festivals
Sarah Kent
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 Folkestone Triennial by the artists’ collective Strange Cargo, this compendium of facts, memories and musings makes for compulsive reading.Ghosts feature large among the 250 snippets of information alongside memories of childhood games, frequently involving dens built from rubbish dumped in wasteland. For the visitor they bring the town to life. We Read more ...
Russ Coffey
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 various locations across the Black Country, a four-month festival looks at the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and celebrates the people who inspired him to “bark at the moon”. Surrounded by guitars, leather and fans' metalobilia in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, theartsdesk caught up with Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi to find out what it’s all Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
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-portrait in 1956. Gob-smacking stuff. So what sort of music does a man born before Benjamin Britten have to offer 2011? Music of an amazingly energetic bent, it transpires. Conversations for piano and percussion reveals a composer who, at least in musical thought, hasn't slowed down one bit. From the off, fantastically industrious ideas are Read more ...
mark.kidel
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, for the second edition of Home, "a Festival with Acoustic Music at its Heart".Now spread over Friday and Saturday, Home offers a family-friendly, laid-back and warmly intimate alternative to the star-heavy events of the summer season. Small, in this case, is definitely the measure of beauty: the largest stages have an audience of 400 each and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
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 200 local participants, whether as singers and performers or working behind the scenes to usher this two-year project to fruition, it’s a show that celebrates not only the talents of the Spitalfields community, but also that most universal of London icons: the rat.Inspired in part by Hans Christian Andersen’s nightmarish fable The Shadow, Gould and Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is where the delirium kicks in. Tired but happy, the attendees started the third day of Sónar festival slightly boggled by how to pick and choose from the strange delights on offer. Saturday was when the true musical variety of the festival was displayed: straight-up hip hop to eye-popping South African tribal dance displays, balmy ambient revivalism to apocalyptic techno, heartbroken electronica to deranged prog rock: it was all on offer...If day one was a warm-up, and day two when the energy levels peaked, this was where we just got swept along in the sheer diversity of the festival Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Montréal natives The Arcade Fire sing in English. Yet 65 percent of the Québec city’s population have French as their first language. Les FrancoFolies de Montréal is Francophone Canada’s annual celebration of non-Anglo Saxon music. This year, big draws include French visitors Jeanne Moreau and Etienne Daho performing Jean Genet’s Le condamné à mort with musical accompaniment. Local legend Jean-Pierre Ferland is reprising his seminal 1970 set Jaune, the first Québec album to - controversially - fuse Franco sensibilities with rock dynamics. More than a festival, FrancoFolies is also cultural Read more ...
David Nice
Everyone in the BBCSO is a potential soloist. I know this because the course I run at the City Literary Institute linked to the orchestra has welcomed principals, duos, two string quartets and three viola foursomes (proving that department the most individual, not the dense deserving butt of many a joke). I adore these players, but I love Erwin Stein's chamber arrangement of Mahler's Fourth Symphony even more, so this was bound to be a gem. Spitalfields' UK premiere of a recent song cycle by favoured Dutch composer Michel van der Aa could only come as an enterprising bonus.Not a bad one at Read more ...
joe.muggs
Thursday was gentle – an easing into the festival experience – but yesterday is when Sónar Festival really kicked into gear. With tapas and Estrella coursing round their veins, the audience was thoroughly drawn into Barcelona's bohemianism and ready to go from the beginning of the day. Which is a good thing, as shameless, in-your-face rave music seemed to be the order of the day.The SonarDome stage throughout the weekend has entirely featured alumni from the Red Bull Music Academy, and while the yearly Academy has built a reputation for nurturing sophisticated and intricate electronica, it Read more ...
joe.muggs
“This is what Ibiza used to be like,” said the man dancing next to me. I've never been to the White Isle, so I have to take his word for it, but he presented a very convincing argument that the commercialisation of dance music's Mediterranean Mecca has led to a polarisation of its crowds towards either ostentatious spending or mindless drunkenness – whereas Barcelona's Sónar Festival attracts more diverse and discerning hedonists focused on music above all. Certainly a good cross-section of people were in attendance for the first day of Sónar. A large number of electronica nerds mingled Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s not often that a performance of Purcell’s King Arthur requires its entire cast of singers to strip down to very tight Union Jack boxer shorts. It’s not often either that the audience find themselves actively encouraged to talk over the music, yet both were unexpectedly and riotously true last night at the Spitalfields Festival. Pairing Baroque big-hitters The English Concert and I Fagiolini, there was nothing half-hearted about this semi-staging of Purcell’s semi-opera. It promised much and delivered more, and while those listening live on Radio 3 might have enjoyed better textural Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
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 moving fast throughout the Maghreb. The first day I was there saw a demonstration of thousands in Rabat, and a smaller one in Fes. By the last day a new constitution had been posted online, with the King renouncing some of his powers. The energy in the city seems slightly giddy with expectation and a certain optimism.Fes was always a fascinating city Read more ...