festivals
theartsdesk in Hamburg: Reeperbahn Festival 2015Sunday, 04 October 2015
An encounter with Hamburg’s Reeperbahn is akin to assimilation into a real-life kaleidoscope where bright lights, mass revellers and shills touting bars, night clubs or strip joints combine in a single multi-sense overload. The tumultuous... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Music@Malling FestivalThursday, 01 October 2015
One of the summer’s greatest pleasures has been to confirm an often untested truism: that you may hear some of the finest and rarest music-making in out-of-the-way places. Just take a local who’s made the grade – in this instance, violinist and... Read more... |
Dunedin Consort, Butt, Brunton Theatre, MusselburghMonday, 14 September 2015
It was, admitted the Lammermuir Festival’s co-artistic director James Waters, ‘a bit of an experiment’. And trying to recreate the fertile atmosphere – intellectual, musical and culinary – of a Leipzig coffee house from the 1730s, complete with Bach... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Bucharest: Loving EnescuSunday, 06 September 2015
Where in the world will you find the most glittering line-up of international orchestras? The Proms? Salzburg? Lucerne? Edinburgh? Bucharest, actually. The Enescu Festival, which began on 30 August, this year boasts appearances by the Concertgebouw... Read more... |
McGregor/Spuck, Ballett Zürich, Edinburgh PlayhouseFriday, 28 August 2015
New Edinburgh Festival director Fergus Linehan has made it clear he wants to offer things people actually want to see. So including Wayne McGregor - prolific, popular, energetically self-promoting doyen of contemporary dance - in the dance... Read more... |
theartsdesk at Green Man 2015Wednesday, 26 August 2015
Sunday. Brecon Beacons. Very early in the morning. I am woken, as I have been every 20 minutes or so since falling asleep, by water dripping on my head. So far, I’ve been able to ignore it, the pain of sitting upright outweighing the inconvenience... Read more... |
Seven, Ballett am Rhein/RSNO, Edinburgh PlayhouseFriday, 21 August 2015
When the Royal Opera House told Kenneth MacMillan that Mahler was unsuitable for ballet, he went – where else? – to Germany. Though the success of MacMillan's Lied von der Erde for Stuttgart Ballet led to its happy adoption into Royal Ballet... Read more... |
Lo Real, Israel Galván, Edinburgh Festival TheatreThursday, 20 August 2015
It is an axiom of Israel Galván criticism to say the Spaniard is wired differently. He's the "Bowie of flamenco" - leggy and intense, unpredictably sparky, intemittently brilliant, and sometimes incomprehensible. His new show, Lo Real/Le Réel/The... Read more... |
887, Edinburgh International Conference CentreMonday, 17 August 2015
Incoming director Fergus Linehan has assembled some of the most respected names in their fields for his first Edinburgh International Festival. For classical music, that means Anne-Sophie Mutter, Valery Gergiev and Michael Tilson Thomas (among many... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Tuscany: Musical landscapesSunday, 02 August 2015
“Treeless and shrubless but for some tufts of broom, these corrugated ridges formed a lunar landscape, pale and inhuman.” Lushly green and densely planted, today the view out over Tuscany’s Val d’Orcia is unrecognisable as the blasted landscape... Read more... |
WOMAD 2015, Charlton ParkWednesday, 29 July 2015
Now was the summer of our disco tent. The disco tent in question backstage was not jumping as much as in previous years – somehow strutting your Travolta moves in wellies doesn’t quite cut it. A glam tribute band at Molly’s Bar on Thursday night,... Read more... |
WOMAD 2, Charlton ParkWednesday, 29 July 2015
Trudging through the mud at last weekend’s WOMAD provided fleeting moments of random entertainment, as if surfing old-style across the bandwidths of a short-wave radio, you’d stumble unexpectedly on snatches of exotic sounds from around the globe:... Read more... |
