21st century
Lullaby, Barbican PitMonday, 27 June 2011
There are few absolutes left in contemporary theatre. Fourth walls have long since crumbled underfoot; site-specific and immersive theatre experiences have further done away with divides between theatre and world, performer and audience. The one... Read more... |
We Are Shadows, Spitalfields MusicSunday, 26 June 2011
Spitalfields Summer Music Festival is now finished for another year, but bid farewell to its audiences in fitting style with We Are Shadows – a new community opera devised by composer John Barber and librettist Hazel Gould. Bringing together over... Read more... |
CD: Gillian Welch - The Harrow and the HarvestSunday, 26 June 2011It has been eight years since Gillian Welch last released an album and her loyal fans – not to mention critics - have been waiting with bated breath. Will she have spent the years honing the delicious Americana and Appalachian-influenced folk that... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Ince, Previn, RossiniFriday, 24 June 2011
This week we’ve a grandiose choral work inspired by a composer’s love for the beautiful game, along with two noisily enjoyable attempts to portray physical movement in musical terms. A frighteningly young Russian soprano’s debut recital is released... Read more... |
Kings of Leon, Hyde ParkWednesday, 22 June 2011
Brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill and their cousin Matthew Followill, better known as Kings of Leon, have come a long, long way from their humble Tennessee roots in the last 12 years. In London last night playing to a 65,000-strong crowd in... Read more... |
Seven Angels, The Opera Group, CardiffTuesday, 21 June 2011
Imagine you are at a study day being run by Friends of the Earth. They mount a play in which a group of angels who somehow got left out of the Book of Genesis fall to a completely barren earth, look around, and start reconstructing, re-enacting its... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Fes: The Festival and the Moroccan SpringWednesday, 15 June 2011
Strange portents – the weather is always dry and baking hot this time of year in Fes. This time it was like winter, with lashing rain and thunder for the first few days of the Fes Festival. But then things are strange in general here; events are... Read more... |
Into Thy Hands, Wilton's Music HallSunday, 05 June 2011
“Where once was certainty is now only void.” The age of John Donne was also the age of Galileo, Milton, of Hobbes, Francis Bacon and, of course, the King James Bible, whose 400th anniversary we celebrate this year. At the intersection of politics,... Read more... |
Opinion: Is classical music irrelevant?Sunday, 15 May 2011
Cambridge University, cradle of Newton, Keynes and Wittgenstein, of Wordsworth, Turing and Tennyson, has produced 15 prime ministers and more Nobel Prize-winners than most nations. In its 200-year history, the university’s debating society has... Read more... |
The Royal Wedding, All ChannelsSaturday, 30 April 2011
The flying Twitter fragments said more about The Wedding than the battalions of experts, "palace insiders", historians and friends ever could (couldn't somebody have put a bag over Simon "infinite loop" Schama's head and had him bundled away from... Read more... |
CD: Tansy Davies - TroubairitzFriday, 08 April 2011
Tansy Davies’s neon and inside out 2 can’t help but recall Stravinsky’s 1940s commission for Woody Herrmann’s orchestra, the Ebony Concerto. There’s an idiomatic use of rich, low-pitched sounds (plenty of bassoon and bass clarinet), and insidious... Read more... |
Brontë, Tricycle TheatreWednesday, 06 April 2011
“Too fat, too miserable, too pinched” for love and life, the Brontë sisters famously made a kingdom out of their dingy rectory home in rural Yorkshire. Denied not just a room but an existence of their own, these three Victorian spinsters found... Read more... |
