A young Korean, 22 years old, won the Dublin International Piano Competition last month. Nothing unusual about that. Koreans and Chinese, raised in a school of hard knocks and rounded off in western conservatories, are winning most prizes. A few — like the phenomenal Lauren Zhang who made child’s play of Prokofiev’s second piano concerto
‘I like your shirt today,’ Sir Ray Davies says to the waiter who brings his glass of water to the table outside a café in Highgate. ‘How’s your girlfriend?’ It turns out the girlfriend is no longer the girlfriend. ‘You broke up? You know, that happens. It’ll be OK. You’ll meet somebody else.’ He pauses
Older readers will perhaps recall the once popular Sunday evening TV programme Scrapheap Challenge, in which oily, boilersuited blokes competed to build machines out of materials scavenged from a scrapheap. Even older readers will recall The Great Egg Race, presented by Professor Heinz Wolff, in which bejumpered and bewhiskered engineers competed to build machines from
Grade: A+ While the young bands plunder the 1980s for every last gobbet of tinny synth and hi-hat, the singer-songwriters remain happily anchored in that much more agreeable decade which came directly before. The 1970s was the era of the introspective, self-pitying, prolix, hairy and winsome singer-songwriter — both the good ones (Young, Martyn, Buckley)
Polly Stenham starts her overhaul of Strindberg’s Miss Julie with the title. She gives the ‘Miss’ a miss and calls it Julie. The wonder of Strindberg is that his characters speak to us with such force, knowingness and candour that they seem to belong to our own era. Modernising the setting destroys the wonder. This
On a sward of AstroTurf somewhere off Silicon Roundabout, Mountain Media is hosting its summer party and, well, it’s the sort of bash you’d pluck your own eyes out to avoid. Hipsters sprawl on dayglo beanbags. Lads wearing fairy wings strike aftershave-advert attitudes as they swig bottled lager, while girls in vintage dresses pout into
There were 1,500 punters in the audience when Eagles of Death Metal played their fatal gig at the Bataclan theatre in Paris in November 2015. By midnight, every one of those fans would either be dead, bereaved, in hospital with gunshot wounds or so traumatised that the horror would haunt the rest of their lives.
In the Moderna Museet in Stockholm there is a sculpture by Katharina Fritsch, which references Chekhov’s famous story ‘Lady with a Dog’. It was part of a Jeff Koons mini-show. At the time (2014), I thought it was by Koons. The postcard disabused me. It shows a woman in unapologetic Barbara Cartland pink, with a
Some disasters could not occur in this age of instant communication. The first world war is a case in point: 9.7 million soldiers died, 19,240 British on 1 July, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, alone. If all that had been seen on social mediaand rolling news threads, public opinion would
Hereditary is the horror film that has been described as a ‘ride of pure terror’ and likened to The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining, to which I can say only: in its dreams. Given I’m such a wuss when it comes to anything frightening — the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang still
There was one of those moments late on Sunday night when a voice is so arresting (either through tone, timbre, or from what’s being said) that you just have to stop what you’re doing and listen, really concentrate, anxious not to miss a word. Floella Benjamin was on the Westminster Hour on Radio 4 talking
