Features
Glastonbury Festival: Live at Worthy Farm livestream review - glitched access upstages beautifully shot live footageTuesday, 25 May 2021
INTERLUDE 1: INVALID CODE-AGEDDON6.45 PM on Saturday 22nd May and all is well. Like tens of thousands of others across the UK (or maybe even more?) my wall flatscreen is tuned to Glastonbury’s livestream. Prior to the event itself promos for Water... Read more... |
Music books to end lockdown: Sam Lee, Hawkwind, Dylan, Richard Thompson, and the Electric MusesFriday, 14 May 2021
It won’t be long now before concert halls and back rooms, arts centres and festival grounds fill with people again, and live music, undistanced, unmasked, and in your face, comes back to us. In expectation of this gradual reopening of the stage... Read more... |
Christa Ludwig, 1928-2021: a selective tributeFriday, 07 May 2021
I only saw Christa Ludwig twice live in concert, but those appearances epitomise her incredible dramatic and vocal rage as well as her peerless artistry in everything she did. The first event was Schubert’s Winterreise with pianist Charles Spencer... Read more... |
Extract: Blackface by Ayanna ThompsonThursday, 06 May 2021
Nearly a year has passed since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police on 25 May. Nearly 200 have passed since the birth of “blackface minstrelsy” as a performance mode: white actors applying racial prosthetics to perform and make a mockery of... Read more... |
First Person: Boris Giltburg on lockdown interruptions to filming Beethoven's 32 piano sonatasMonday, 03 May 2021
About a year ago, in a distant pre-pandemic world, I remember walking down Edgware Road one cold London evening. I was heading towards Jaques Samuel Pianos, my favourite haunt in London, to meet filmmaker Stewart French from Fly On The Wall. There,... Read more... |
First Person: composer and Renaissance man Tunde Jegede on transcending genresWednesday, 28 April 2021
In this era when there is so much talk and discussion around crossing musical boundaries, diversity in music and inter-disciplinary work it seems strange that there is still so little knowledge of how, why and when it works. Ironically, much of this... Read more... |
Helen McCrory: 'If there's one interesting thing about acting it's trying to lose your ego'Monday, 19 April 2021
Each generation is given an actress who can do everything – be intimate with the camera but also coat a back wall in honey from 100 paces. There was Judi Dench, and then there was Imelda Staunton, both loved by all. Helen McCrory – who has died... Read more... |
The Royal Ballet - variations on a comebackFriday, 16 April 2021
Like the British high street, the once richly diverse landscape of dance in the UK is likely to look very different once lockdown is fully lifted. There will be losses, noticeably among the smaller companies whose survival was always precarious.... Read more... |
The Master Musicians of Joujouka review - a 4000 year-old rock'n'roll bandThursday, 15 April 2021
The Master Musicians of Joujouka, described by William Burroughs as a “4000 year-old rock’n’roll band”, and recorded by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones in the late 1960s, have always been something of a cult – even in their own land. Based in the... Read more... |
Filmmaker Darius Marder: 'Deafness is a culture. That's not being PC'Saturday, 03 April 2021
Sound of Metal has been a long time coming. Director and writer Darius Marder faced years of delays ranging from casting changes to the whole world shutting down. Was it worth the wait? Well, six Academy Award nominations including Best Film... Read more... |
Extract: TV by Susan BordoTuesday, 30 March 2021
"Television and I grew up together." As a baby boomer born in 1947, Susan Bordo is roughly the same age as our beloved gogglebox, which began life as a broad box with a ten-inch screen, chunky and clunky and encased in wood. With the rapid changes... Read more... |
First Person: violinist Abigail Young on getting back to her Japanese orchestra in Covid yearFriday, 26 March 2021
February 2020: an item a long way down the agenda of the nightly news caused me to remark, fairly casually, “I wonder if that will affect me”. I had already heard about Covid-19, the new virus emerging from China; now it was spreading... Read more... |
