Imelda Marcos: David Byrne has set her story to a disco beat
Music
George Benjamin at 50 Queen Elizabeth Hall, 7th February, Tel: 0871 663 2588 Howard Skempton Portrait Concert CBSO Centre Birmingham, 27th February, Tel: 0121 767 4050
One of the good things about Britain’s new music scene is that it isn’t in thrall to a dominant trend. Individualism and eccentricity thrive and the big institutions of new music are refreshingly open to them. Two February concerts prove the point. One, from the London Sinfonietta, is devoted to George Benjamin. This one-time wunderkind, favourite pupil of Olivier Messiaen (doyen of French modernism), burst on the scene as a composer of scintillating, many-layered textures with a fabulously rich harmonic palette. More recent works have revealed a darker, more acerbic strain in the music. Both sides are revealed in the Sinfonietta’s concert, which puts brilliant early works like At First Light next to the more recent Palimpsests.
The other one, from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, focuses on a composer who had no brilliant debut and no starry mentors. For decades, Howard Skempton was a marginal figure, taking tiny scraps of humble material and turning them into witty, sometimes unsettling miniatures. In the 1990s his orchestral piece Lento became a surprise bestseller, and his profile has grown and grown since. The concert includes the premiere of a mini-viola concerto, Only the Sound Remains.
Ivan Hewett is the Telegraph’s music critic
Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic Tate Liverpool, 29th January-25th April, Tel: 0151 702 7400
In 1993, Paul Gilroy, now professor of social theory at LSE, wrote the groundbreaking book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. He identified a network of black cultures surrounding and crisscrossing the ocean, connecting Africa to North and South America, the Caribbean and Europe, all contributing to the powerful, hybrid, syncretic culture of the African diaspora. Gilroy argued that the contribution of this culture to 20th-century modernism and contemporary art has been consistently diminished. “Afro Modern” seeks to redress the balance.
Appropriately for this port city once embroiled in the business of slavery, the exhibition will trace the trade routes of the imagination to and fro across the sea. It will show how the different black cultures fringing the Atlantic inspired Picasso and Brancusi but also gave birth to avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance. In turn, it will explore how contemporary artists as various as Ellen Gallagher, Chris Ofili, Isaac Julien and Kara Walker, have taken the language of modernism and used it to formulate and assert their own identities. The show is part of a citywide celebration, “Liverpool and the Black Atlantic,” but its scope is more far reaching, excavating an undervalued lineage in contemporary art.
Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer
Biography
Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual by Michael Scammell (Faber, £25)
Arthur Koestler certainly had his defects—a weakness for crackpot scientific theories, a domineering and occasionally violent personality—but no one could accuse him of leading a boring life. He was a Zionist by the age of 20, a communist spy by 30, and went on to embrace myriad other causes. He lived in 13 countries and was imprisoned in three of them (Spain, France and Britain). He slept with hundreds of women and knew everyone from Jean-Paul Sartre to Timothy Leary. Even his death was controversial, the result of a suicide pact with his (considerably) younger wife.
All this and much more is described in Michael Scammell’s superb biography. Scammell does justice to his subject’s questing brilliance, but it is another quality—his inconclusiveness—that emerges most forcefully. At one time or another Koestler embraced most of the 20th century’s great ideological causes; but he was far too honest to stick with any of them for long. And it was this process of repudiation—especially of communism—that inspired his finest writing, notably Darkness at Noon, his novel based on Stalin’s show trials. Although manifestly a product of the 20th century, Koestler, in his endless capacity for disillusionment, seems strangely to belong to our own age too.
William Skidelsky is books editor of the Observer
Cinema
The Headless Woman Dir Lucrecia Martel. On general release from 19th February
We are in the midst of a strong run of films by talented women directors: I’ve mentioned Claire Denis here before, and Jane Campion’s Bright Star and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker will be part of the Oscar speculation. But Lucrecia Martel is something else. Her films have a peculiar sensual intimacy. The best of the new directors who emerged after Argentina’s financial collapse in 2002, her subject is dysfunction among the tentacular well-off families of her home region of Salta.
Martel made a huge impact on the international film circuit with her feature debut La Ciénaga, concerning the semi-incestuous entanglements of a sprawling dynasty during a baking summer, and its follow-up La Niña Santa, in which a Catholic schoolgirl obsesses about “saving” a male guest at her mother’s hotel who rubbed himself up against her in a crowd. Her latest film, The Headless Woman, is an observational drama of great subtlety that demands alert viewers. A wealthy distracted female dentist drives over something when she’s not looking—A dog? A boy? A log?—and, having banged her head, suffers lapses of memory and concentration. Her wispy feelings of guilt are constantly massaged away by her husband, friends and servants and all evidence of what happened seems magically erased. Each tiny emotional detail and oblique revelation builds towards a devastating portrait of contemporary carelessness.
Nick James is editor of Sight & Sound
Dance music
Here Lies Love David Byrne with Fat Boy Slim (Todo Mundo/Nonesuch Records)
With its earthly pleasures and sexual delights, the nightclub can provide an amusing backdrop for artistic experiment. Turner prize winner Jeremy Deller once hired a brass band to perform acid house anthems to bemused clubbers, while the silent disco, at which dancers shuffle about in silence because everyone is listening to the music via wireless headphones, is now a hit attraction at festivals and student unions across the country.
No less quirky is David Byrne’s concept of introducing political biography onto the dance floor. Here Lies Love is a 22-track song cycle about Filipino first lady and extravagant shopper Imelda Marcos, and her favourite maid, Estrella Cumpas. The project began life in 2006 as a stage show, driven by Byrne’s quest to understand how delusion and fantasy feed the lust for power. The former Talking Heads front man’s typically subversive approach to music also led him to wonder: “could one bring a ‘story’ and a kind of theatre to the disco?”
No one will know until the double CD is released later this month, yet with Fat Boy Slim slipping the beats, and a 22-strong cast of nearly all-female vocalists, including Florence Welch, Martha Wainwright, Tori Amos and Natalie Merchant, I’ll be one of the first to start dancing.
Nick Crowe is a music writer
Theatre
An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen, dir Daniel Evans, Sheffield Crucible Theatre, 11th February-20th March, Tel: 0114 249 6000, www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk
All eyes will be on Sheffield as the Crucible Theatre re-opens after a £15.3m redevelopment under the new artistic directorship of Daniel Evans, a talented actor and musical theatre specialist who is spectacularly inexperienced at this level.
The Sheffield venue, celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, is a key regional theatre, and not just because it hosts the World Snooker Championships; it’s a flagship of excellence, having launched the directing careers of Stephen Daldry and Michael Grandage, operating in a unique, thrust-stage auditorium.
Evans opens with the fine Ibsen translation by Christopher Hampton that Trevor Nunn commissioned to begin his National Theatre regime in 1997. In that production, Ian McKellen took the role of Thomas Stockmann—“the man who stands alone” as local dignitaries and even journalists cover up the health risks of an infection in the water system to keep the tourists coming.
It’s a perennially relevant public play about corruption, politics and civic responsibility, and Evans has announced a strong cast led by Antony Sher as Stockmann, with Lucy Cohu and John Shrapnel in support. He follows Ibsen with a full programme of new plays in the studio, a new version of Alice in Wonderland by Laura Wade (the partner of Evans’s predecessor, Sam West) and another box office Hamlet, starring John Simm.
Michael Coveney is chief theatre critic of Whatsonstage.com and an author
Music
George Benjamin at 50 Queen Elizabeth Hall, 7th February, Tel: 0871 663 2588 Howard Skempton Portrait Concert CBSO Centre Birmingham, 27th February, Tel: 0121 767 4050
One of the good things about Britain’s new music scene is that it isn’t in thrall to a dominant trend. Individualism and eccentricity thrive and the big institutions of new music are refreshingly open to them. Two February concerts prove the point. One, from the London Sinfonietta, is devoted to George Benjamin. This one-time wunderkind, favourite pupil of Olivier Messiaen (doyen of French modernism), burst on the scene as a composer of scintillating, many-layered textures with a fabulously rich harmonic palette. More recent works have revealed a darker, more acerbic strain in the music. Both sides are revealed in the Sinfonietta’s concert, which puts brilliant early works like At First Light next to the more recent Palimpsests.
The other one, from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, focuses on a composer who had no brilliant debut and no starry mentors. For decades, Howard Skempton was a marginal figure, taking tiny scraps of humble material and turning them into witty, sometimes unsettling miniatures. In the 1990s his orchestral piece Lento became a surprise bestseller, and his profile has grown and grown since. The concert includes the premiere of a mini-viola concerto, Only the Sound Remains.
Ivan Hewett is the Telegraph’s music critic
Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic Tate Liverpool, 29th January-25th April, Tel: 0151 702 7400
In 1993, Paul Gilroy, now professor of social theory at LSE, wrote the groundbreaking book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. He identified a network of black cultures surrounding and crisscrossing the ocean, connecting Africa to North and South America, the Caribbean and Europe, all contributing to the powerful, hybrid, syncretic culture of the African diaspora. Gilroy argued that the contribution of this culture to 20th-century modernism and contemporary art has been consistently diminished. “Afro Modern” seeks to redress the balance.
Appropriately for this port city once embroiled in the business of slavery, the exhibition will trace the trade routes of the imagination to and fro across the sea. It will show how the different black cultures fringing the Atlantic inspired Picasso and Brancusi but also gave birth to avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance. In turn, it will explore how contemporary artists as various as Ellen Gallagher, Chris Ofili, Isaac Julien and Kara Walker, have taken the language of modernism and used it to formulate and assert their own identities. The show is part of a citywide celebration, “Liverpool and the Black Atlantic,” but its scope is more far reaching, excavating an undervalued lineage in contemporary art.
Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer
Biography
Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual by Michael Scammell (Faber, £25)
Arthur Koestler certainly had his defects—a weakness for crackpot scientific theories, a domineering and occasionally violent personality—but no one could accuse him of leading a boring life. He was a Zionist by the age of 20, a communist spy by 30, and went on to embrace myriad other causes. He lived in 13 countries and was imprisoned in three of them (Spain, France and Britain). He slept with hundreds of women and knew everyone from Jean-Paul Sartre to Timothy Leary. Even his death was controversial, the result of a suicide pact with his (considerably) younger wife.
All this and much more is described in Michael Scammell’s superb biography. Scammell does justice to his subject’s questing brilliance, but it is another quality—his inconclusiveness—that emerges most forcefully. At one time or another Koestler embraced most of the 20th century’s great ideological causes; but he was far too honest to stick with any of them for long. And it was this process of repudiation—especially of communism—that inspired his finest writing, notably Darkness at Noon, his novel based on Stalin’s show trials. Although manifestly a product of the 20th century, Koestler, in his endless capacity for disillusionment, seems strangely to belong to our own age too.
William Skidelsky is books editor of the Observer
Cinema
The Headless Woman Dir Lucrecia Martel. On general release from 19th February
We are in the midst of a strong run of films by talented women directors: I’ve mentioned Claire Denis here before, and Jane Campion’s Bright Star and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker will be part of the Oscar speculation. But Lucrecia Martel is something else. Her films have a peculiar sensual intimacy. The best of the new directors who emerged after Argentina’s financial collapse in 2002, her subject is dysfunction among the tentacular well-off families of her home region of Salta.
Martel made a huge impact on the international film circuit with her feature debut La Ciénaga, concerning the semi-incestuous entanglements of a sprawling dynasty during a baking summer, and its follow-up La Niña Santa, in which a Catholic schoolgirl obsesses about “saving” a male guest at her mother’s hotel who rubbed himself up against her in a crowd. Her latest film, The Headless Woman, is an observational drama of great subtlety that demands alert viewers. A wealthy distracted female dentist drives over something when she’s not looking—A dog? A boy? A log?—and, having banged her head, suffers lapses of memory and concentration. Her wispy feelings of guilt are constantly massaged away by her husband, friends and servants and all evidence of what happened seems magically erased. Each tiny emotional detail and oblique revelation builds towards a devastating portrait of contemporary carelessness.
Nick James is editor of Sight & Sound
Dance music
Here Lies Love David Byrne with Fat Boy Slim (Todo Mundo/Nonesuch Records)
With its earthly pleasures and sexual delights, the nightclub can provide an amusing backdrop for artistic experiment. Turner prize winner Jeremy Deller once hired a brass band to perform acid house anthems to bemused clubbers, while the silent disco, at which dancers shuffle about in silence because everyone is listening to the music via wireless headphones, is now a hit attraction at festivals and student unions across the country.
No less quirky is David Byrne’s concept of introducing political biography onto the dance floor. Here Lies Love is a 22-track song cycle about Filipino first lady and extravagant shopper Imelda Marcos, and her favourite maid, Estrella Cumpas. The project began life in 2006 as a stage show, driven by Byrne’s quest to understand how delusion and fantasy feed the lust for power. The former Talking Heads front man’s typically subversive approach to music also led him to wonder: “could one bring a ‘story’ and a kind of theatre to the disco?”
No one will know until the double CD is released later this month, yet with Fat Boy Slim slipping the beats, and a 22-strong cast of nearly all-female vocalists, including Florence Welch, Martha Wainwright, Tori Amos and Natalie Merchant, I’ll be one of the first to start dancing.
Nick Crowe is a music writer
Theatre
An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen, dir Daniel Evans, Sheffield Crucible Theatre, 11th February-20th March, Tel: 0114 249 6000, www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk
All eyes will be on Sheffield as the Crucible Theatre re-opens after a £15.3m redevelopment under the new artistic directorship of Daniel Evans, a talented actor and musical theatre specialist who is spectacularly inexperienced at this level.
The Sheffield venue, celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, is a key regional theatre, and not just because it hosts the World Snooker Championships; it’s a flagship of excellence, having launched the directing careers of Stephen Daldry and Michael Grandage, operating in a unique, thrust-stage auditorium.
Evans opens with the fine Ibsen translation by Christopher Hampton that Trevor Nunn commissioned to begin his National Theatre regime in 1997. In that production, Ian McKellen took the role of Thomas Stockmann—“the man who stands alone” as local dignitaries and even journalists cover up the health risks of an infection in the water system to keep the tourists coming.
It’s a perennially relevant public play about corruption, politics and civic responsibility, and Evans has announced a strong cast led by Antony Sher as Stockmann, with Lucy Cohu and John Shrapnel in support. He follows Ibsen with a full programme of new plays in the studio, a new version of Alice in Wonderland by Laura Wade (the partner of Evans’s predecessor, Sam West) and another box office Hamlet, starring John Simm.
Michael Coveney is chief theatre critic of Whatsonstage.com and an author
