mon 25/11/2024

festivals

theartsdesk in Copenhagen: The Copenhagen Jazz Festival

A game of two halves at the Opera House: The Keith Jarrett Trio

“In jazz music you have the freedom, you have the expression. You have the visceral and you have the intellectual. Everything can be expressed through jazz, and is expressed through jazz and through the medium of improvisation. This is the highest...

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Coming Up Later at the Old Vic Tunnels

The Old Vic Tunnels won't look like this for the three nights of the Coming Up Festival

It’s not often that a venue’s stage door is easier to find than its main entrance, but The Old Vic Tunnels is one such location. For those behind Coming Up Later, however, this is all part of the fun of a three-evening underground festival...

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Morrissey, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Hop Farm Festival

It cannot be easy being a veteran pop star on tour. All you want to do are your lovely new songs and all your fans want to hear are your golden oldies. Two weeks ago Ringo Starr showed that he has clearly got to an age where he has decided to give...

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theartsdesk in Los Angeles: The Film Festival Without Stars

'An Ordinary Family' seems determined to sidestep a whole host of clichés about religion and gay identity

In its second year under creative director David Ansen and in its new home at the LA Live complex, the Los Angeles Film Festival seems to have recovered from the slightly rocky start of its downtown debut last year. While one or two of the...

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Top Girls, Minerva Theatre Chichester

The remarkable thing about Caryl Churchill, Max Stafford-Clark has said, is that she is "completely new, every time she comes out of the box". Watching the first act to his revival of her most celebrated work, which Stafford-Clark revisits for...

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theartsdesk at the Glastonbury Festival 2011

Thursday 23 JuneHaven’t left yet but someone sends me an email saying, "Not going to Glastonbury this year and feeling rather smug about it." What are they feeling smug about? The fact that they’re going to have a forgettable, normal weekend while...

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Music and Maths: A Yardstick to the Stars

Einstein: His Theory of Relativity was published in the same year as Schoenberg's provocative Kammersymphonie No 1

The history of maths and music is the history of early Greek philosophy, medieval astronomy, of the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the two World Wars. While mathematics at its purest may be an abstraction, the quest for its proofs is deeply and...

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theartsdesk in Folkestone: Art Echoes by the Seaside

The locals are understandably proud of Folkestone; Everywhere Means Something to Someone is an idiosyncratic guidebook offering an insider’s view of the town that bears witness to the depth of people’s attachment to it. Put together for the ...

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Birmingham - Home of Metal

This site has never acknowledged a distinction between high and popular culture. Nor, it seems, does the city of Birmingham. Currently bidding for UK City of Culture 2013, it is also promoting itself as the "Home of (Heavy) Metal". This summer, at...

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Colin Currie, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, CBSO, BCMG, Oliver Knussen, Aldeburgh Festival

Yesterday afternoon's final concert at the Aldeburgh Festival saw an astonishing world premiere. A major new double concerto from a 102-year-old Elliott Carter. Imagine Schubert premiering a song cycle in 1900, or Van Gogh unveiling a self...

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theartsdesk at the Home Festival, Dartington

While Michael Eavis’s fields were colonised by the solstice hordes, transforming a tranquil farmstead into a vibrant (and muddy) drop city, a very different and much smaller crowd assembled in the enchanting grounds of Dartington Hall in south Devon...

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We Are Shadows, Spitalfields Music

Rattus Rattus (Adam Green) and his cohort of exuberant rat-minions

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...

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