Posts Tagged Classical music
Readers’ cultural review of 2011: What, no Katy B?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 15, 2011
Last week our critics picked their highlights of 2011. Did they get it right? Readers respond with their own highs (and lows)
MattB75
One Man, Two Guvnors was the most fun I've had in a theatre for years – easily the best play of 2011, and James Corden best performer. The National theatre largely misfired for me: A Woman Killed with Kindness, Cherry Orchard, 13, The Kitchen, Frankenstein and Greenland were all largely disappointing.
The RSC's Homecoming was the best revival. Rupert Goold's Merchant of Venice was great fun, even if the inconsistency in Portia's characterisation (from ditzy blond Glee fan to brilliant prosecutor, hm) took the edge off it.
Tom Brooke was my favourite actor of the year – in The Kitchen, and I Am the Wind.
oogin
Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid are still two of my least-admired starchitects. However, credit where it's due. I had the pleasure of wandering Toronto's AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario), redesigned by Gehry [a few years ago], and apart from his usual frivolous facade, the interior had been quite brilliantly done. So restrained and sophisticated: words I never never thought I'd use for the old showboater.
daveportivo
Katy B owned pop in 2011, or temporarily leased the lower sections of the charts from Adele at least. Seven singles off one album and a successful B-side, bridging the gap between cool, intriguing dance and charming, relatable 2000s-style British pop-star writing. Loved it.
Kleistphile
The programme of the year has been Mark Cousins' superb history of the cinema, The Story of Film: An Odyssey, on More4. Incredibly wide-ranging, informative and inspiring, with extremely intelligent analysis of how film developed and how the great directors innovated.
drdownunder
Artist Christian Marclay's awesome 24-hour film-montage The Clock, shown as part of the British Art Show in Plymouth. Mesmeric, fascinating, witty editing and marvellous film-buffery content.
SlimJim888
The Inbetweeners Movie. The snobs may scoff but this film says more about Britain and its youth than 20 Ken Loach films ever could.
OldFriar
Two of the greatest musical evenings were the appearances of the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Ivan Fischer in Mahler's First symphony, and the zany late-night Prom with audience requests including Bartók, Kodály and Stravinsky. A month before that, the magic combination of Andris Nelsons and the CBSO in Richard Strauss and Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky.
At the Royal Opera, the three most memorable performances were Madama Butterfly with Kristine Opolais in the title role and her husband Andris Nelsons in the pit; Werther with Sophie Koch and Rolando Villazón doing his best (still short of what Jonas Kaufmann can do); and the recent revival of Faust, with Vittorio Grigolo, René Pape, Angela Gheorghiu and Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
digit
The release by the BFI on DVD and Blu-Ray of Barney Platts-Mills's 1971 film Private Road, starring Bruce Robinson (who later wrote Withnail and I). I first saw this in about 1987 on TV and I've been wanting to see it again ever since. Even better than I thought.
Mark42
Gruff Rhys's Hotel Shampoo was my favourite album of the year; Cashier No 9 was not given the recognition it deserved. Enjoyed Kate Bush, Tinie Tempah, Noel Gallagher and Will Young's offerings, but very disappointed with Coldplay. Adele: lovely voice but too many songs sound the same on her album.
Still, it wasn't all bad: the end of Westlife and hopefully the beginning of the end for X Factor.
dbeecee
Right Here Right Now; Format international photography festival in Derby. Thousands of photographers took part from all over the world, including Joel Meyerowitz and Bruce Gilden. An exciting and eclectic mix showing the best in street photography.
davidabsalom
Best resurrection: Rab C Nesbitt. Comedy of the year for me. Now that the Tories are back in, he seems to have found his mojo again.
zibibbo
Leonardo da Vinci at the National Gallery. I think the major problem with this absurdly hyped show is that, apart from the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks and the unfinished St Jerome, the other six "Leonardo" paintings on display are either too unattractively gauche, stiff and mannered to be considered good or significant. Or they're too implausibly naturalistic to be an autograph work (La Belle Ferronière is too lifelike to be by Leonardo). Or just too plain weird and damaged to take seriously (step forward, the newly discovered Salvator Mundi).
Thank you, Adrian Searle, for having the integrity to give your honest opinion about this insanely promoted but hugely disappointing show.
andglove
The High Country, an album by Portland band Richmond Fontaine, demands your attention from first song to last. It's one of the only albums that will give you the same sense of satisfaction that finishing a novel does.
LDTBFJ
Bridesmaids was a great and genuinely funny film. Comedies (and female comedians) are too frequently dismissed, especially by the Oscars board.
Snarlygog
British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet in Plymouth. It was good to see [Christian Marclay's] The Clock and Sarah Lucas's work up close and personal. At least there is an emphasis on craft skills in video art: good focus, framing and timing are back in fashion.
alphabetbands
Nicola Roberts, the good one from Girls Aloud. In her album Cinderella's Eyes she lays out her inner demons and anguish on a platter of sumptuous dance pop hooks and beats. The album is so simple that my two-year-old can sing along, and layered enough that we slightly elder statesmen can appreciate it as well.
juliendonkeyboy
In no particular order: Sufjan Stevens live at Southbank: ambitious, experimental, joyous, exciting, sad. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle: the sixth episode, Democracy, was quite simply awesome. Senna is my film pick: made in 2010, but didn't get released on these shores until 2011. Wonderfully moving.
habsfan0303
Propeller's Comedy of Errors was riotous. I mean, how often does a naked grown man run past you with a sparkler wedged into his buttocks?
glynluke
Archipelago is the worst film I have ever seen in 50-odd years of cinema-going. How Peter Bradshaw and Philip French can find a single redeeming quality in this dreadful two-hour river of bathetic, emotionless, drama-free drivel baffles me.
Shatillion
I loved Attack the Block. I got mugged the week before it was released and actually found watching it quite cathartic. I was rooting for the little shits by the end. That's good screenwriting.
JimTheFish
A really disappointing year for British TV, which has been on a downward slide. Doctor Who was probably still the best thing domestically. The Crimson Petal and the White and The Hour were underwhelming misfires; The Shadow Line was about the only really promising new kid on the block.
The basic problem is that there's just not enough TV drama being produced. We need more one-offs, more Plays for Today to allow TV to find new voices and take more chances. Everything seems to be market-researched and focus-grouped into mediocrity.
LocalBird
We went to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park this summer and were blown away by the incredible Jaume Plensa exhibition; the alabaster heads took my breath away. Beautiful, mesmerising and enchanting.
Carefree
Memorable plays: Flare Path, Frankenstein (Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature was brilliant), and Much Ado at the Globe (Eve Best and Charles Edwards were good enough to almost match my memories of Janet McTeer and Mark Rylance as Beatrice and Benedick).
Damper squibs were Chicken Soup with Barley (far too long). Conor Macpherson's The Veil at the National started brilliantly but didn't deliver the beautiful, haunting, elegiac power of The Weir – a great shame.
Alarming
There were aspects of Grayson Perry's Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman that drove me round the bend. But he wrote well about his theme and chose some absolutely lovely objects from the British Museum's collection.
uptomost
85A collective from Glasgow's brilliant mechanical opera Idimov and the Dancing Girl at the Secret Garden Party. Spooky, funny, ingenious.
AdminGuru
The Tree of Life: a vast expansive film with multiple interpretations, and little in the way of film convention for the casual viewer to latch on to. Viewers fall into two camps I think: those who want simply to be entertained and led, and those who want to explore and participate. Tree of Life is about participation.
Wrighthanes
I just couldn't get The Tree of Life. I tried. I wanted to like it. Admittedly I was on a Singapore Airlines flight, which is not the ideal way to appreciate its cinematic beauty.
DeunanKnute
The Tree of Life is quite possibly the most overrated movie of all time. The sheer brilliance of every single actor isn't in dispute, nor is the superb cinematography. The movie itself is the problem, because it's a real clunker. It's also one of the few films I've seen at the cinema where people were either (vociferously) walking out in disgust or staying behind just to boo.
GorillaPie
The [designs for the] new US Embassy in London. I realise these buildings have to be more fortresses than offices, but really. I'm disappointed that such an important new commission isn't going to be more iconic. Especially since I live opposite the site.
Gundmundsdottir
Possibly the biggest disappointment was the final track on Bon Iver's second album: it never fails to surprise me with just how cheesy and plain bad it is.
CurlyScot
Some of my favourite moments have been in otherwise unremarkable shows. I was slowly won over by Susan Hiller at Tate Modern, and Nancy Spero's works Azur and Hours of the Night II [at the Serpentine] were so incredible I forgot all the meh stuff that surrounded them. The only exhibition I have been unreservedly knocked over by was Mike Nelson's Coral Reef at Tate Britain – an old piece so I'm not sure it counts. Not a superlative year; let's hope 2012 is better and isn't overwhelmed by a spurious Cultural Olympiad.
Iannis Xenakis: sites and sounds
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 18, 2011
A student of both Messiaen and Le Corbusier, Xenakis combined his two passions to conceive a new musical language. Christopher Fox looks at a singular creative mind
Death is a difficult career move in the arts. Without the living presence of the artist – whether that presence was compelling, tiresome, benign or objectionable – their work changes its meaning and there's nothing they can do about it. Dull work is no longer redeemed by the artist's charming personality, it's just dull and it gets forgotten. But some work takes on a life of its own, something I realised this summer when the Jack Quartet came to London and played Iannis Xenakis's Tetras at the Wigmore Hall. Too young to have studied the work with Xenakis, who died in 2001, the Jack musicians gave the music a glossy shine I had not heard before. Their Tetras had the same dynamic energy as earlier performances, but it was as if that energy came from a new power source with a leaner, cleaner burn. If it's the mark of a masterpiece that it can sustain this sort of new-generation makeover, then Tetras was confirmed as a masterpiece.
Now it's November and the Huddersfield contemporary music festival is making a major feature of Xenakis's music for the first time since his death. The festival's artistic director Graham McKenzie has also noticed the continuing power of the music. "No other composer seems to generate as much interest in successive generations of listeners as Xenakis," he says. McKenzie is also excited by the way Xenakis's music reaches out beyond the classical concert hall; he sees it as "a rich source for all sorts of diverse artistic practice, from the German noise band Zeitkratzer to dance music and club culture".
It's a bold claim, which matches the boldness of Xenakis's life. Born in 1922 in Romania to Greek parents, he grew up to be fascinated by both the arts and sciences, eventually deciding to study engineering at Athens polytechnic. Like so many people of his generation, Xenakis's life was torn apart by the second world war and in his case the tearing apart was literal and terrible. By October 1944 the German occupation of Greece had ended but there was widespread resistance to the rightwing government that the western allies wanted to install as an eastern bulwark against communism. In Athens, this resistance culminated in a series of mass demonstrations which in December escalated into a vicious armed struggle, with British tanks firing into buildings occupied by the protesters. The building Xenakis was defending was hit and a piece of shrapnel ripped open the left side of his face, permanently blinding him in that eye.
He recovered and completed his engineering qualifications but the oppressive political climate in Greece continued to worsen. As Xenakis later said, for those on the left, the choice was "recantation or the concentration camp". He fled, and by November 1947 had arrived in Paris where, with his engineering diploma in hand, he found a job in an architect's office. No ordinary architect, however; Xenakis's new boss was Le Corbusier. He became part of the team working on projects such as the huge Marseilles public housing scheme, the Unité d'Habitation, where Le Corbusier's modernist convictions about the relationship between form and function found their most extreme expression.
Many composers have day jobs, but not many find a way of connecting the day job with the business of writing music. Le Corbusier knew that Xenakis was composing but was frustrated by his lack of technique and direction, so he suggested a consultation with the leading French modern composer of the day, Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen's advice was revelatory. "You have the good fortune of being an architect and having studied special mathematics", he told Xenakis. "Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music."
Over the next few years Xenakis slowly implemented Messiaen's advice. The main Corbusier project on his desk was the Couvent de la Tourette that demanded a complex spatial geometry of intersecting planes and curves. Xenakis realised that his structural calculations could apply to sounds, too. A rising plane could be a sliding string tone, its physical mass translated into the number of violins sliding together. Tones could intersect, curve away from one another: brutalist architecture becoming brutalist music. When the first of these pieces, Metastaseis, was premiered at the 1955 Donaueschingen festival it caused a scandal; most European modern music in the 1950s was obsessed with the organisation of individual points or groups of sounds. The kinetic force of Metastaseis must have seemed like an alien invasion.
Like Le Corbusier's architecture, Xenakis's music is based on first principles rather than on received ideas about how to do things. Cut holes in a continuous surface, as Le Corbusier did with the Couvent de la Tourette, and not only do the holes let in daylight, but also divide the surface, articulating regular or irregular patterns. This works in music, too. Cut holes in a continuous musical tone and you have a rhythm; cut holes in a tone which is rising or falling and you have both a rhythm and a scale. Cut 12 holes at regular intervals in a tone that slides up an octave and you have the familiar chromatic scale represented by the black and white keys on the piano keyboard.
By the middle of the 20th century arguments about different ways of organising this 12-note scale dominated musical debate. The new orthodoxy in modernist music was that all 12 notes had to be organised into a more or less equal relationship all the time, making music without the gravitational pull of a single central note: atonal music. But architects need to maintain a healthy respect for gravity, and in Xenakis's music instability and irregularity – the default settings of so much mid-20th century modern music – co-exist with passages where a central note or a regular pulse dominate. It's music in which delicate scatterings of sounds can suddenly be supplanted by a shatteringly intense unison or by driving rhythms redolent of some lost east European folk tradition. It's the pull between these opposite forces that makes this music so immediate.
"He created something new," says Irvine Arditti, whose Arditti Quartet worked closely with Xenakis for 20 years. "Anyone can appreciate Xenakis's music without needing to know about the music of the earlier 20th century." He remembers how "in his rehearsals Xenakis was interested not in small details, but in larger shapes and characters of sound".
At the Huddersfield contemporary music festival, the Arditti Quartet will be joined by the pianist Ian Pace, who too enjoys the challenge of finding these "larger shapes and characters" in Xenakis's often very complex scores. In some of them, says Pace, "there is no way every single pitch can be played exactly … there is no way of keeping reiterated quick chords going at both ends of the keyboard and the centre at the same time, even if one plays with one's nose. Ultimately it comes down to what one thinks does most justice to the work's essence and conception." Getting to the "essence" of a piece of music, it's quite an old-fashioned idea, but Xenakis's music is uniquely ancient and modern; a decade after its composer's death it's still full of life.
Works by Xenakis are performed at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival tonight and on 24, 25 and 27 November. Details: hcmf.co.uk
The sights and sounds of summer
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 9, 2011
What's your favourite gallery, painting, building or song? Artists, writers and musicians reveal what cultural highlights they associate with the holiday season
• What are your cultural summer highlights? Share your tips by posting a comment
MUSIC
One of the things I missed when I was living in Portland, Oregon was the art scene in the UK. Martin Creed's just refurbished the Scotsman Steps in Edinburgh, using beautiful marble slabs. I though his Mothers sculpture [shown in London this spring] was amazing – a huge neon sign saying Mothers spinning on a pole. My friend asked him what was the inspiration for it, and he just said: "Mothers are scary."
Johnny Marr, musician, on the UK arts scene
THEATRE
The memory of walking through the dark, slightly sinister, narrow streets of the Spanish Quarter in Naples always stays with me. I climbed a hill to a small church in a back street called Pio Monte della Misericordia where there were no guards, no entrance fee and no security. But, on entering, there is a glorious Caravaggio over the altar waiting to be enjoyed in total silence and peace.
Sonia Friedman, West End and Broadway theatre producer
The 798 Art District in Beijing, set in what used to be factories, in the east of the city. It's like arriving in a small town. The buildings vary in scale; spaces like the Tate's Turbine Hall sit next to galleries the size of sheds. I occasionally found myself unsure whether I was looking at an installation or an abandoned bit of machinery. Some of the artwork is perplexing, some of it is really beautiful and quite wild, but what's most exciting about the place is that you get to go really deep into the imaginations of lots of young Chinese artists. I found China hard to get under the surface of but this place was a real eye opener.
Bijan Sheibani, associate director, National Theatre
It's hardly unknown, but the Uffizi in Florence is a treasure: endless corridors filled with beautiful paintings. The light in the city is extraordinary but my tip would be to go towards the end of the day when the crowds have receded and the heat is not so great. The first time I went, just as I emerged into the dusk from seeing Giotto's incredible works, a violinist in the courtyard began playing [Samuel Barber's] Adagio for Strings. It was a breathtaking moment – you could have put it in a play, but no one would believe you.
Michael Attenborough, artistic director, the Almeida theatre
Austria's Felsenreitschule, which is a glorious old writing academy built into a mountainside, is the most amazing place to be during the Salzburg festival. Max Reinhardt resurrected it in the 20s and established it as a place to stage operas. It remains a beautiful space. I directed Romeo and Juliet there last summer and there was a great tradition of going to the Triangel afterwards, which is the restaurant opposite where everyone goes to eat and people-watch.
Bartlett Sher, director, South Pacific, Barbican
My favourite district of Paris is Montmartre and it's there, nestling in front of a beautiful tree-lined square, that you'll find Théâtre de l'Atelier. It's a gorgeous Georgian theatre, wonderfully intimate, and dating back to 1822. It makes me wonder what Bristol Old Vic was like when it was built 50 years earlier. Then, the theatre was an unlicensed playhouse, prevented by law from staging anything so subversive as a play. It was more like a speakeasy or a rave than the kind of bourgeois entertainment we now think of when we say theatre.
Tom Morris, artistic director, Bristol Old Vic
A trip to Harmony Hall, Brown's Mill, on the east coast of Antigua is well off the beaten track but worth the bumpy ride to get there. It was an old sugar plantation and is now an art gallery and restaurant overlooking Nonsuch Bay. It's secluded, the setting is picture-perfect and the food absolutely delicious. You can take a dip before lunch or a boatride across to Green Island nearby. The cocktail bar serves the best rum punch on the island and the art gallery displays the work of the most prestigious local artists so you can pick up a Caribbean print to remind you of the sunshine when you get home.
Nikki Amuka-Bird, actor
BOOKS
Seattle residents check out more books than people in any other US city, so don't miss their matchless new library, opened in 2004. Rem Koolhaas's extraordinarily bold design in glass and steel has surprises all over, from shocking yellow escalators to vertiginous viewpoints. But it's welcoming, efficient and comfortable, has all a library needs, and is appreciated by everyone from the tired, bag-toting homeless to the passionate child reader. Best of all, it's a shining rebuke to anyone who thinks the public library's day is done.
Anne Fine, writer
Thessaloniki is an amazing city, with some great Byzantine treasures. There's a building there called the Rotunda which is an absolute must-see It's a round, beautiful, reddish stone building, built around 300AD by emperor Galerius to be his mausoleum. But when he died, Constantine said it should be a church. In 1590 it became a mosque, then in 1912, when the city became Greek again rather than part of the Ottoman empire, it was reconsecrated as a church. You look at it and think, this tells the history of the city.
Victoria Hislop's new Greek-set novel The Thread is published in October
The Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp has become one of my favourite museums in the world. It's a museum of printing. Christoffel Plantin was a 16th-century printer, and it was his family home as well as his place of business. It's a house from the late middle ages, built round a courtyard, where the family lived and worked for generations. Plantin was interested in philosophy and religion and his house became a centre for humanist thought, discussion and debate. I love the atmosphere of the place. You can sit in the courtyard in the sunshine and let what you've seen sink in. The museum gives a history of printing, but it's very personal because it was Plantin's home.
Val McDermid, writer
The Musée Marmottan is an unbelievable museum which I only really discovered when writing Paris Revealed, looking around for hidden cultural gems. It's on the edge of Paris and features all of the impressionists but especially Monet, including a lot of the paintings he himself had in his home. Even the painting that inspired the name impressionism is here: an impression of a sunrise in the north of France, a wonderful foggy picture of water with what looks like a dab of Marilyn Monroe's lipstick in the middle. All this is just 10 minutes extra on the Metro, and you get to see all these paintings without having to queue at the Musée d'Orsay.
Stephen Clarke is the author of Paris Revealed
Last year I realised a long-held ambition to go to Russia and took a cruise from St Petersburg to Moscow. Passing through lakes, rivers and canals, the trip takes in rural villages, towns and cities ranging from epic grandeur to rustic simplicity. There were many highlights to the trip – the White Lake, Kizhi Island, Red Square, the Tretyakov Gallery – but a genuine stand-out moment was the Peterhof in St Petersburg. Inspired by Versailles, Peter the Great took the best of European and Russian architecture and created a palace of monumental proportions. Be warned, this is not for the faint-hearted: this is the baroque on a jaw-dropping scale.
Erica James's Promises, Promises is published on 18 August
ART
I always go to Venice for the Biennale at the end of August with my family, when it's not so hot. By then we've already heard other people's favourite picks so we know where to head. Then we always go over to the Giudecca, the island opposite, and have a glass of wine. And we always check out the Museo Fortuny – especially the James Turrell room. My daughter, who's about to turn 10, loves it. It's a light installation and it changes all the time, so we like to have a nice quiet moment in the top of the museum watching the lights change. Venice itself is very visual and just a lovely place to be.
Cornelia Parker, artist
The West Kennet long barrow in Wiltshire is a great free attraction – a neolithic burial site, opposite Silbury Hill, clothing optional. It's a great day out for the family, just a half-mile walk to this burial chamber – built in a time before shopping – which you can enter before you walk back. It's not Alton Towers, that's for sure; there's not much to do apart from walk around and get fresh air.
I first went there in my early teens. Silbury Hill is an iron age manmade hill, and the long barrow is almost in its shadow – the whole area is full of these ancient pre-Christian sites. There's a certain mystery to them which I like. Silbury Hill is an amazing structure, the biggest manmade hill in Europe – an engineering feat the equivalent of the Pyramids, but in Wiltshire. It's not clear what the long barrow was used for, and it's that lack of clarity that's interesting and in a way inspiring, because you can make up your own stories.
Jeremy Deller, artist
I love the Greek islands and have done so since the early 80s when I went backpacking. Hydra especially resonated with me – it didn't have cars but donkeys, it had a fantastic club called Disco Heaven, and it was also incredibly beautiful. I went back there several times, and then in 1999 I was invited to exhibit at Hydra Workshops, a gallery owned by the art collector Pauline Karpidas. You might think it an unlikely place to find contemporary art, but Hydra has a long history of artistic patronage. Leonard Cohen lived there and it's where he met Marianne, who inspired the song So Long Marianne – I saw her on the island in 1999. The painter Brice Marden has a house there and now the art collector Dakis Joannou has opened a branch of his private museum the Deste foundation on the island. I can't think of any other small island boasting that much contemporary culture.
Gillian Wearing, artist
I fly to Madrid as often as possible and stay within shouting distance of the Prado. I go every day and look at the same paintings until I have them secure in memory. After my last trip I can conjure Goya's paint choices and techniques for royal clothing, numberless scabrous defeated demons, El Greco's favourite flesh colours, and Velásquez's reworked horse legs. I walk the Prado for hours so I'm marginally fitter and blissful by the time I leave.
Jenny Holzer, artist
I'm not keen on holidays; I find tourism sad. Visiting places that have become a fake version of what they really were, seeing how small and standardised the world is becoming since tourism became the main industry. It's a trancelike state. Tourists want their home comforts, en suite, burger and chips . . . There's no real adventure in it. Of course there are many interesting things to see in the world, but wandering around gawping and taking snaps is not my idea of really being somewhere. I travel a fair bit, for work, and that's preferable. A real engagement – with real people – that's about something.
Sarah Lucas, artist
CLASSICAL, WORLD AND JAZZ
2011 is the bicentenary of Franz Liszt, the great composer and pianist and perhaps the biggest pop star of the 19th century. Now that I have a chance to take a break from playing and recording his music, I will be spending my summer reading about him. Alan Walker's monumental three-part biography is a reference I return to again and again. Apart from the meticulous research, I love how he includes so many interesting stories and writes with such great enthusiasm. I am also looking forward to dipping into Oliver Hilmes's new German biography, with the help of my German dictionary. Subtitled Biographie eines Superstars, I am hoping for lots of colourful anecdotes.
Lang Lang, pianist
The main thing I've been listening to lately is the wonderful English singer and pianist Liane Carroll and her new album Up and Down. There's so much life and love and happiness that goes into her music, which I believe is fundamental, to what we do as jazz musicians. There's so many different moods in the album, but the emotion she puts into the ballads especially is very naked. There's one particularly beautiful track, Turn Out the Stars, which features the wonderful flugelhorn player Kenny Wheeler, who's 82 now. But the whole album is wonderful - full of standards that we know and love, and it's amazing to hear Carroll sing them.
Gwilym Simcock, jazz and classical pianist
Whether I'm stageside or poolside I listen to a lot of Imogen Heap's music. Parachute's album Losing Sleep is a favourite too. The three things I've listened to most this summer are Dario Marianelli's music for 2005's Pride and Prejudice. Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona is my perfect hot summer Latin-lover-esque soundtrack, also genius is the soundtrack from the brilliant film that Zach Braff wrote and directed, Garden State which is my poolside must-listen. There is another film staring Braff, The Last Kiss. The film is OK, but the soundtrack is wonderfully mellow, and perfect for relaxed inspiration.
Danielle di Niese, soprano
I'm not going on holiday this year, but I will hopefully be spending a good deal of time in the back garden by my daughter's paddling pool, probably listening to her making up dirty versions of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. She is two, so this usually involves either bogeys or her bum. To play through the back door or open window I am still very fond of Paolo Nutini's last album, or if I'm feeling authentic, some good old ska compilations or something in a field recording selection like Southern Journey: "Sheep sheep, dontcha know the road?". As the evening draws in I'll listen to Sam Amidon, or Laura Veirs's first album The Triumphs and Travails of Orphan Mae, as I am a sucker for a strange fiddle and a sad old banjo. With gin.
Eliza Carthy, folk musician
TELEVISION
I'm off to Cape Cod to a coastal village of wooden houses and a white wooden church with a spire. There's very little culture that doesn't involve the freeway. But every Wednesday something comes along to perform beneath the spire – I avoid the Scottish pipers, but the pianist who plays Brahms will light my fire. By the end of three weeks, having exhausted the drive-in cinema, we may head for Boston and take in the amazing, eclectic Gardner Museum. But in truth we go for the culture in the dunes, the sea, and the sky. We do it ourselves and paint watercolours.
Jon Snow, Channel 4 News presenter
I went to Madrid for the new year with a friend who new his way around, and he took me to what they call the Golden Triangle: the Prado, the Thyssen-Bornemisza and La Reina Sofia. You can literally walk to them all in 10 minutes We saw Guernica, which is awesome. It's fascinating because Picasso knew he was making a masterpiece before he even painted it. The Thyssen collection is the biggest personal art collection in history: you have to go back a few times. I found myself in front of a Frank Auerbach, one of the north London set. You have to pay an entrance fee – we don't realise how lucky we are that you can just wander into the Tate for free in this country - but it's worth every euro.
Russell Tovey, actor
Interviews by Kate Abbott, Nosheen Iqbal, Alison Flood, Daniel Martin, Imogen Tilden and Richard Vine
Aspen Ideas Festival: How the vineyard style trumped the shoebox
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 2, 2011
Yasuhisa Toyota, the world's foremost acoustician, explains the design that let audiences see and hear great orchestras
What is the source of the rich, beautiful sound of a great concert hall? Even those who make their living from designing and building some of the world's best concert halls confess that it is – despite computer aided design and modern acoustic techniques – still a mystery.
Take New York's Carnegie Hall. "Nobody knows why it sounds so good – if they did they would copy it," says architect Richard Olcott, who has designed Stanford University's new Bing Concert Hall and worked on the restoration of Carnegie Hall itself.
Yasuhisa Toyota, the acoustician behind the acclaimed Walt Disney Concert Hall clad by Frank Gehry's masterpiece in Los Angeles, says acoustic quality remains a mystery as much as music itself:
Many people talk about acoustics as a mysterious thing – I would agree but it's a more complex thing.
If a concert hall is empty and there's no music, then we can't hear the acoustics. When we evaluate acoustics we need musicians on the stage – and then we are having a discussion about music. And isn't music a mysterious thing?
Olcott agreed: "We can do all the computer modelling in the world but it can never replicate the human experience."
Toyota and Olcott were speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival on the concertgoing experience, one that has been radically changed by modern design.
Concert hall design used to be simple enough: the classical shape known as the "shoebox" with an orchestra at one tall, narrow end and the audience facing them in seried ranks.
Various attempts to tamper with the shoebox's simplicity never quite succeeded acoustically: London's Royal Festival Hall and the Verizon Hall in Philadelphia's Kimmel Centre being two of the unhappier attempts.
But in the 1960s came the "vineyard style", a ground-breaking design pioneered at the Berliner Philharmonie hall and later at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo.
Suddenly, the orchestra was opened up and surrounded by the audience on all sides in boxes around the central stage, but without the acoustic problems of earlier attempts, the boxes reflecting the sound back towards the stage.
Rather than just hear the orchestra, as the shoebox favoured, the vineyard style allowed almost every seat a clear view of the stage. "It's amazing," Toyota said. "This is what we never experienced in the conventional seating style."
And while traditionalists might prefer the Musikverein of Vienna or its modern incarnation, the McDermott hall in Dallas, purists could not fault the acoustic quality of the new designs.
Toyota is undoubtedly the greatest exponent of the vineyard style, as the acoustician behind the Suntory Hall – "a jewel box of sound," according to von Karajan – as well as the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the extraordinary Kitara in Sapporo.
"I think the vineyard style hall has big advantages, not only for acoustics" which justified it above the "simpler" shoebox style, said Toyota, describing his "psycho-acoustics" that benefited the audience as much as the orchestra:
Concerts are competing with CDs or DVDs. What's the choice? To purchase a CD or a concert ticket. But the thing about a CD, the sound is so clear, it's not necessary to be seated in a concert space.
Being able to see the orchestra so clearly, as the vineyard style allows, added to the "concert experience" that couldn't be matched by recordings.
But for all that, even Toyota says the quality of performance must trump even the best acoustics. Offered the choice between hearing a student orchestra in a great acoustic venue, or a great orchestra such as those of Vienna or Berlin in a "bad space," Toyota doesn't hesitate: "Between those I would choose the Berlin or Vienna Philharmonic."
Guardian young arts critic competition 2011: Our critics’ picks
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 20, 2011
From an illicit Pixies gig to a Mesopotamian ziggurat, Guardian critics recall their biggest moment of inspiration in their respective fields
How to enter this year's competition
Pop: Alexis Petridis
Can any gig you see as a critic ever match the ones you saw as a teenager? Bizarrely, going to a gig when I was 17 was harder work than writing reviews has ever been. It involved not merely getting to London, but lying to my parents about where I was going, lying to my friend's parents about where my parents thought I was going, bunking off school, and then convincing somebody who looked 18 to go to the bar on my behalf.
But none of that mattered the night I saw the Pixies supported by My Bloody Valentine, in September 1988. It's not every night you see arguably the two most important guitar bands of the era on the same stage at the peak of their powers: the Pixies had just released their incredible second album, Surfer Rosa, while My Bloody Valentine had released the astonishing single You Made Me Realise.
It says something about the pre-internet age that, before they walked on, I had no idea what the Pixies looked like. I didn't expect the guy who sang all those dark songs about sex and violence to be chubby and balding. This was nothing compared to the shock of their sound: a ceaseless roar, with the next song starting as the last chord of the previous one was still dying away.
I remember that gig in snapshots. Two roadies having to hold on to My Bloody Valentine's drumkit as Colm O'Cíosóig hit it with such ferocity that it started moving across the stage. The Pixies performing Hey, a song so self-evidently filthy it seemed to have been beamed in from another world. But most of all, I remember feeling more excited than I'd ever been in my life. You could argue that my career has involved chasing that feeling ever since.
Visual art: Adrian Searle
The first serious art exhibition I ever saw was on a school trip to Goya and His Times at London's Royal Academy in 1963. I have seen many Goya shows since and think I know his art well, but he always surprises me, even when I look at paintings I have known for most of my life. How time flies.
I can't say this was the best show, or even the best Goya show, I have ever seen. I was, after all, only 10. But I remember being struck by Goya's weirdness: the distorted faces of the Spanish royal family, the isolated, looming figure of the Duchess of Alba (Goya's lover), the strange skies. Decades later, I saw that the clouds over Madrid often look like old, torn tapestries.
I must have about 20 books about Goya now, including the tiny paperback I bought at the time. It's a useless book – pictures too small, colours all wrong – but I kept it. Another book is Goya's Last Portrait, a play by the critic John Berger. A few years ago, Berger and I had a long talk about that dog Goya painted, the one that could be drowning in quicksand or might just be sticking his nose up over a hill to sniff the sky.
I remember wondering why Goya's paintings meant so much to me when I knew nothing about art and had never been anywhere, least of all to Madrid. Maybe that show only became important later, because of things that happened in my life. Many roads lead back to a kid looking at Goya and understanding nothing.
Classical music: Erica Jeal
It was 10 years ago, but I remember it better than things I heard last week. The Alban Berg Quartet and the cellist Heinrich Schiff were playing Schubert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall: the String Quintet in C, the one with two cellos and the glorious first-movement melody that begins again and again, as if the composer couldn't bear to let it go.
A few minutes in, I knew this performance was different from any I'd heard before. Then I realised why. It was all coloured by death, every note. Something in the Alban Berg's playing made it obvious: Schubert, at 31, knew he was dying, and had composed a love letter to the world that was as sweet as it was sincere, full of anguish, acceptance, anger and serenity. I wondered if I was just a bit strung out: perhaps I was the only one experiencing it this way. But at the end, the usually reserved QEH audience was on its feet.
There are few things more depressing than a performance of a work you love that leaves you cold. But there is nothing more exciting than hearing a musician, or an orchestra, take something you thought you knew, and make you realise there is still more to fall in love with. I felt that way hearing Iván Fischer conduct the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony in January this year. I felt that way in 2003, when I heard veteran tenor Peter Schreier sing a searing Die Schöne Müllerin, somehow bringing an old man's wisdom to a young man's tale.
That was Schubert again. I'm starting to suspect that Schubert understood everything there was to know about the world, and that the answers to all life's big questions might be found in his music. I haven't uncovered them yet, but I'm still listening.
Architecture: Jonathan Glancey
For as long as I can remember, right back to when I was a teenager trying to piece together the story of architecture, the ziggurat at Eridu had been a presence in my life. I was haunted by the thought that somewhere in deepest Mesopotamia, today's southern Iraq, there lay, in ruins and largely hidden under sand, what might be the world's first monumental building: the mother of all architecture in the world's first metropolis.
I finally got to Eridu just months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Somehow I had persuaded the right people to let me go, and a platoon of Saddam's soldiers now escorted me along routes flanked by unexploded munitions dating from the first Gulf war. The heat was intense: 50 degrees. On the way, we stopped to climb the ziggurat of Ur, walking the site's excavated streets in the zig-zagging shadow of the great pyramid.
When we reached Eridu, the young soldiers were as excited as I was. We almost fell on the sands. It was thrilling to palm them away and find the stepped form of its crumpled ziggurat, built and rebuilt over thousands of years. There was a lake here once, and marshes. Eridu, founded in 5,400BC, was a sacred place for millennia until finally being abandoned in the 7th century AD. In 1949, excavations were undertaken, but it became a no-go zone after the first Gulf war.
At the same time as those excavations were taking place, Le Corbusier was designing his astonishing Unité d'Habitation, a block of flats in Marseilles. Although ultra-modern, this building also managed to be as elemental in form and as ancient in spirit. Great architecture connects with the past and pushes into the future.
Film: Peter Bradshaw
In my time as a critic, there have been many films that have made me want to punch the air with joy (and a few that made me want to punch a brick wall). But the film that I come back to, over and over, is Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, a beautiful, sad, sexy, mysterious movie that came out in 2000, when I'd been in this job for less than a year.
The premise is simple enough. The scene is 1960s Hong Kong, and Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung play neighbours who discover their spouses are having an affair. The realisation gives them a kind of intimacy: they have a tragic, erotic quasi-affair of their own. It is electrifying. Leung's desperate sadness is something he cannot admit to anyone, and the final sequence, in which he "confesses" it secretly to himself, is heartbreaking.
So many mainstream films have everything signposted and underlined, leaving no doubt as to what you are supposed to think and feel. In The Mood For Love demands you notice nuances and subtlety; you have to exert yourself to see, really see, what Wong is doing.
Theatre: Michael Billington
The toughest challenge for a theatre critic, and the greatest excitement, comes from responding to something new. How to describe, interpret and evaluate a play that expands the frontiers of drama? My mind goes back to a night in April 1975, when I reviewed the first performance of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land at the Old Vic.
I knew something about Pinter, having seen The Homecoming, The Caretaker and The Birthday Party. But I'd never reviewed a Pinter premiere, and this one had the smell of a big occasion: a production starring Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud.
I know I got some things wrong. At one point, Hirst (Richardson) engages in a prolonged reminiscence with Spooner (Gielgud). I took that as genuine rather than a parodic fantasy. But I did intuit that the play was a reflection of Pinter's own fears: that Spooner, the shabby minor poet, was the man he might have been; and Hirst, the literary celebrity cut off from life, was the figure he was terrified of becoming.
What I remember above all is the crackling comic vitality and sombre poetry of Pinter's language. In the mouths of Richardson, who was all spring-heeled ebullience, and Gielgud, who looked like some seedy, downmarket WH Auden, Pinter's phrases bounced off the walls like a ball in a squash court. In the play's overpowering final moments, one had a sense of Hirst starting to crawl unburdened towards death. Or, at least, to what Pinter poignantly calls a no man's land "which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains for ever, icy and silent". That struck me as theatrical poetry at its best: distilled, precise, yet infinitely mysterious.
Trying to pin down a Pinter play at first sight was exhilarating, like stepping into a ring with a champion boxer: one ran the risk of being knocked out.
Dance: Judith Mackrell
It was a Royal Ballet matinee in April 2001, and the hairs on the back of my neck started prickling: I realised I was witnessing the start of one of the great careers. Alina Cojocaru was just 19 and performing her first Giselle, a role that challenges even the most experienced ballerinas. In act one, she has to play a naive peasant girl, her heart broken by the aristocratic love rat Albrecht; in act two, she is a ghost, her dancing as transparent as air. Cojocaru did more than dance both roles with mesmerising beauty: she made you believe she had performed Giselle in some other, previous life.
I have seen more technically brilliant performances (although in act two, Cojocaru's dancing was so eerily exquisite, her feet barely seemed to touch the floor), but I have never seen a dancer live the role with such intensity. In the mad scene that leads to Giselle's death, Cojocaru's body looked so broken with pain you weren't sure she was acting.
Other great productions I have seen would include Les Noces, created by Bronislava Nijinska back in 1923 with a visual, emotional and musical power that blows your head off; Mark Morris's fierce Dido and Aeneas, with himself as the lead; Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring, a dance to death on a stage covered with black earth; and Frederick Ashton's poetically exact Scènes de Ballet.
The best moments I have as a critic are when I forget I'm working, when nothing I know has prepared me for what I'm experiencing. As I wrote on that extraordinary day back in 2001: "You felt that flukey thrill of being in exactly the right place at the right time."
TV: Sam Wollaston
The best thing I've ever watched on TV? That's impossible. If you're including drama, news, sport, documentary, comedy, everything, how can you possibly say which is better: news coverage of the twin towers coming down (extraordinary but hardly "good") or series four of The Wire (extraordinary, but less important in terms of changing the world)? Then there's Mad Men, The West Wing, The Thick of It, Ali G, The Office. And Big Brother's first series, when Nasty Nick was kicked out, because it changed television for ever. No, I don't dare pick that – too scared of the flak.
I'm going for Seven Up on ITV. Or 49 Up, as the last instalment, in 2005, was called. Back in 1964, 12 seven-year-olds from a wide range of backgrounds told film-maker Michael Apted what they wanted and expected out of life. Every seven years, Apted has been back to check on them. We've seen them grow up, become adults, fall in love, start careers, get married, have children, succeed, fail, despair, get more posh, get less posh, become Australian, have grandchildren.
It's been an extraordinary journey, a social history of this country: we've seen how attitudes to class, work and family have changed, along with clothes and hairstyles. But it's also, more importantly, the story of 12 individuals. This is real reality TV, touching, sad and funny – and about as important as television gets.
• This article was amended on 20 June 2011. The original stated that 49 Up was in 1995
Guardian young arts critic competition 2011: Our critics’ picks
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 20, 2011
From an illicit Pixies gig to a Mesopotamian ziggurat, Guardian critics recall their biggest moment of inspiration in their respective fields
How to enter this year's competition
Pop: Alexis Petridis
Can any gig you see as a critic ever match the ones you saw as a teenager? Bizarrely, going to a gig when I was 17 was harder work than writing reviews has ever been. It involved not merely getting to London, but lying to my parents about where I was going, lying to my friend's parents about where my parents thought I was going, bunking off school, and then convincing somebody who looked 18 to go to the bar on my behalf.
But none of that mattered the night I saw the Pixies supported by My Bloody Valentine, in September 1988. It's not every night you see arguably the two most important guitar bands of the era on the same stage at the peak of their powers: the Pixies had just released their incredible second album, Surfer Rosa, while My Bloody Valentine had released the astonishing single You Made Me Realise.
It says something about the pre-internet age that, before they walked on, I had no idea what the Pixies looked like. I didn't expect the guy who sang all those dark songs about sex and violence to be chubby and balding. This was nothing compared to the shock of their sound: a ceaseless roar, with the next song starting as the last chord of the previous one was still dying away.
I remember that gig in snapshots. Two roadies having to hold on to My Bloody Valentine's drumkit as Colm O'Cíosóig hit it with such ferocity that it started moving across the stage. The Pixies performing Hey, a song so self-evidently filthy it seemed to have been beamed in from another world. But most of all, I remember feeling more excited than I'd ever been in my life. You could argue that my career has involved chasing that feeling ever since.
Visual art: Adrian Searle
The first serious art exhibition I ever saw was on a school trip to Goya and His Times at London's Royal Academy in 1963. I have seen many Goya shows since and think I know his art well, but he always surprises me, even when I look at paintings I have known for most of my life. How time flies.
I can't say this was the best show, or even the best Goya show, I have ever seen. I was, after all, only 10. But I remember being struck by Goya's weirdness: the distorted faces of the Spanish royal family, the isolated, looming figure of the Duchess of Alba (Goya's lover), the strange skies. Decades later, I saw that the clouds over Madrid often look like old, torn tapestries.
I must have about 20 books about Goya now, including the tiny paperback I bought at the time. It's a useless book – pictures too small, colours all wrong – but I kept it. Another book is Goya's Last Portrait, a play by the critic John Berger. A few years ago, Berger and I had a long talk about that dog Goya painted, the one that could be drowning in quicksand or might just be sticking his nose up over a hill to sniff the sky.
I remember wondering why Goya's paintings meant so much to me when I knew nothing about art and had never been anywhere, least of all to Madrid. Maybe that show only became important later, because of things that happened in my life. Many roads lead back to a kid looking at Goya and understanding nothing.
Classical music: Erica Jeal
It was 10 years ago, but I remember it better than things I heard last week. The Alban Berg Quartet and the cellist Heinrich Schiff were playing Schubert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall: the String Quintet in C, the one with two cellos and the glorious first-movement melody that begins again and again, as if the composer couldn't bear to let it go.
A few minutes in, I knew this performance was different from any I'd heard before. Then I realised why. It was all coloured by death, every note. Something in the Alban Berg's playing made it obvious: Schubert, at 31, knew he was dying, and had composed a love letter to the world that was as sweet as it was sincere, full of anguish, acceptance, anger and serenity. I wondered if I was just a bit strung out: perhaps I was the only one experiencing it this way. But at the end, the usually reserved QEH audience was on its feet.
There are few things more depressing than a performance of a work you love that leaves you cold. But there is nothing more exciting than hearing a musician, or an orchestra, take something you thought you knew, and make you realise there is still more to fall in love with. I felt that way hearing Iván Fischer conduct the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony in January this year. I felt that way in 2003, when I heard veteran tenor Peter Schreier sing a searing Die Schöne Müllerin, somehow bringing an old man's wisdom to a young man's tale.
That was Schubert again. I'm starting to suspect that Schubert understood everything there was to know about the world, and that the answers to all life's big questions might be found in his music. I haven't uncovered them yet, but I'm still listening.
Architecture: Jonathan Glancey
For as long as I can remember, right back to when I was a teenager trying to piece together the story of architecture, the ziggurat at Eridu had been a presence in my life. I was haunted by the thought that somewhere in deepest Mesopotamia, today's southern Iraq, there lay, in ruins and largely hidden under sand, what might be the world's first monumental building: the mother of all architecture in the world's first metropolis.
I finally got to Eridu just months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Somehow I had persuaded the right people to let me go, and a platoon of Saddam's soldiers now escorted me along routes flanked by unexploded munitions dating from the first Gulf war. The heat was intense: 50 degrees. On the way, we stopped to climb the ziggurat of Ur, walking the site's excavated streets in the zig-zagging shadow of the great pyramid.
When we reached Eridu, the young soldiers were as excited as I was. We almost fell on the sands. It was thrilling to palm them away and find the stepped form of its crumpled ziggurat, built and rebuilt over thousands of years. There was a lake here once, and marshes. Eridu, founded in 5,400BC, was a sacred place for millennia until finally being abandoned in the 7th century AD. In 1949, excavations were undertaken, but it became a no-go zone after the first Gulf war.
At the same time as those excavations were taking place, Le Corbusier was designing his astonishing Unité d'Habitation, a block of flats in Marseilles. Although ultra-modern, this building also managed to be as elemental in form and as ancient in spirit. Great architecture connects with the past and pushes into the future.
Film: Peter Bradshaw
In my time as a critic, there have been many films that have made me want to punch the air with joy (and a few that made me want to punch a brick wall). But the film that I come back to, over and over, is Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, a beautiful, sad, sexy, mysterious movie that came out in 2000, when I'd been in this job for less than a year.
The premise is simple enough. The scene is 1960s Hong Kong, and Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung play neighbours who discover their spouses are having an affair. The realisation gives them a kind of intimacy: they have a tragic, erotic quasi-affair of their own. It is electrifying. Leung's desperate sadness is something he cannot admit to anyone, and the final sequence, in which he "confesses" it secretly to himself, is heartbreaking.
So many mainstream films have everything signposted and underlined, leaving no doubt as to what you are supposed to think and feel. In The Mood For Love demands you notice nuances and subtlety; you have to exert yourself to see, really see, what Wong is doing.
Theatre: Michael Billington
The toughest challenge for a theatre critic, and the greatest excitement, comes from responding to something new. How to describe, interpret and evaluate a play that expands the frontiers of drama? My mind goes back to a night in April 1975, when I reviewed the first performance of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land at the Old Vic.
I knew something about Pinter, having seen The Homecoming, The Caretaker and The Birthday Party. But I'd never reviewed a Pinter premiere, and this one had the smell of a big occasion: a production starring Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud.
I know I got some things wrong. At one point, Hirst (Richardson) engages in a prolonged reminiscence with Spooner (Gielgud). I took that as genuine rather than a parodic fantasy. But I did intuit that the play was a reflection of Pinter's own fears: that Spooner, the shabby minor poet, was the man he might have been; and Hirst, the literary celebrity cut off from life, was the figure he was terrified of becoming.
What I remember above all is the crackling comic vitality and sombre poetry of Pinter's language. In the mouths of Richardson, who was all spring-heeled ebullience, and Gielgud, who looked like some seedy, downmarket WH Auden, Pinter's phrases bounced off the walls like a ball in a squash court. In the play's overpowering final moments, one had a sense of Hirst starting to crawl unburdened towards death. Or, at least, to what Pinter poignantly calls a no man's land "which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains for ever, icy and silent". That struck me as theatrical poetry at its best: distilled, precise, yet infinitely mysterious.
Trying to pin down a Pinter play at first sight was exhilarating, like stepping into a ring with a champion boxer: one ran the risk of being knocked out.
Dance: Judith Mackrell
It was a Royal Ballet matinee in April 2001, and the hairs on the back of my neck started prickling: I realised I was witnessing the start of one of the great careers. Alina Cojocaru was just 19 and performing her first Giselle, a role that challenges even the most experienced ballerinas. In act one, she has to play a naive peasant girl, her heart broken by the aristocratic love rat Albrecht; in act two, she is a ghost, her dancing as transparent as air. Cojocaru did more than dance both roles with mesmerising beauty: she made you believe she had performed Giselle in some other, previous life.
I have seen more technically brilliant performances (although in act two, Cojocaru's dancing was so eerily exquisite, her feet barely seemed to touch the floor), but I have never seen a dancer live the role with such intensity. In the mad scene that leads to Giselle's death, Cojocaru's body looked so broken with pain you weren't sure she was acting.
Other great productions I have seen would include Les Noces, created by Bronislava Nijinska back in 1923 with a visual, emotional and musical power that blows your head off; Mark Morris's fierce Dido and Aeneas, with himself as the lead; Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring, a dance to death on a stage covered with black earth; and Frederick Ashton's poetically exact Scènes de Ballet.
The best moments I have as a critic are when I forget I'm working, when nothing I know has prepared me for what I'm experiencing. As I wrote on that extraordinary day back in 2001: "You felt that flukey thrill of being in exactly the right place at the right time."
TV: Sam Wollaston
The best thing I've ever watched on TV? That's impossible. If you're including drama, news, sport, documentary, comedy, everything, how can you possibly say which is better: news coverage of the twin towers coming down (extraordinary but hardly "good") or series four of The Wire (extraordinary, but less important in terms of changing the world)? Then there's Mad Men, The West Wing, The Thick of It, Ali G, The Office. And Big Brother's first series, when Nasty Nick was kicked out, because it changed television for ever. No, I don't dare pick that – too scared of the flak.
I'm going for Seven Up on ITV. Or 49 Up, as the last instalment, in 2005, was called. Back in 1964, 12 seven-year-olds from a wide range of backgrounds told film-maker Michael Apted what they wanted and expected out of life. Every seven years, Apted has been back to check on them. We've seen them grow up, become adults, fall in love, start careers, get married, have children, succeed, fail, despair, get more posh, get less posh, become Australian, have grandchildren.
It's been an extraordinary journey, a social history of this country: we've seen how attitudes to class, work and family have changed, along with clothes and hairstyles. But it's also, more importantly, the story of 12 individuals. This is real reality TV, touching, sad and funny – and about as important as television gets.
• This article was amended on 20 June 2011. The original stated that 49 Up was in 1995
Garsington Opera: A seat near the deer, please
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 29, 2011
This pop-up opera house in the heart of the English countryside is one of the most thrilling venues in Britain. Jonathan Glancey goes wild at Garsington's new pavilion
Robin Snell takes a look around the rolling fields and hills of Wormsley Park, a luscious green space in the Chilterns that's home to hares, kites, sheep, deer and partridges. "The site we found was perfect in pretty much every way," he says. "It has a beautiful outlook. It's quiet. And we've been able to fit the pavilion into the landscape very conveniently."
Snell, an architect and clarinettist, has reason to be proud. The pavilion in question is an astonishing creation: a 600-seat opera house in the heart of the coutryside. What's more, after its five-week season, this daunting collection of steel poles, timber planks and PVC screens will be packed away. This is pop-up opera, and when The Magic Flute opens here on Thursday it should confirm this delightful marriage of architecture and landscape as one of the most thrilling places in the country to hear live music.
Wormsley Park is the new home of Garsington Opera, founded in 1989 by Leonard Ingrams, a banker and violinist. He bought Garsington, a 17th-century Oxfordshire manor house, in 1982. Within seven years, inspired by Glyndebourne, he had created his own country-house opera in the walled gardens of his estate. "But," says Anthony Whitworth-Jones, Garsington's director, "when he died in 2005, it was clear the show would have to go elsewhere. The family, although hugely supportive, wanted their home back."
Whitworth-Jones and his team visited more than 40 sites before settling on Wormsley. They could have gone further afield, he says, "which might have made our search easier, but that would have meant breaking away from our backers, who are our audiences. Garsington was a local event. At heart it still is – and always will be."
Wormsley Park, a 2,500-acre estate boasting an 18th-century country house, is the former pile of philanthropist Paul Getty, who died there in 2003. It is now home to Mark Getty and his family, who have granted Garsington a 15-year lease, on condition that the site – next to the estate's farm and Getty's famous cricket ground – is returned to grazing land for the deer after each season.
As a result, the pavilion doesn't just settle into its surroundings, it actually exploits them – in particular the ha-ha, as the hidden ditch designed to keep the deer in is called. "The ha-ha now doubles as the orchestra pit," explains Snell, who was project architect for Glyndebourne's superb 1994 opera house. "So we've not had to excavate. The concrete foundations are like pads set into the grass with the building bolted on top. Once it's taken down, the pads are grassed over and you'd never know there had been a building of any sort here, let alone an opera house."
Want decor? Then look around
Snell based his design on traditional Japanese kabuki theatres. These colourful timber pavilions, which flowered in the 17th and 18th centuries, made elegant use of sliding screens and were often connected by bridges to gardens outside. Stage, bridge and garden would be used for performance, making indoors and outdoors meld into one. This spirit lives on in Snell's sparsely yet elegantly functional steel frame. Apart from its gently rippling roof, it does little to draw attention to itself; all the colour stems from either the gardens, costumes or sets.
"It's simply a question of what was appropriate," says Snell. "We needed to find a way of building, and deconstructing, that would be quick and easy. This is a big kit of parts that serves as a frame to performances. The landscape, along with what's on stage, is all the decoration you could want. Things might be different if this was to be a permanent building, though."
No one will expect a temporary pavilion to be as proper a setting for full-blooded opera as, say, the Royal Opera House. Yet the Garsington pavilion really is fully functioning, complete not just with high-ceilinged auditorium, stage and pit, but also with boxes, champagne bar, verandas and stairs to parade up and down in fine summer frocks and dusted-down DJs – all the while looking out at that meandering view. That's not something you spend a lot of time doing in a big city venue.
In fact, thanks to its clear screen sides, you can see out into the forests and fields from any one of the linen-covered, timber-framed seats. And, as performances start at 6pm, the auditorium will still be filled with light as the orchestra strikes up. "A part of the magic," says Snell, "is that the audience arrives in bright sunshine and leaves in the dark, when the pavilion lights up, changing character almost completely. It's meant to be a theatrical experience in every way."
Let's pray it doesn't hail
But what happens when it rains? "We thought a lot about this," says acoustician Robert Essert. "What we've come up with is a fine mesh screen, a bit like a mosquito net, stretched above the roof. This breaks raindrops down into tiny globules, so that when they hit the roof below, they will have turned into mist. Unless we get hail, you won't hear rain inside the auditorium."
Essert has also shaped what he calls "windsurfer sails" along the sides of the pavilion. These bounce sound from the pit and the stage back into and along the auditorium, so that it isn't lost to the skies. The roof is designed to do likewise. The pavilion promises some fine sights backstage, too: to swap wigs, change costumes, or just take a breather, performers will have to nip off to nearby farm buildings, bustling along paths and through flowerbeds.
Oboist Helena Gaunt can remember some stormy nights at the previous Garsington venue. "You couldn't hear yourself play because of the wind and the rain. But equally, you'd have those extraordinary evenings when the birds were singing in the first half, and dusk was falling on a warm, still night. There's something very special about that. And audiences seem to love the spirit of it come what may."
The Observer Summer Arts Calendar
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 30, 2011
Our critics pick the season's highlights: From Lady Gaga to Harry Potter, Coppélia to Tony Cragg, this summer has something for all
MAY
4 FILM The Tree of Life
The much-delayed fifth feature from director Terrence Malick, snapped up by Icon for UK release ahead of its Cannes showing, is a multi-generational drama featuring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn – and, reportedly, dinosaurs.
5 CLASSICAL From the House of the Dead
Opera North's production of Janáek's final work, directed by John Fulljames and conducted by Richard Farnes. Stars Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Alan Oke and Roderick Williams. Leeds and touring
DANCE By Singing Light/Romance Inverse
National Dance Company of Wales bring Stephen Petronio and Itzik Galili's arresting double bill to Dance City in Newcastle, with the former set to the poetry of Dylan Thomas.
6 THEATRE Shrek
Nigel Lindsay plays the lime-coloured, lovelorn ogre, with Amanda Holden as Princess Fiona and Nigel Harman as Lord Farquaad, in this Anglo-American production at Theatre Royal Drury Lane.
CLASSICAL The Damnation of Faust
Ex-Python Terry Gilliam takes on the devil as director of this ENO staging of Berlioz's masterpiece, conducted by Edward Gardner and starring Peter Hoare, Christine Rice and Christopher Purves.
7 CLASSICAL Steve Reich at 75
UK premiere of Steve Reich's WTC 9/11, part of the two-day Reverberations festival at the Barbican. Then toured by the Kronos Quartet in Glasgow (13 May) and Norwich (17 May).
10 THEATRE The Cherry Orchard
Zoe Wanamaker stars; Howard Davies, who has excelled in the staging of Russian drama, directs in the National's Olivier, with a design by Bunny Christie and a translation by Andrew Upton.
11 FILM Cannes film festival
Robert De Niro heads the jury at Cannes this year, casting his eye over eagerly awaited films by Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar, Lynne Ramsay and Woody Allen, whose Midnight in Paris opens the competition.
13 DANCE Royal Ballet
The season's penultimate triple bill at the ROH includes the Royal Ballet premiere of Balanchine's Ballo della regina and a new work, Live Fire Exercise, from Wayne McGregor, set to a score by Sir Michael Tippett.
FILM Attack the Block
The debut feature from Joe Cornish, of Adam and Joe fame. A "hoodie horror" about aliens landing in south London and teenage gangs uniting to fight them.
14 ART Tate St Ives
Treats at the Cornish gallery's Summer Exhibition include late paintings by Agnes Martin, installations by Martin Creed and sculpture by Naum Gabo.
16 POP Kate Bush: Director's Cut
While fans await an album of new material, the fabulously eccentric Bush has chosen to rework a selection of older songs: "The Sensual World" gains a new title and lyrics from Ulysses.
THEATRE Much Ado About Nothing
Hotly anticipated. David Tennant and Catherine Tate play the sparring lovers at Wyndham's in London. They are directed by Josie Rourke, who takes over as artistic director of the Donmar next year.
18 ART Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want
Tracey Emin needs no introduction, and quite possibly no huge solo retrospective, but this show of sculptures, photographs, films and drawings at the South Bank's Hayward Gallery will no doubt thrill her fans and infuriate her detractors alike.
19 THEATRE Lord of the Flies
William Golding's savage fable, adapted by Nigel Williams, plays in the open air until 18 June at Regent's Park theatre, which is enjoying its most imaginative era for decades.
21 ARCHITECTURE The Hepworth Gallery
The second David Chipperfield-designed gallery in two months. The Hepworth promises to be as good as the first, the Turner Contemporary in Margate. No beach in Wakefield, but a fine permanent collection of Barbara Hepworth's sculpture.
23 POP Lady Gaga: Born This Way
Two taster tracks have overtly recalled Madonna, both musically ("Born This Way") and irreligiously ("Judas"). But the proper follow-up to Monster remains this year's most eagerly awaited pop release.
27 POP Take That
Britain's best-loved manband have sold out 27 nights at the UK's vastest stadiums, with the Pet Shop Boys supporting.
JUNE
2 DANCE Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde!
Dave St-Pierre is the enfant terrible of Canadian dance and has provoked comparisons with Pina Bausch. In this production at Sadler's Wells, his 20 performers are literally and figuratively stripped naked.
3 ART The Government Art Collection
Discover which works of art your government owns; which Lowrys, Turners and Bridget Rileys hang in Downing Street. All is revealed at the Whitechapel Gallery.
4 ART Venice Biennale
Quite simply the most important international art event in the world; 82 artists in the official Giardini pavilions, with many more off site at the Arsenale. Until 27 November.
7 ARCHITECTURE Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
Usually less stuffy than its art counterpart; curated this year by a stylistic odd couple of the flamboyant postmodernist Piers Gough and the more restrained Alan Stanton.
8 DANCE Coppélia
Peter Wright's production of Coppélia with the Birmingham Royal Ballet is a funny, occasionally spooky, family ballet, set to Delibes's irresistible score. At the Lowry, Manchester, and touring.
10 POP Meltdown
Former Kink Ray Davies is this year's curator at the South Bank, recreating 60s TV show Ready Steady Go!, and springing surprises such as the Fugs. But will the Kinks reform?
CLASSICAL Aldeburgh festival
Opens with Simon Rattle and the CBSO. Premieres by Elliott Carter and Harrison Birtwistle , as well as Netia Jones's site-specific Everlasting Light, set in Sizewell. Runs until 26 June.
15 FILM Edinburgh film festival
Instead of an artistic director, EIFF has appointed guest curators, including Isabella Rossellini and Gus van Sant, who should make this year's event particularly interesting.
21 ARCHITECTURE Transport Museum Glasgow
Zaha Hadid now has several UK works to her name, but this will be her biggest public work to date, pending completion of the Olympic aquatic centre.
22 THEATRE Ghost: the musical
Matthew Warchus's production of the 1990 movie moves from Manchester to London's Piccadilly, with music by Dave Stewart. Stars Richard Fleeshman.
POP Glastonbury festival
Barring any mishaps, U2 finally lead the charge at Worthy Farm, with Beyoncé, Coldplay, the Chemical Brothers and Morrissey providing backup. NB: Dengue Fever are a band on the bill, not this year's health scare.
24 CLASSICAL Two Boys
ENO premiere of Nico Muhly's co-production with the New York Metropolitan Opera about a teenage stabbing. With a libretto by Craig Lucas, directed by Bartlett Sher and conducted by Rumon Gamba.
FILM The First Grader
When the Kenyan government introduces free primary schooling, a former Mau Mau fighter, now in his 80s, applies for an education. Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl) directs, Naomie Harris co-stars in this British film which won an audience award at Tribeca.
ART Magritte: The Pleasure Principle
Still the best of the surrealists, with this first show in a generation focusing on eroticism, visual revelation and the influence of commercial design. More than 100 paintings at Tate Liverpool.
FILM Bridesmaids
In this female riposte to the stag-party-gone-wrong subgenre, produced by Judd Apatow, Saturday Night Live regular Kristen Wiig (who co-wrote the script) plays a lovelorn maid of honour ill-equipped to organise her best friend's pre-wedding rituals.
29 POP Arcade Fire
First, the Texan/Haitian/Canadian indie wunderkinder took London's O2 Arena. Now, they are taking Hyde Park, with help from Mumford & Sons, Beirut and the Vaccines.
30 ART Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography
Brassaï, Robert Capa, André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy: more than 200 works showing the astonishing impact of this single country on photojournalism, documentary, fashion and art photography. At the Royal Academy until 2 October.
THEATRE Manchester international festival
The flourishing festival will include Robert Wilson's The Life and Death of Marina Abramović and Victoria Wood's The Day We Sang, inspired by Manchester Children's Choir. Runs until 17 July.
JULY
1 ARCHITECTURE Serpentine Gallery Pavilion
Every year the Serpentine asks a famous architect to design the gallery a temporary pavilion. This year it has lured Peter Zumthor out of his Alpine lair.
3 POP Ke$ha
America's second-most outrageous starlet is back on our shores. Ke$ha's Get $leazy world tour is oversexed and over here until 13 July.
5 DANCE Sylvie Guillem
New contemporary works by William Forsythe, Mats Ek and Jiří Kylián performed by the celebrated ballerina. Essential. To 9 July at Sadler's Wells.
6 ART Thomas Struth
One of Germany's most praised photo artists comes to Whitechapel Art Gallery. Includes the celebrated Museum series and recent installations of Cape Canavarel and the Korean shipyards.
7 ART Glamour of the Gods
Hollywood portraiture from the industry's golden age, 1920-60. From Greta Garbo to Audrey Hepburn, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe: portraits that transformed actors into international style icons. At the National Portrait Gallery.
8 THEATRE Double Feature
Four new plays by Sam Holcroft, DC Moore, Prasanna Puwanarajah and Tom Basden - all writers new to the National Theatre - are staged by a new ensemble in the Cottesloe.
FILM Jack Goes Boating
Philip Seymour Hoffman makes his directorial debut and stars in this tale of lost souls and confused love lives in snow-bound New York. It's based on a 2007 play in which he also appeared.
12 THEATRE A Woman Killed With Kindness
In what promises to be a radical production, Katie Mitchell directs Thomas Heywood's celebrated but rarely seen play. The domestic tragedy, written in 1603, will be staged in the National's Lyttelton.
15 FILM The Deathly Hallows: Part Two
After 10 years the Harry Potter franchise reaches its denouement with a film set to keep box-offices busy.
CLASSICAL The Proms
The BBC Proms opening fortnight includes Havergal Brian's mammoth "Gothic" symphony, new conductor Juanjo Mena, soloist Steven Osborne and pianist Lang Lang. To 10 September.
POP POP Latitude
The headliners may be iffy – the National and Paolo Nutini – but Latitude in Suffolk is a sublime antidote to the mud and mayhem of other festivals. And Alan Hollinghurst is in the Lit Tent.
POP Snoop Dogg
The lazy drawl of Calvin Broadus has long been eclipsed by the rapper's multiplatform media career. It's worth savouring, as he performs 1993's Doggystyle at Manchester international festival and Lovebox Weekender.
20 DANCE Roland Petit
Triple bill of works by the French choreographer, Margot Fonteyn's lover and husband of Zizi Jeanmaire. Includes the sexy, existentialist Le Jeune Homme et la Mort. ENB at the Coliseum.
FILM Nader and Simin, A Separation
Winner of the Golden Bear award at Berlin in February, Asghar Farhadi's fine film explores class tensions in present-day Iran as a middle-class couple on the verge of separation battle over the care of an elderly relative.
26 CLASSICAL St Endellion festival
An ambitious festival in north Cornwall (stars perform for no fee). Includes Wagner's Die Walkure with Susan Bullock (30 July), which then goes to Truro's Hall for Cornwall (2 Aug).
POP Womad
Womad's organisers are on solid ground with headliners such as Baaba Maal and Rodrigo y Gabriela, but the splendour of Womad is always in the discovering.
29 FILM Horrid Henry
The popular series of children's books about a troublesome pre-teen gets the 3D treatment, with Theo Stevenson as Henry, and Anjelica Huston and Richard E Grant among the adults.
30 ART Tony Cragg
Huge retrospective for Tony Cragg, senior British sculptor, with an emphasis on the cast-art of the last decade. At the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to 6 November.
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Skylon’s the limit for Festival of Britain rerun
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 20, 2011
South Bank re-creation of confidence-boosting 1951 festival aims to provide a similar tonic on a slimline budget
It was one of the most austere of years but the Labour government spent a fortune on buildings and cultural events to cheer up the battered nation. Yesterday, 60 years on from the Festival of Britain, the Southbank centre announced plans to mark the anniversary with a similar summer of celebrations – on a fraction of the budget. The four-month event will see the centre, including the Royal Festival Hall and Hayward gallery, taken over in celebration of what was a defining moment in 20th-century Britain. The Festival of Britain cost £8m – more than £200m in today's money. More than a quarter of the population came to visit the "people's palace", or be amazed by the "dome of discovery", or be photographed next to the 296ft Skylon which towered over everything.
While the rerun may not have the same levels of financial backing, Jude Kelly, the Southbank centre's artistic director, said it hoped to bring some of the joy and optimism of the 1951 festival. "We're going to celebrate everything that the thinking conjured for us in that period and then re-interpret it for now."
The festival will see Tracey Emin taking over the Hayward gallery with a show of old and new work; Billy Bragg leading performances over the royal wedding weekend; Ray Davies curating a Festival of Britain-themed Meltdown and Heston Blumenthal updating the Afternoon Tea.
There will be talks by "national treasures" such as Meera Syal and Tony Benn; and a "great thinkers" series with people such as Francis Fukuyama and John Berger.
The designer Wayne Hemingway will bring his successful Vintage festival, which debuted last year at Goodwood, to the South Bank in July. He is also co-designing a museum of 1951 memorabilia.
Among the musical events is a May visit by pianist Lang Lang, who aims to inspire a new generation of musicians, and there will be weekends given over to guitars, choral music, light music, black British music and hip-hop.
For some people, the Festival of Britain could only be properly marked if Skylon – the architect-designed tower that stood on the South Bank throughout the festivities – was returned or rebuilt. It was dismantled on the personal instructions of Winston Churchill, who saw it as a symbol of socialism and the Attlee government.
There are no plans. "We don't even know where Skylon is," said Kelly. "It's like the Loch Ness monster. People have sightings of Skylon – they think – and bits of it, but nobody really knows what happened to it.
"Skylon is a very potent image and when you see it, the design elements of it are amazing, unbeatable. It's very hard now to understand why they threw it away."
There are stories of it being simply thrown in the Thames or buried in Jubilee Gardens. Kelly said there was also a story that it was dumped in the river Lea and she might, with the Museum of London, send divers in to search for it. A spokesman for the Museum of London later contradicted that and said there was no evidence of Skylon being in the Lea.
The festival, taking place between 22 April and 4 September, will be the first of three themed festivals on the South Bank, all sponsored by MasterCard.
‘This is not criticism in a vacuum’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 28, 2010
From demolishing Alice in Wonderland to deciphering Macbeth, our young readers bowled over the judges with their wit
Fresh bands, young directors, hot new actors and artists straight out of college are the lifeblood of the arts. And, to ensure that criticism doesn't get stale, it's essential that their generation is represented in our reviewers. The Guardian's annual young critics competition is designed to ensure that arts criticism can reflect the voices of a younger arts audience. That said, youth alone is not enough. These days, it's easier than ever to find a platform on which to voice your opinions – by blogging, tweeting, or posting on comment threads – but with all that competition, it's more essential than ever that you have something worthwhile to say.
The entries confirmed that there are 10-18-year-olds out there with perceptive, funny things to convey about subjects ranging from the Selfridges building in Birmingham to tattooed LA rockers Buckcherry. What's more, the best of our critics seemed to be predominantly female – of the 14 finalists, only three were male. There were eight categories and two age groups in each: under 14s and 14-to-18s, though not all art forms had enough entries to qualify. Classical music critics aged under 14 are still thin on the ground.
The overall winner, 15-year-old Rebecca Grant, won the judges over with her demolition of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which she described as a "beautifully eccentric odyssey" reduced to "disgusting dregs". "She managed to be witheringly critical without sounding as if she was grandstanding," said Liz Forgan, the chair of Arts Council England. Rebecca will win a trip to a film screening with a Guardian film critic, and get the chance to write about it in g2.
All runners-up get a £25 book token, and have their review published on guardian.co.uk today. Two were highly commended. Pandora Haydon's review of All My Sons at the Apollo theatre, London, "brilliantly captured the taut physicality of David Suchet's performance", said Andrew Dickson, our online arts editor. Frances Myatt – a winner in the under-14s dance category last year – impressed dance critic Judith Mackrell once again with her review of Mutatis Mutandis at the Macrobert theatre in Stirling.
Yinka Shonibare – the artist who put a ship in a bottle on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square – judged the visual art category with the Guardian's chief art critic Adrian Searle. Twelve-year-old Mark Hardy won the under-14s category with a review of Fiona Banner's installation of two fighter jets at Tate Britain. Jo Waugh, 15, won the 14-18 category with a sophisticated review of Recollection Has Not Been Mentioned by Tony Swain. "This is not criticism in a vacuum," Shonibare said. "I like the way the work is contextualised in relation to modernism, surrealism and Kandinsky. She also describes the ambiguity in the art world very well."
The winner of our architecture category, India Miller, was also prepared to look beyond the work and discuss its significance in the wider world. Her review of Selfridges in Birmingham impressed architect Amanda Levete, whose practice Future Systems designed it. "She sets the context of a 'city left in tatters', and alludes to the paradox of the democracy of impact that the building has had on Birmingham in becoming symbolic of the city while at the same time representing a 'bubble of wealth'," said Levete.
Sasha Millwood, 18, won the classical music category with a fluent review of the National Youth Orchestra conducted by Semyon Bychkov at the Royal Albert Hall. Ella McCarthy, 13, won the under-14s theatre category for what the Guardian's Michael Billington termed a "graphic account" of Macbeth in Regent's Park.
Two entries stood out in the TV category. Seventeen-year-old Lilith Johnstone's review of Mo "showed good awareness of the context, and of the elements that were generic and original," said critic Mark Lawson. A special mention should go to Nathan Ellis, who was a winner in the same category last year, and whose review was enjoyed by Lawson's fellow judge Fearne Cotton. "He gets straight to the point with his slick, humorous and analytical review. Rounded off nicely with a heartfelt quip, it didn't drag."
There was only one winner in the pop category – Fin Murphy, 17, for his Buckcherry review. Michael Hann, the editor of the Guardian's Film&Music section, said it had "a good opening that tricked me into believing I was going to read a string of cliches, then undercut expectations". His fellow judge Tinchy Stryder was moved to check out Buckcherry's music online "in spite of the genre not being my kind of thing" – or the review being all that positive. It was a reminder that reviews can expose you to art you wouldn't otherwise have considered or known about – and that's something valuable whether you're 10 or 80.
• This article was amended on 21 October 2010. The original misspelled the name of the winner of the classical musical category as Sasha Millward. This has been corrected.