festivals
igor.toronyilalic
The 2012 BBC Proms open on 13 July and end on 8 September. This is the full list of the 76 concerts. Book tickets here. Prom 1: First Night of the PromsFri 13 July 2012, 7.30pm, Royal Albert HallMark-Anthony Turnage - Canon Fever (3 mins)Elgar - Overture 'Cockaigne (In London Town)' (15 mins)Delius - Sea Drift (25 mins)Tippett - Suite for the Birthday of Prince Charles (16 mins)Elgar - Coronation Ode (33 mins)Prom 2: Lerner & Loewe – My Fair LadySat 14 July 2012, 7.00pm, Royal Albert HallLoewe - My Fair Lady (170 mins)Prom 3: Debussy – Pelléas et MélisandeSun 15 July 2012, 7.00pm, Read more ...
Dylan Moore
The Laugharne Weekend has become a fixture in the crowded calendar of festivals that now punctuates not just high days and holidays but the whole six months that make up British Summer Time. Carving a niche for itself as a halfway house between literature and music, Laugharne’s success is built on two key factors.First, its remarkable natural location in a remote corner of Carmarthenshire, southwest Wales and the village’s associations with Dylan Thomas, whose Boathouse, writing shed and the string of local pubs with legendary stories of the poet’s drunken antics make up Laugharne’s year- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Queen's given everyone an extra bank holiday, so while you rest up over the Easter holidays, start planning your next downtime with theartsdesk's definitive clickable festival guide for the summer. We have headline listings and links for all the UK festivals this year, from rock by the lochs to DJs in London parks, and catching classical and opera on the way. Due to the London Olympics' snatch on Britain's stocks of portable toilets and police, as well as the economic downturn, some festivals have been suspended this year, including Sonisphere Knebworth and Glastonbury (but registration Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It began with a warning. Opening the fourth Tallinn Music Week, Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves cautioned, “In a free society, it’s risk-free. In an un-free society, it’s not risk-free. It’s not all fun.” From behind a hotel conference room lectern, he then began rolling a video of Russia’s Pussy Riot being arrested in Moscow a few days earlier. Not everyone can make their point, make their music, choose how they want to get it across.The contrast between Pussy Riot’s fate and a festival that celebrates new music in all its forms, held in a country bordering Russia, was marked by Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Edinburgh International Festival runs this year from 9 August to 2 September, with an energetically global look. Forty-seven nations - around a third of the world's countries - are represented in a conscious reflection of the focus of the London Olympics.A new unorthodox theatrical space has been added with the conversion of the Royal Highland Centre’s Lowland Hall for three unconventional stagings: Grzegorz Jarzyna’s Macbeth, Ariane Mnouchkine's Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir (Aurores) and Christoph Marthaler's comic adaptation of My Fair Lady, Meine faire Dame – ein Sprachlabor.Other Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You can’t walk down the street in central Abu Dhabi. Not because of any danger or prohibition, but simply because there just aren’t any pavements yet. Look out of any one of the high-rise buildings that dominate the city, and you’ll see a landscape modestly veiled in the dust of construction. Roads, schools, hospitals and inevitably hotels are all emerging from the desert at a rate that renders the city map unrecognisable every six months. But while the developments of infrastructure and architecture are proclaimed in the fog and clamour of drills, there’s an altogether quieter project at Read more ...
kate.connolly
As concert venues go, this one is perfect – a barn-like structure, whose pine timbers emit a fragrance not unlike that of a sauna, whose long glass windows look out across oxon-red wooden Swedish farmsteads and the frozen expanse of Lake Orsasjön. The Vattnäs Konsertlada is the labour of love of local girl, the international opera singer Pers Anna Larsson, and is being used at Sweden's by now best-known music festival, Vinterfest, for the first time.Guests are streaming into the barn, stepping on pine branches strewn across the entrance to stop them sliding on the ice. Meanwhile the artists Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the four days of Norway’s 15th by:Larm Festival were dominated by the presentation of the second annual Nordic Music Prize, there were plenty of other distractions: a sobering tour of Norwegian black metal’s infamous sites, a talk by legendary Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, what felt like millions of shows in millions of venues, and weather confounding all expectations of what Oslo ought to be like in February.Previous visits to by:Larm have involved negotiating snow three-foot deep, urban pack ice and temperatures of minus 18 centigrade. This year, the sun shone, temperatures hovered Read more ...
Amy Liptrot
In the same way that some chase the thrills of extreme sport, extreme art fans can now take the challenge of visiting this small art festival, which is uncompromising in terms of location, climate and content. Orkney as a whole has natural beauty, a rich history and a thriving cultural life, with a disproportionate number of artists compared to the size of the population. The prestigious and high-brow St Magnus Festival of arts, held each midsummer, is patronised by composer and isles resident Peter Maxwell Davies.However the Orkney "mainland", the largest island of the group and home to most Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Peter Gabriel announced WOMAD’s 2012 festival in Sicily this afternoon. It’s a year of anniversaries for the annual showcase of world music, with 2012 also marking the 30th year for Britain’s big brother festival. On a wintry afternoon, sharply contrasting with Sicily’s climate, Gabriel was joined at London's Italian Cultural Institute by Carlo Presenti, the institute's director, and Roy Paci (pictured below right), Sicily’s cultural polymath and musician whose past collaborators have included Manu Chao and the Netherlands' The Ex.Presenti said this year’s festival, to be held on 5–8 July at Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On a bitingly cold and snowy night in Leicester, Nathan Caton still manages to attract a big house for his show Get Rich or Die Cryin'. The hip young Londoner, in corncrow-and-dreads hairstyle and city slicker casual gear, is an immediately engaging presence on stage at the Firebug club, dissing his teated fruit-drink bottle as undermining any macho posturing he may be tempted to do.Caton is clearly too bright for any of that nonsense, though. He's a qualified architect, but has been involved in comedy for several years (he's 27 and feeling old, he tells us, because he has a teenage brother) Read more ...