Buzz
Chopin listTuesday, 09 February 2010
While bicentenary homages to Poland's greatest composer have already been flooding in, the big tide that leads up to the birthday on 1 March starts this evening. Artur Pizarro, fresh from personable interpretations of concertos by Ravel and Richard... Read more... |
When a brass player says he's ill, he's ill...Tuesday, 09 February 2010Singers are always calling in sick. The merest puff of wind can blow a voice into A&E. The tiniest tickle in the throat can leave 2000 people jilted. They build instrumental musicians more robustly, especially brass players, so when David Pyatt... Read more... |
Earl Wild (1915-2010) plays againTuesday, 09 February 2010The death of the late great American virtuoso Earl Wild a few weeks ago has had me poring over youtube trying to find a decent clip of him in his prime. You'd think there'd be a raft of footage of a man who spent three decades as a staff pianist for... Read more... |
Get inside Outsider Art tomorrowTuesday, 09 February 2010That nebulous tag, Outsider Art, is stuck to self-taught artists inhabiting the margins of society and sometimes the norms of sanity, those unconnected to Art Institutions, and some who operate according to the whims of their internal visions.... Read more... |
South Bank goes Brazilian for the summerMonday, 08 February 2010
As Jude Kelly put it today, the Southbank Centre’s Festival Brazil this summer is about a country "living its future now" (link here for the initial programme). That is certainly exciting for a city like London trying to live down its last decade (... Read more... |
Wizard of Oz goes deluxeMonday, 08 February 2010
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu is an unlikely star. A 39-year-old blind singer and multi-instrumentalist from Elcho Island, a remote indigenous community off the coast of Australia’s Northern Territory, Gurrumul’s eponymous solo album was Britain’s... Read more... |
Famous literary drunks and addictsSaturday, 06 February 2010Life magazine has a terrific photographic portfolio up on its site of famous drunks and substance abusers - with quotes - including Dorothy Parker: "One more drink and I'll be under the host", Jack Kerouac: "I'm a Catholic and and I can't commit... Read more... |
Birthdays on the Tube: 7-13 FebruarySaturday, 06 February 2010
This week's birthday musicians include Gene Vincent singing "Be Bop A Lula" in his first TV appearance, Sergio Mendes with "Mas Que Nada", soul balladry from Roberta Flack, Carole King and a couple of composers - Alban Berg and Leopold Godowsky.... Read more... |
Is it too late to save the Cultural Olympiad?Friday, 05 February 2010
We’d almost blown the so-called Cultural Olympiad, and if the appointment of Ruth Mackenzie as artistic director had come a moment later than the turn of this year, we would have done. Not my opinion: this from Tony Hall of the Royal Opera House,... Read more... |
An eruption of pop-up cinemasFriday, 05 February 2010
Pop-up cinemas, like restaurants, shops and galleries, are, well, popping up all over the place these days, but one of the pioneers has been Secret Cinema. This outfit claims, grandly, to have been "revolutionising the traditional cinematic... Read more... |
In fair Leicester where we lay our sceneFriday, 05 February 2010Orchestras and theatre companies rarely collaborate. The current revival of Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour enlists the services of the Southbank Sinfonia. Apart from that, concert musicians and actors steer clear of each other. You... Read more... |
Scaling the heights in HoxtonFriday, 05 February 2010Everything was green at 20 Hoxton Square this week as Kilimanjaro Magazine Edits opened: forget the environment, it was the plentiful absinthe imparting a verdant hue.The show features photos from Kilimanjaro, a self-described "vibrant printed space... Read more... |
