Cambridge
La Bohème, The Village UndergroundThursday, 28 July 2011
Vignette Productions is a bit of a one-off in the operatic world. It was established three years ago by the rising young British tenor Andrew Staples, his mission to create operas that were more exciting and told better stories than those generally... 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... |
DVD: City Girl (1930)Monday, 11 April 2011
I’ll confess it straightaway: I’m biased about this picture (as it surely would have been known in 1930) – wholly, shoutily in favour of it. I watched it last September at the Cambridge Film Festival on a big screen in Emmanuel College, with two... Read more... |
Fry and Laurie Reunited, GoldWednesday, 24 November 2010
There’s a surreal sitcom waiting to be written about the often-told story of when Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse were Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s plasterers for a while in the early 1980s. Here’s the pitch: F and L would play caricatures of... Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Conductor Stephen LaytonSaturday, 16 October 2010
Conductor and choral scholar Stephen Layton once said that he often wondered what happened to the little boy at his primary school who he thought sang better than he did. The discovering and nurturing of raw talent is an issue very close to his... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Cambridge: 30th Cambridge Film FestivalSunday, 19 September 2010
Cambridge is in pre-term cocktail mood, almost. Its Film Festival slips in after Locarno and Venice, and as Toronto ends, and before Rome (increasingly important) and London (internationally a struggler) start. It tilts in the same direction as the... Read more... |
A Disappearing Number, Novello TheatreWednesday, 15 September 2010
“I want to disrupt your sense of logic and show you something really thrilling,” explains a young academic, as her animated scribbling on the whiteboard gains pace and incomprehensible complexity. It’s a promise that Complicite’s A Disappearing... Read more... |
Complicite and the Mozart and Salieri of MathsWednesday, 08 September 2010
In 1913 a 25-old-year mathematician from Tamil Nadu sailed to England. He journeyed at the behest of a Cambridge professor who had been mesmerised by the display of untutored genius evident in the young Indian’s correspondence. Within four years the... Read more... |
Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shadwell Opera, Rosslyn ChapelWednesday, 25 August 2010
Forget Dan Brown’s phony grail trail which has led so many paying pilgrims to Rosslyn outside Edinburgh. For the last week of the Festival Fringe the Chapel, most intricate and mysterious of 15th-century sanctuaries, has become a temple of high art... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Artist Maggi HamblingSaturday, 01 May 2010
Next week sees the opening of an exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art of new work by Maggi Hambling, one of the most innovative and prolific - not to mention flamboyant - artists working in Britain today, which neatly coincides with a show of sea... Read more... |
Art Gallery: Maggi Hambling - Sea Sculptures and PaintingsSaturday, 01 May 2010
To accompany theartsdesk Q&A with artist Maggi Hambling by Hilary Whitney, this is a selection of pieces from two new exhibitions of her latest work opening in London and Cambridge. Maggi Hambling: New Sea Sculptures at Marlborough Fine Art... Read more... |
Halfway To HollywoodTuesday, 22 September 2009This second volume of my diaries covers my life from the beginning of the 1980s to the night before I set out from the Reform Club in September 1988 on Around The World In Eighty Days, the journey that was to change my life.For me the 1980s was the... Read more... |
