Features
First Person: ethnomusicologist Shumaila Hemani on global musical traditions and Concert for AfghanistanFriday, 22 October 2021
In early 2020, the year that soon saw COVID-19 lockdown, I served on the music faculty for Semester at Sea, Spring 2020 voyage, where I taught self-designed courses on global music cultures as well as a course called Soundscapes. This course... Read more... |
First Person: Rachel O'Riordan on the enduring power of a sad, funny, and extraordinary playWednesday, 13 October 2021
The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a vicious, sad and extraordinary play.On the surface, Martin McDonagh's play, first seen 25 years ago and revived now in a collaboration between Chichester Festival Theatre and my home base, the Lyric Hammersmith... Read more... |
'The din is loud these days': playwright Cordelia Lynn on her imminent premiere at the Donmar WarehouseMonday, 11 October 2021
As I write this, we've just had our final day in the rehearsal room and are going into tech onstage next week with my new play, which is also reopening the Donmar not only to live performance but follows major renovations at their home address.It’s... Read more... |
Extract: The Breaks by Julietta SinghWednesday, 06 October 2021
How do we mother “at the end of the world”? Among the ruins of late capitalism, climate catastrophe, and entrenched white state violence?Julietta Singh “admit[s] that at a conceptual level there is a crucial part of me that wants to throw in the... Read more... |
K-Music 2021: striking the right note for musical fusionWednesday, 06 October 2021
It’s been eight years since the first K-Music landed in London, courtesy the Korean Cultural Centre UK, along with world, folk and jazz concert producers Serious. Since then it has brought an eclectic range of bands and musicians from Korea to the... Read more... |
'Rest now, you God': remembering bass-baritone Norman Bailey (1933-2021)Friday, 24 September 2021
Few singers really change your life. Norman Bailey did that for me [writes David Nice of theartsdesk]. The occasion wasn't my first experience of a Wagner opera, but it was the first time I'd been to a performance of his great human comedy Die... Read more... |
Summer seasons in a Covid world: five opera company movers and shakers reflectTuesday, 14 September 2021
The bleakest time of all for live music during the Covid crisis came in the first four and a half months of this year. Re-emergence came too late for many of the big national opera companies – though the Royal Opera threw down a sensational gauntlet... Read more... |
First Person: theatre director Christopher Haydon on how the Rose Theatre, Kingston, can bloom anewMonday, 13 September 2021
Programming a theatre during a pandemic has been like trying to nail jelly to a set of constantly moving goalposts. Government indecision meant that reopening dates shifted repeatedly while the configuration of our auditorium kept changing as we... Read more... |
Out of the shadows: Dylan’s Eighties reappraisedSaturday, 11 September 2021
Dylan’s 1980s weren’t great in terms of critical acclaim. As an emerging new fan, I knew that first hand from the scathing reviews accorded Shot of Love by the British music press when it was released in the summer of 1981, it seemed about as... Read more... |
First Person: pianist Filippo Gorini on head, heart and the contemporary in Bach's 'The Art of Fugue'Saturday, 11 September 2021
A past work of art either still speaks to us in the present, or it is dead. To try and understand a masterpiece, we tend to look at its past: we study it, analyse it, read biographies of the artist behind it and chronicles of its historical... Read more... |
Through hoops and hurdles to sheer joy: BBC Proms Director David Pickard on a season like no otherFriday, 10 September 2021
As anyone who has been trying to steer an arts organisation through the pandemic will tell you, the greatest challenge has been uncertainty; learning to live with the unknown and the unexpected. When we planned this year’s Proms, I would have said... Read more... |
First Person: composer Joseph Phibbs on rescoring BrittenTuesday, 24 August 2021
The music Britten composed in his twenties occupies a special place in his output. Even among his detractors there are some who begrudgingly concede that this early period is somehow different: fresher, more extroverted and daring, perhaps less... Read more... |
