London
First Person: Donatella Flick on why the conducting competition in her name is needed more than ever
Donatella Flick
What are the qualities that make a great conductor? It’s something that has been debated for years, brought into focus recently not least because of Cate Blanchett’s award-winning performance as fictional maestra Lydia Tár. Despite what you may think of the film, it has reignited debate about what it means to be a conductor today, and what qualities they should possess. For me, of course technique, gesture, and communication with the orchestra are obviously all vital – but what is needed in the end is magic, that something extra that makes you sit up in your seat and hang on to every Read more ...
theartsdesk
Sent by a surely reluctant BBC PR, an ardent choral singer and supporter of new music, last Tuesday’s email had a title to make one groan: “New Strategy for Classical Music Prioritises Quality, Agility and Impact”. Very W1A. But this was no laughing matter – ker-pow-ing out of the thicket of corporatespeak were two devastating punches to the solar plexus.The first, under “Future-Proofing BBC Ensembles”, told us that “a voluntary redundancy programme will open across salaried posts in the English Orchestras (BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra and BBC Philharmonic Orchestra), aiming Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s a huge amount to admire in Rye Lane, a new romcom set in south London. It’s the first feature directed by Raine Allen-Miller, who has conjured up a love letter to the neighbourhoods she grew up in. The street markets and much-loved Peckhamplex cinema, Brockwell Park with its walled garden and hilltop views, Brixton’s arcades with their mix of food and fabrics from all over the world, are all captured here in eye-popping colour. It’s refreshing to see this part of the city in all its multi-cultural glory and to escape the well-worn tourist landmarks that usually signify Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It would seem unfitting to report on Nonclassical’s event – happening? – in the Barbican Conservatory on Sunday with anything resembling a conventional review. So instead I shall treat this free-form “experience” to a non-sequential response, in the form of 19 observations: things I saw, heard or noticed.1. Carola Bauckholt’s Doppelbelichtung required Linda Jankowska to produce a range of unlikely sounds from her violin, viz.: creaks, squeaks, whistles, swirls, swoops, wails, whines and rasps. They hung in the air, being broadcast in loops via speakers hidden in suspended violins. 2. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
“Darkly comic thrillers” (as they like to say) set in Ireland tracking how families, or quasi-families, fall apart under pressure are very much in vogue just now. Whether The Banshees of Inisherin will garner the Oscars haul it hardly deserves remains to be seen, but set 60 years later in a different Civil War, I suspect Under The Black Rock will not be troubling theatre’s award ceremonies next year. During the euphemistically named The Troubles, a Belfast mother loses her son, having seen him follow in his father’s footsteps into the Provisional IRA. Her daughter, wanting to prove Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s almost 40 years, but I still vividly remember the excitement of hearing Suzanne Vega for the first time. Singer-songwriters had always mattered to me, even though I grew up in the vacuous era of glamrock and insipid teen idols such as David and Donny. Nor did much of what followed speak to me. Suddenly, a new voice was getting airplay. I still have all the old vinyl.“Queen of the bedsit blues” she was inevitably dubbed, but Vega opened the door for a new generation of young guitar-playing women, American and English, many of them now largely forgotten. She emerged, as many of her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Vive l’entente cordiale! “Despite Brexit” (as the BBC likes to say), Apple TV+ has successfully bridged the Channel to create this lurid Anglo-French thriller, in which Euro-skulduggery rubs shoulders with bribery, corruption and high treason.At centre stage in Westminster we find Alison Rowdy (Eva Green) – slightly confusingly, Green is French, but plays an English character with a dollop of French in her background. She's employed as a civil servant who answers to the British government’s security minister, Richard Banks (a rough, gruff Peter Mullan). Rowdy will soon find herself entangled Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Here's a question. A romcom stars a man and woman, friends from childhood, both straight and with no romantic history. He's a Muslim and has decided to pursue an arranged marriage; she has a chaotic love life. What are the odds that they will end up together at the end of the film?No prizes for guessing correctly. But first-time screenwriter Jemima Khan takes us on a nicely circuitous route to get to that ending, and provides lots of smart one-liners on the way. When Kazim (Shazad Latif) tells Zoe (Lily James) an arranged marriage is now called “assisted marriage”, she replies: “Like assisted Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It’s been five years since 72 people died in the Grenfell Tower fire in West London. Five years and no arrests, as countless placards and posters around the neighbourhood point out.The Grenfell Tower Inquiry into how the tragedy occurred – why it was allowed to occur by hundreds of people – concluded in November 2022, with enough material that Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicolas Kent have been able to construct another devastating verbatim play. Where Grenfell: Value Engineering (2021) left us speechless, System Failure makes us rage.The Playground Theatre is about 10 minutes’ walk from Read more ...
Gary Naylor
For many years, I would ask groups of students to vote in elections because “it’s important to honour those who gave up so much to ensure that the likes of us can”. Some would nod, others would shrug, a few might have inwardly scoffed – too cool for school, innit? Kate Prince’s long-aborning musical Sylvia illustrates how our (near) universal franchise was won and the emotional and physical cost levied on the pioneers who won the argument in Parliament and on the streets.Ben Stones’ set doesn’t give us much to work with – the dark greys on even darker greys suggesting the bleak Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is new writing becoming increasingly literary? Recently, some of the language being used by younger playwrights seems to me to be becoming too subtle, something to be savoured on the page rather than strongly felt in live performance. Certainly, this is true of Ava Wong Davies’s Graceland, which was a winner of the 2022 Ambassador Theatre Group Playwright’s Prize, having been developed as part of an Introduction to Playwriting group at the Royal Court, where it gets a studio production. Although this 75-minute monologue has moments of perception and beauty, it is more writerly than raw.The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I once gave Peter Doig a tutorial, when he was a student at Chelsea College of Art. He had little to say about his strange images and I came away feeling I’d seen something unique, but was unable to tell if he was a very good painter or a very bad one. He now enjoys international success and his paintings sell for millions of pounds yet, judging by his Courtauld Gallery exhibition, my ambivalence was well founded. The show contains a sublimely beautiful painting and two very bad ones. The Alpinist 2019-22 (pictured right) is Doig at his very best. A lone skier trudges up a snow covered Read more ...