Wales
Laura Mvula, Festival of Voice, CardiffSunday, 12 June 2016
Laura Mvula talks almost as much as she sings. Between songs she confesses to rambling, but her musings – on heartbreak, on “toilet analogies” for the recording process, on meeting the Duke of Edinburgh and then falling over – are never less than... Read more... |
John Cale, Festival of Voice, CardiffSaturday, 04 June 2016
“Are you enjoying Wales, John?” shouts a fan, eventually. Our returning hero has remained taciturn and all but static at his keyboard throughout an epic show that spans one of popular music’s most interesting and influential careers. Cale affects to... Read more... |
Is Wales really the land of song?Monday, 30 May 2016
Culture, said Aneurin Bevan, comes off the end of a pick. A hundred years ago there was no shortage of picks when a quarter of a million coalminers were employed in south Wales. By now the mines have gone but many of the choirs they created are... Read more... |
Tom Jones's 1950s: The Decade That Made Me, BBC Two / Jim Carter: Lonnie Donegan and Me, ITVMonday, 18 April 2016
So just how grey were the 1950s? "It was grey," said Bruce Welch of The Shadows. Au contraire, said Joan Bakewell, the Fifties were "giddy and full of optimism." Veteran journalist Katharine Whitehorn added that not only were the Fifties not boring... Read more... |
Strange and Familiar, BarbicanSunday, 03 April 2016
The Barbican has built a steady reputation for almost unclassifiable large-scale art exhibitions, particularly in architecture, design and photography: they have been underestimated pioneers, often working in areas themselves under-scrutinised. Thus... Read more... |
10 Questions for Artist Marc ReesFriday, 18 March 2016
Marc Rees (b 1966) is an interdisciplinary artist-performer from Wales whose works are renowned for imaginitively mixing media, as well as for their underlying sense of fun. Over the years he has been based in Berlin, Amsterdam and Canada, and now... Read more... |
Cosy, Wales Millennium CentreThursday, 10 March 2016
Kaite O’Reilly’s new play is a dark dark comedy, a Chekhovian family saga on a mainly bare stage that handles its subjects of aging, death and family with a rich and grounded intellectualism to be expected of the playwright’s work. The production... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes: David Jones' Nativity with Shepherds and Beasts RejoicingTuesday, 22 December 2015
David Jones’ black and white drypoint – a drawing made by incising lines on a copper plate with a diamond-tipped needle and then printing from the plate – is a view of the nativity which is fresh, full of wonder and a highly intelligent naïveté. It... Read more... |
The Insatiable, Inflatable Candylion, National Theatre WalesSunday, 20 December 2015
While Christmas is the season when traditional theatres trot out the tired clichés of panto, the ever-innovative National Theatre Wales have decided, in their wisdom, to stage a surreal, psychedelic theatre-gig at the Sophia Gardens cricket ground... Read more... |
David Jones, Pallant House Gallery, ChichesterWednesday, 04 November 2015
Switching between the orderly and the chaotic, David Jones’ depiction of Noah’s family building the ark immerses us in the drama of the moment while simultaneously holding us at some point out of time, to emphasise the story’s ancient roots.... Read more... |
First Person: 'We Have Found a Better Land'Monday, 02 November 2015
"Helo, ti yw Mark?" A friendly-looking woman on the tiny plane asks me my name. She is a teacher from a Welsh-speaking school in Patagonia, Ysgol yr Hendre, escorting her pupils home from a trip to Cardiff. "I was told to look out for you on the... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Brecon Baroque FestivalSunday, 25 October 2015
The city of Brecon (county town of former Brecknockshire, now lost in the spurious and far-flung county of Powys) is a long way from Leipzig and on the face of it has little in common with the home of Bach and the native city of Wagner. But once a... Read more... |
