tue 08/07/2025

avant-garde

European Festivals 2010 Round-Up

Istanbul, Turkey, 3-30 JuneThe 38th annual music festival in the jewelled city of culture-clash continues its strong classical showing with Radu Lupu and Lang Lang, the Borodin Quartet and Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. Equally...

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Brian Eno - Pure Scenius, The Dome, Brighton

It's 4.00 in the afternoon and Brighton Festival curator Brian Eno is fast-forwarding us to the future. Perched onstage behind an array of consoles, he tells us we're in for "something special for the end of term". The conceit is that the audience...

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Freedom of the City, Conway Hall, London

Evan Parker: intense and emotive explorations of pure sonics

Eight hours of “improvised and experimental music” would not be on everyone’s list of Bank Holiday essentials, and the marathon programme that constitutes the first half of the two-day Freedom of The City festival could have proved daunting for even...

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The Metal Machine Trio, Royal Festival Hall

A great wall of noise greets the audience as it settles in to the Royal Festival Hall - the sound of some heavy outer planet’s radio frequency, a subtly oscillating drone that recalls NASA’s recordings of radio emissions from Saturn made by the...

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The Return of Metal Machine Music

A self-portrait by Lou Reed, who is about to play some UK dates

With Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio landing on these shores this weekend, I found myself remembering one of the most memorable listening experiences of my life; the first time I heard Reed’s 1975 album Metal Machine Music. How do you get your...

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Laurie Anderson, Barbican Theatre

“I want to tell you a story. About a story.” Thus spake Laurie Anderson at the beginning of her new show, Delusion, which is running for four nights as part of the Barbican’s Bite season. It was a typically cryptic, teasing prologue from a woman who...

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4.48 Psychosis, Barbican Theatre

Sarah Kane’s last play is the stuff of legend. Since its first production some 18 months after her suicide in 1999, it’s become a favourite with black-attired drama students, nostalgic in-yer-face drama buffs and mainstream theatres all over...

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Spiro, Passing Clouds, Dalston

A self-styled “string quartet comprising a guitar, fiddle, mandolin and accordion” - welcome to the topsy–turvy world of Spiro. A world where nothing is quite what it seems. A world where up is down, black is white, and folk is, well, kind of avant-...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Composer George Crumb

George Crumb (b.1929) is one of the great American experimental composers of the 20th century. His delicate scores are characterised by a child-like sense of wonder and an array of instrumentation that appears to have hitched a ride from outer...

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Q&A Special: Choreographer William Forsythe Over Time

The radical modern choreographer William Forsythe (b 1950) was celebrated in a week of events in London’s stages this year, marking his transition from mouldbreaking neo-classical ballet to a more collaborative, theatre mode.These transcripts come...

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