choose just 20 to reflect that, but our task as curators would have been a lot easier if one country, Argentina, wasn’t producing quite so many wonderful films.The Argentine Film Festival, at London’s Ritzy this weekend, is a first Read more ...

Matilda, the Royal Shakespeare Company-spawned musical about an extraordinary young girl, managed the extraordinary feat Sunday of snaring a record seven trophies at last night’s 36th Laurence Olivier Awards. Its rampaging hold over the black-tie ceremony at the Royal Opera House came at the expense of such comic hopefuls as One Man, Two Guvnors and The Ladykillers, which had 10 nominations between them and emerged with no awards. Nor did the twice-nominated Noises Off.The lack of recognition for One Man must be particularly hard for its creators coming on the eve of the Richard Bean play’s Read more ...

Two things are certain with music coming from the north: there will be some wonderful surprises and some of it will sound like nothing else on earth. It’s even more enticing when the two merge. Making the peculiar accessible is a uniquely Scandinavian knack. There are more than a few examples of that – the creation of new micro-genres – in this round-up of current and new releases, but some straightforward albums are equally striking. First, however, we head for the offbeat end of the spectrum.After my first encounter with Denmark’s Sleep Party People, I remarked they were “a peculiar Read more ...

The onerous task of recording all 205 national anthems for playing at the Olympics medal ceremonies has fallen on the London Philharmonic Orchestra. An edited group of 36 players has recorded the anthems at the Abbey Road Studios in 60 gruelling recording hours over six days. But which would try their patience most?The anthems - every one known in the world, good, bad and indifferent - have been arranged by British composer and cellist Phillip Sheppard, who did the British anthem arrangement for the Beijing Olympics closing ceremony. Judging from a selection below, he would be giving the LPO Read more ...

On the tip-off of an art-loving West Country amigo, Miss April and I took a day out of our Easter hols to visit the recently re-opened Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, in Exeter.We’d missed the exhibition of French and British impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and some Englishmen), so we took the opportunity to wander aimlessly round the satisfyingly manageable building and reacquaint ourselves with that childlike enthusiasm for the Wonder House (as the natives call the Devon museum). Despite its rooms full of Egyptologica, taxidermised birds, Grand Tour bling, Congolese Read more ...

The annual conference of the Incorporated Society of Musicians may not sound like an event liable to stop traffic, but this year's gathering at LSO St Luke's (13 and 14 April) offered such treats as a conversation with Sir Colin Davis, a concert celebrating 100 years of jazz composer/arranger Gil Evans by the Guildhall Jazz Band, and a masterclass from soprano Amanda Roocroft.And on Thursday afternoon, a panel of broadcasters and programme-makers gathered under the chairmanship of Radio 3 broadcaster and journalist Tom Service to kick around the thorny question of The Future of Classical Read more ...

Royal Ballet prima ballerina Tamara Rojo has been appointed the new artistic director of English National Ballet. Though the announcement was officially dated for tomorrow, the press release was issued by the company this morning and the news has been widely sent out over the internet and social media since then.The ballerina had made clear in an interview with theartsdesk back in 2009, that her eye was set on a future job as a director when she stopped dancing, and on English National Ballet in particular, the touring company where she first showed herself as a shooting star 15 years ago. Read more ...

Centenaries are sizeable business in 2012. It just so happens that the Olympics are coming to the United Kingdom for the third time in a year which finds us thinking very hard if being British still means what it did 100 years. Then, two momentous calamities singed themselves into the national psyche: the Titanic sank, and Captain Scott and his four companions failed to return from the South Pole.Adam Sweeting has already reported on the deluge of Titanica fanning across the television schedules from National Geographic docs to Drownton. The Scott industry is spreading itself more widely Read more ...

If you’re not French, there are probably two things you know about Claude François: that he wrote “My Way” and that he died from electrocution when fiddling with a lighting fixture while in the bath. In France, however, he’s been part of pop-cultural furniture since the mid-Sixties and has remained so since his death in 1978. He’s even more ubiquitous right now due to a biopic, DVD box set and TV specials dedicated to the constantly dancing dynamo known as “Cloclo”. Posters for Cloclo line Paris’s streets.Unlike Serge Gainsbourg, François has remained a local delicacy. It’s unlikely the film Read more ...

“If James Bond actually worked in MI6 today,” said “Anna”, “he’d spend a large amount of time behind a desk.” Fair enough, since he’d also be about 110. And besides, the days of the Oxbridge “tap” having gone the way of Bernard Lee, most of 007’s work has long been outsourced to Johnny Foreigner.In the age of Homeland, Spooks, Rubicon, Tinker Tailor... (again), and Ben Macintyre, it seemed unlikely that much more needed to be said about the role (and/or importance) of spies in our world. But Peter Taylor’s Modern Spies (BBC Two) deserves credit for being made at all – a first, apparently: Read more ...

Norman Lebrecht, the seasoned and ever-alert musical commentator, thinks he and his readers may have uncovered someone making a very good stab at being Mozart. Three pieces have been discovered on the internet DIY-video channel being played by a pianist whose face can't be seen, all purporting to be new or obscure works by Mozart, Haydn and Mendelssohn.In a time when lost items are turning up quite regularly now - Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven pieces have recently been found in far-flung files and libraries - Lebrecht decided to take the "Ask the Audience" option, by putting the Mozart piece Read more ...

If there was a holy trinity of rock'n'roll iconography, it would be guitars by Fender and Gibson, plugged into amplifiers bearing the unmistakeable Marshall logo. Merely to be seen using Marshall amps and loudspeakers became an obligatory badge of rockingness, to the extent that many acts just did it for show."Jimi Hendrix used three 100-watt amps and three stacks," Marshall supremo Jim Marshall commented. "KISS go a lot further, but most of the cabinets and amps you see on stage are dummies. We once built 80 dummy cabinets for Bon Jovi. They all do it - it's just backdrop."Jim Marshall, who Read more ...