Posts Tagged Pop and rock
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.
Guardian young arts critics competition 2011: the winners
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 12, 2011
Our young critics competition turned up some fearless talent
What makes a great critic? Lots of things: an eye for detail, an instinct for the right adjective, an empathy with audience and artist. A great critic can make a reader feel that they, too, have been there: watching, listening, holding their breath. A great critic's opinion carries conviction; a great critic loves language. And, in a world where everyone has an opinion, and the means to share it, these qualities matter more than ever: a professional 21st-century critic has to look harder, write funnier, be smarter than anyone else.
So it's a tough job, but somebody has to do it – and somebody has to do it after this generation have had their turn. For the fourth year running, we've been looking for the UK's best young critics. We asked for entries in eight categories, and split those into two age groups: under 14, and 14 to 18. Most wanted to write about film, TV, theatre, visual art and music; there were fewer entries for classical, dance and architecture. You told us about your 2011 highlights and lowlights: Bon Iver's "magical" new album, Kevin Spacey's Richard III (not terrifying enough), Gavin Henson's "robot" turn on The Bachelor, the discreet charms of Coventry railway station. You were direct, engaged, enthusiastic, occasionally brutal – and you impressed our judges, who included writer Anthony Horowitz, singer Emmy the Great and Kick–Ass screenwriter Jane Goldman.
In the film category, 13-year-old Francesco Dernie reviewed Project Nim, James Marsh's documentary about the chimp raised as a child, concluding: "I do think he achieved some humanity." For Goldman, this was "the stand-out entry, a beautifully honed balance between information and opinion". Kiera McIntosh-Michaelis's review of Kevin Macdonald's crowdsourced documentary Life in a Day won in the older category. "A little gem that showed natural writing talent," said Goldman.
Among younger pop critics, 13-year-old Holly MacHenry won for her rousing review of Gogol Bordello, with the judges praising its ability to convey the raw excitement of being there ("About halfway through the second song I decided being cool wasn't important and started jumping about"). Julia Smith, 18, was first in the older age group for her review of Bon Iver's recent album. His previous album, For Emma, Forever Ago, she wrote, "hits you right there. You know, there, that space between your head and your heart". Judge Emmy the Great said: "She will doubtless be the sort of music critic who has fans. I am one."
There was a surprising amount of foreign reporting in visual art: Seward Johnson's controversial 26ft Marilyn Monroe in Chicago, two shows at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, ceramics in Switzerland. The Met shows inspired the best writing: 14-year-old Angelica Gottleib's take on Savage Beauty, the Alexander McQueen retrospective ("a marvellous, skeleton-like back-brace … antelope ears crafted from gleaming twigs"); and 12-year-old Freddie Holker's extraordinarily accomplished review of a homage to Lucian Freud, in particular his painting Naked Man, Back View ("Disgusting. That's what I'm thinking, that's my gut instinct.") Of Freddie, art critic Adrian Searle said: "The writing is tight, the descriptions vivid."
It was a strong year for theatre. Thomas Marshall, 16, won the older category with his review of Kevin Spacey's Richard III: "At about 11pm, a hunchbacked man with a leg-brace is hung upside-down, dead, in a darkened room somewhere in London to the applause of hundreds." (This first line had director and judge Katie Mitchell "hooked".) The under-14s group scored the competition's youngest winner, nine-year-old Laura Stevens, whose review of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Stratford used "beautiful imagery to relate what she'd seen, conveying her enthusiasm and insight", said playwright Lucy Prebble.
There was a confidence and swagger to the TV reviews, pleasing our TV editor, Vicky Frost. Hannah Quinn, 17, won for her savagely cynical review of Gavin Henson's The Bachelor ("The end is nigh! A mad scientist has succeeded in creating a robot and an army of clones!"). Horowitz said: "This is a critic who puts her personality right on the page – great fun to read."
Dance critic Rachel Balmer, 16, wrote one of the bounciest, liveliest reviews. Riverdance, she said, was "the oddest genre of theatrical art", featuring "singing, a bout of flamenco, a candelit vigil … some Irish-style disco dancing complete with cartwheels … I told you it was odd." Our classical music winner was Rosie Busiakiewicz, 18, who reviewed a new recording of Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet.
In the final category, architecture, judge Ted Cullinan declared Michael Sackur, 13, winner in the younger category, for his "beautifully observed formal critique" of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin: "Criticism like this is hard to write." Fourteen-year-old Mollie Davidson won the older category for her review of Coventry railway station. This, Cullinan said, was a brilliant summary of the "earnest economical period" of architecture just after the second world war.
The winners will receive a Guardian certificate and a £25 book token; their entries are published today at guardian.co.uk/culture. Picking an overall winner was tough, but with Alan Yentob, creative director of the BBC, and Georgina Henry, head of guardian.co.uk, we agreed on 12-year-old Freddie Holker for his amazingly mature critique of Lucian Freud. I would conclude by saying something along the lines of the kids are all right – but that's just the kind of cliche our young critics know to avoid.
• Winner Freddie Holker will be writing for G2 later this year.
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
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
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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‘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.
What to see in the arts this autumn
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 14, 2010
There's a double helping of the Dane, Wall Street returns, Wallace and Gromit take up presenting – and Robyn goes for broke. Our critics pick this autumn's hottest shows
Theatre
Hamlet
Prepare for the latest battle of the princes. John Simm is first in the field at the Sheffield Crucible; then Rory Kinnear enters the running in a Nicholas Hytner production for the National Theatre. It's not, of course, a contest – but comparisons will be inevitable. Crucible, Sheffield (0114-249 6000), from 16 September; and Olivier, London SE1 (020-7452 3000), from 7 October.
The Thrill of it All
Forced Entertainment continues the British experimental tradition with an evening of vaudevillian capers, Japanese lounge music and tarnished sequins. Nuffield, Lancaster (01524 594151), 12-13 October. Then touring.
Tribes
Nina Raine follows her impressive debut play, Rabbits, with a drama about an unconventional family that has its own private language and rules. At its centre is Billy, who is deaf and desperately wants to get a word in edgeways. There will be both captioned and sign-language performances. Royal Court, London SW1 (020-7565 5000), from 20 October.
Love Steals Us from Loneliness
Playwright Gary Owen grew up depressed and suicidal in Bridgend. Now he returns to the town that's seen more than 20 suicides in recent years, to explore what's gone wrong and what's going right. Hobo's Rock Club, Bridgend (029-2064 6900), 7-16 October.
The Lady from the Sea
David Eldridge unveils a new version of Ibsen's tale of watery passion. Sarah Frankcom directs a production the Royal Exchange calls "Anna Karenina meets The Piano". Royal Exchange, Manchester (0161-833 9833), 13 October to 6 November.
The Picture
Jacobean dramatist Philip Massinger's play revolves around a Bohemian knight who sets off to war with an enchanted image of his wife that changes colour according to her fidelity, or lack thereof. Philip Wilson transposes the action to the mid-19th century, at the time of the birth of photo-graphy. Playhouse, Salisbury (01722 320333), from 4 November.
King Lear
Derek Jacobi teams up again with director Michael Grandage for a King Lear that will both tour nationally and be broadcast to more than 20 countries. Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (0844 871 7624), from 7 December.
Beasts and Beauties
This blissful take on fairytales, drawn from Carol Ann Duffy's poetry, was first seen at the Bristol Old Vic in 2004 and is now being remounted in Hampstead. Hampstead theatre, London NW3 (020-7722 9301), 10-31 December.
Film
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Just as the financial world goes into meltdown, Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko is back with a sinister new plan to make more money and to destroy more lives. He's desperate to be reconciled to his environmentalist daughter, played by Carey Mulligan; she's engaged to a idealistic young Wall Street trader, Shia LaBeouf, who falls under Gekko's awful spell. Released on 6 October.
Eat, Pray, Love
Julia Roberts stars in this showy journey of personal growth, based on the bestselling memoir about a newly single woman finding herself. Reportedly, Roberts converted to Hinduism as a result of this film. Released on 24 September.
Made in Dagenham
Sally Hawkins stars in this real-life drama, based on the 1968 strike by women workers at the Ford Dagenham plant, who object to getting paid less than their male counterparts. A star-studded British cast includes Bob Hoskins, Rosamund Pike and Miranda Richardson as Barbara Castle. Released on 1 October.
The Kids Are All Right
This easy-going comedy has won hearts and minds across America. Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are a gay couple who have had children through artificial insemination – one each, from the same father. Now teenagers, these kids wish to contact their father; the parents have no choice but to agree. Released on 29 October.
Countdown to Zero
This terrifying documentary by British film-maker Lucy Walker assembles an impressive array of talking heads, including Gorbachev and Tony Blair, to talk about the real danger of a nuclear explosion by accident, or from committed terrorists. A cautionary tale for anyone who thinks that a nuclear catastrophe is something we don't need to worry about. Released on 12 November.
Architecture
RIBA Stirling prize 2010
The 15th instalment of British architecture's answer to Big Brother. A coterie of architects attends a gala dinner at London's Roundhouse (shown live on BBC2) to select the best building from a shortlist of six. The winner gets £20,000. Bookies' favourites are Zaha Hadid's Maxxi gallery in Rome and David Chipperfield's revamp of the Neues Museum in Berlin. 2 October. Details: architecture.com
World Architecture festival 2010
More than 1,000 architects from around the world will converge on Barcelona for this festival, at which an expert panel will name the world's best new building. Last year, the award went to the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre, by Peter Rich Architects, which was built in South Africa on a confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers. Barcelona, Spain, 3-5 November. Details: worldarchitecturefestival.com
Comedy
Tommy Tiernan
This is the first UK tour for the 1998 Perrier award winner since he got into hot water last year for Holocaust material in his native Ireland. (His Canadian tour was cancelled as a result.) A comic, said Tiernan in reply, has to be "reckless and irresponsible". Expect more saying of the unsayable, in a lyrical Donegal lilt. Sheffield Memorial Hall (0114-2789 789), 6 October. Then touring.
Tim Minchin
Having written his musical of Roald Dahl's Matilda for the RSC, which premieres in November, the shock-haired Australian troubadour Minchin returns to live comedy. His UK tour promises new songs, old favourites – and a 55-piece orchestra. Birmingham NIA (0121-780 4141), 8 December. Then touring.
Josie Long
Before this year's Edinburgh festival fringe, Josie Long's standup was big on crayons and kookiness but low on bite. Her fringe set retained the idealism but added sass, sharp teeth and a rousing call to political arms. Now she takes her message to the nation. The Stand, Edinburgh (0131-558 7272), tomorrow. Then touring.
Armstrong and Miller
Perrier nominees in 1996, Armstrong and Miller's TV fortunes were flatlining until they found mid-career success with their BBC1 sketch show. Now they take those popular primetime characters – including their toff-but-common RAF pilots – on the road. Bristol Hippodrome (0844 847 2325), 23 September. Then touring.
Dance
Nearly Ninety
Merce Cunningham created this, his final work, just months before his death last summer. For all the poignancy surrounding its UK premiere by his dance company, it's also a piece alive with invention, fusing dance, music, video and a futurist set. Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891), 26-30 October.
Cinderella
A new staging of Prokofiev's fairytale score from Birmingham Royal Ballet mixes darker themes of loneliness and loss in among the tinsel. Hippodrome, Birmingham (0844 338 5000), 24 November to 12 December.
Iphigenie auf Tauris
In the months following Pina Bausch's death, her work has enjoyed a rich showing in the UK, culminating with this London premiere of Iphigenie auf Tauris, her 1973 staging of Gluck's opera. Sadler's Wells, London EC1 (0844 412 4300), 27–31 October.
The Nutcracker
English National Ballet celebrate their 60th anniversary with a fresh take on the Tchaikovsky classic. Where the last version had a cartoon-coloured tone, this will be Victorian picture-book pretty. Coliseum, London WC2 (0871 911 0200), 10-30 December. Then touring.
Classical/Opera
Promised End
English Touring Opera premieres what composer Alexander Goehr says will be his last opera: a Noh-style treatment of King Lear. Linbury, London WC2 (020-7304 4000), 9-16 October. Then touring.
Nine Rivers
Scotland's greatest living composer, James Dillon, finally gets proper recognition in his homeland with the first complete performance of his magnum opus. Rolf Gupta conducts the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. City Halls, Glasgow (0141-353 8000), 14 November.
Rebecca Saunders
The expat British composer is in residence at the Huddersfield Contemporary music festival, bringing with her a whole sheaf of UK premieres as part of the festival's rich spread of new music. Various venues, Huddersfield (01484 430 528), 19-28 November.
Tannhäuser
The Royal Opera's final new show of 2010 brings Wagner's "grand romantic opera" back to Covent Garden after more than 20 years, in a production by Tim Albery. Semyon Bychkov conducts. Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020-7304 4000), 11 December to 2 January 2011.
Visual arts
Brighton photo biennial 2010
This city-wide survey puts photo-graphers such as Robert Mapplethorpe alongside counterparts from across the globe.Venues around Brighton, 2 October to 14 November. Details: bpb.org.uk
Paul Gauguin
France's quintessential bohemian painter hasn't had a UK show this large in 50 years. This one leads us from Brittany to Polynesia, where Gauguin died in 1903. Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8888), 30 September to 16 January 2011.
British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet
The five-yearly whip through what's hip in art will be inspiring and annoying in equal measure. Venues around Nottingham, 23 October to 9 January 2011, then touring. Details: britishartshow.co.uk
Ai Weiwei in the Turbine Hall
The first non-western artist to take on the space, Weiwei is an outspoken critic of the Chinese government. How far will he go here? Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8888), from 12 October.
Move: Choreographing You
Explores 50 years of interaction between art and dance. Could be fascinating. Hayward Gallery, London SE1 (0844 875 0073), 13 October to 9 January 2011.
Pop
Robyn
Swedish starlet Robyn is as fiercely individual as it's probably possible for an unabashed pop star to be. Her latest venture involves releasing three albums in one year (a reaction to touring her last record for five years). Expect the highlights, from foul-mouthed hip-hop to sparkling electropop. O2 ABC, Glasgow (0844 477 2000), 18 October. Then touring.
LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip
Spectacularly good value: James Murphy's outfit on (apparently) their final lap, with Hot Chip, touring their career-best album One Life Stand. Cardiff International Arena, 12 November. Then touring. Details: livenation.co.uk
Vampire Weekend/Janelle Monáe
Vampire Weekend, whose bookish, Afro-influenced indie really comes to life on stage, make an intriguing choice of support for their final tour date: the year's breakout soul star. Alexandra Palace, London N22 (0844 277 4321), 3 December.
Suede
Briefly the Indie Band Most Likely To (before they were swept away by the less complex pleasures of Oasis), Suede parlay the momentum from their reunion concert for Teenage Cancer Trust earlier this year into a huge London show. O2 Arena, London (0844 811 0051), 7 December.
Arcade Fire
Arcade Fire's burgeoning success suits their music: what can sound a bit overinflated on record makes perfect sense booming around stadiums with crowds singing along en masse. LG Arena, Birmingham (0844 338 8000), 8 December. Then touring.
Television
The Special Relationship
Michael Sheen steps back into Tony Blair's shoes for the third time in a new feature-length drama from screenwriter Peter Morgan. These are Blair: The Action Buddy years, as he enters centre-left on the world stage to find Bill Clinton – his husky sincerity nailed by Dennis Quaid – waiting with open arms. BBC2, this Saturday.
Community
Joel McHale (host of E!'s sarky entertainment news show The Soup) plays a dodgy lawyer sent back to college to get the degree he's been pretending he's had for years. Viva, October.
Any Human Heart
This adaptation of William Boyd's novel promises to be one of the season's classiest offerings. Jim Broadbent, Matthew Macfadyen and Sam Claflin take turns to play writer Logan Mountstuart, who tumbles through the 20th century while crossing paths with Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and a succession of lovers. Channel 4, November.
The Walking Dead
Andrew Lincoln (Egg from This Life) plays a police officer who wakes up after an accident to find himself in the middle of an undead apocalypse. Based on the cult graphic-novel series, The Walking Dead could be the moment zombies get a True Blood-style makeover. FX, November.
Wallace and Gromit's World of Invention
Well-loved duo try out TV presenting for this six-part series, celebrating the mothers and fathers of scientific invention – as well as quirkier projects that never got beyond the drawing board. BBC1, November.
World music and jazz
AfroCubism
The original idea for Buena Vista Social Club is revived, uniting Malian stars including Toumani Diabaté with Cuba's finest. Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891), 21 November; Usher Hall, Edinburgh (0131-228 1155), 2 December.
Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares
This all-female Bulgarian choir return to the UK for the first time in more than a decade. Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1 (0844 875 0073), 2 November. Then touring.
Vandermark 5/Atomic
Chicago saxophonist Ken Vandermark references everything from Sun Ra to rock; the Norwegian/Swedish Atomic ensemble splices old and new with ferocious vivacity. Vortex, London N16 (020-7254 4097), 16 September. Then touring.
London jazz festival
Includes Herbie Hancock's Imagine Project and shows by Sonny Rollins and Brad Mehldau. Various venues, London, 12-21 November. Details: londonjazzfestival.org.uk
Books
Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's first novel since 2001's The Corrections is getting rave reviews. 23 September.
Jump! by Jilly Cooper
The bonkbuster queen returns to what she does best: sex among the horsy set. 16 September.
Conversations With Myself, by Nelson Mandela
Mandela's collection of private letters, diaries, doodles and conversations has a foreword by Barack Obama. 12 October.
Map of a Nation, by Rachel Hewitt
The story of the Ordnance Survey map, from the 18th-century adventurers who slogged up hill and down dale, right up to today's digital database. 7 October.
• Chosen by Michael Billington, Peter Bradshaw, Andrew Clements, Robin Denselow, Alison Flood, John Fordham, Lyn Gardner, Jonathan Glancey, Brian Logan, Judith Mackrell, Alexis Petridis, Adrian Searle and Richard Vine.
• This column was amended on 14 September 2010. The original gave the opening date for Hamlet at the Crucible, Sheffield as 22 September. This has been corrected.
What to see in summer 2010
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 24, 2010
Stevie Wonder hits the UK, Toy Story goes 3D, and it's the last ever Big Brother – our critics pick the unmissable events of the season
Pop
Stevie Wonder
Anyone who can't face braving Glastonbury to see the Motown legend's Sunday-night set can head to London's Hyde Park for this headlining show. It's likely to be heavy on the hits, but a little too heavy on the audience participation, if complaints from disgruntled punters at Wonder's recent shows are anything to go by. And be warned: Jamiroquai seems to have been enticed out of retirement to provide support. Hyde Park, London W2, 26 June. Box office: 020-7009 3484.
This beloved Scottish festival is prized as much for its atmosphere as its lineup. And they're certainly wheeling out the big hitters this year: Eminem, Muse, Kasabian, Jay-Z, Black Eyed Peas, Florence and the Machine, La Roux, Dizzee Rascal and Paolo Nutini, among others. Balado, Kinross-shire, 9-11 July. Box office: 0844 499 9990.
There are those who would argue that going to a festival with no camping doesn't strictly constitute going to a festival: equally, there are those who wouldn't countenance doing anything else. Either way, this year's Wireless lineup looks strong: it includes Pink, the Ting Tings, LCD Soundsystem, Lily Allen, Missy Elliott, Jay-Z, Plan B and Friendly Fires. Hyde Park, London W2, 2-4 July. Box office: 020-7009 3484.
If you're prepared to travel abroad for your festival jollies, Spain's Benicassim can offer things no British event can: a beach and guaranteed good weather. This year you can also catch Kasabian, Ray Davies, the Prodigy, Lily Allen, the Specials, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vampire Weekend, PiL, Dizzee Rascal, Hot Chip, Goldfrapp and the intriguingly named Love of Lesbian. Benicassim, Spain, 15-18 July. Box office: tickets.fiberfib.com
Of all the boutique festivals, Green Man is the longest-established. This year's eclectic bill sees something of a shift away from its nu-folk roots – but they presumably know their audience well enough to know what they'll like. Doves, Joanna Newsom and Flaming Lips are among the headliners; also on the roster are Billy Bragg, Fuck Buttons, Wild Beasts and Steve Mason. The traditional end of things, meanwhile, is held up by the Unthanks and Alasdair Roberts. Brecon Beacons, 20-22 August. Box office: 0871 424 4444.
Film
Greenberg
An indie comedy from Noah Baumbach, creator of The Squid and the Whale. Ben Stiller is Roger Greenberg, an unfulfilled middle-aged guy who house-sits for his more successful brother Phillip in LA, and begins a relationship with Phillip's nervy assistant Florence, played by mumblecore star Greta Gerwig. Released on 11 June.
Inception
The Batman movies made Christopher Nolan one of Hollywood's biggest hitters; now, he raises the stakes with this non-superhero film. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Cobb, a guy with a unique gift in a strange dystopian future where corporate espionage has engendered an unsettling new technology. Released on 16 July.
Toy Story 3
The first two Toy Stories were sublime, so hopes are high for the third instalment. Woody, Buzz and his toy pals are facing the much-feared betrayal/abandonment issues hinted at in the previous film. Their owner has grown up, and they are headed for the charity bins, to be played with by kids who do not appreciate them. So the toys plan a daring escape. Released on 21 July.
Mother
This movie from South Korea has acquired cult status on the festival circuit, and makes a welcome appearance in the UK. Kim Hye-ja plays an elderly woman whose twentysomething son still lives with her. When he is charged with murder, it is up to her to right what she is convinced is a terrible wrong, and to track down the real killer. She is a formidable amateur sleuth. But what will she – and we – discover? Released on 20 August.
The Illusionist
Sylvain Chomet, the director of the hugely admired animation Les Triplettes de Belleville, has scored another hit by resurrecting an unproduced script by Jacques Tati and bringing it to life with complete fidelity to his spirit. It is a gentle, melancholy tale about an old-school vaudevillian magician and entertainer who finds that modern showbusiness is leaving him behind. But a young girl still thrills to his act. Released on 20 August.
Scott Pilgrim vs the World
Comic fans suffering from withdrawal after Kick-Ass can find comfort in this adventure. Based on the graphic novel by Brian Lee O'Malley and directed by Edgar Wright, this stars Michael Cera as the introspective rock musician Scott. He falls hard for Ramona Flowers, but discovers that he has to vanquish her seven ex-boyfriends before he can win her heart. Released on 6 August.
Books
Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor
In Edwardian Dublin, a young actress begins an affair with JM Synge. This latest from historical novelist O'Connor, author of Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls, is loosely based on the real story of the great Irish playwright's affair with Molly Allgood, moving between 1907 Dublin and 1952 London. Harvill Secker, 3 June.
Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis
Twenty-five years after Ellis burst onto the scene with Less Than Zero comes this sequel to his story of disaffected LA teenager Clay and friends. Middle-aged Clay is now a screenwriter, returning to LA to cast a movie and catch up with ex-girlfriend Blair, childhood best friend Julian (now a recovering addict running an escort service) and their old dealer Rip. Picador, 2 July.
Faithful Place by Tana French
Every holiday needs a good crime novel and French's skilful thrillers are tailor-made to terrify. This follows the story of Frank Mackey, who planned to run away to London with his girlfriend Rosie, aged 19. She failed to turn up; 20 years later he's still in Dublin, working as an undercover policeman. And then Rosie's suitcase is found. Hodder, 19 August.
A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Reasons Why We Can't Stop Reading Jane Austen
Authors from Jay McInerney to Fay Weldon, Alain de Botton and Susanna Clarke ponder Austen's enduring appeal in this collection, edited by Susannah Carson. Martin Amis, for one, dreams of a 20-page sex scene between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, with Darcy "acquitting himself uncommonly well". Particular Books, 3 June.
Visual art
Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception
Belgian artist Alÿs, now based in Mexico City, has pushed a block of ice through sweltering streets, had 500 volunteers move a Peruvian sand dune, and walked the 1948 Armistice line between Palestine and Israel, trailing green paint behind him. This will be the largest survey of his work ever held. Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8888), 15 June-15 September.
Martin Creed: Down Over Up
A mid-career survey show of the Turner Prize-winning artist who made the lights go on and off, filled galleries with balloons, and had runners sprinting through Tate Britain. Creed works increasingly with performance, both with his band Owada and with dancers. His art can be funny, touching and outrageous, all carried off with wit, charm and a lack of pretension. Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (0131-225 2383), 30 July–31 October.
Alice Neel: Painted Truths
Alice Neel (1900-1984) was a tough, single-minded and wonderful American portraitist whose subjects included her family and art-world friends, such as Andy Warhol (whom she painted in bandages after he was shot). An artist's artist, her work is idiosyncratic and acute. Expect art schools to be filled with teenage mini-Neels next term. Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 (020-7522 7888), 8 July–17 September.
John Cage: Every Day Is a Good Day
Cage did much more than compose 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. The composer, writer, mushroom-hunter, unconventional artist and collaborator with Merce Cunningham and Jasper Johns is undergoing a major revival. This show is curated by artist, writer and long-time fan Jeremy Millar, and is organised according to Cage's ideas of chance and indeterminacy. Baltic, Gateshead (0191-478 1810) 19 June‑5 September.
Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945-1962)
Complementing Tate Liverpool's current Picasso show, this exhibition, curated by Picasso biographer John Richardson and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, focuses on the artist's Mediterranean roots, with portraits, sculptures, ceramics and prints, mostly taken from Picasso's own collection. Gagosian Gallery, London WC1 (020-7784 9960), 4 June–28 August.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Based in London for 20 years, Tillmans takes his relationship with the city as the starting point for this show. Abstract photographs and snapshots, portraits and places, old things and new: Tillmans's subjects are as rich and varied, as surprising and askew as the world itself. Serpentine Gallery, London W2 (020-7402 6075), 10 July–17 October.
Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries
An exhibition for anyone interested in the skulduggery of forgery; the mangling of old paintings to make them fit later taste; or in the science of restoration and CSI-type investigation. The show analyses work from the gallery's own collection. National Gallery, London WC2 (020-7747 2885), 30 June–12 September.
Theatre
Women, Power and Politics
Nine dramatists, including Bola Agbaje, Moira Buffini, Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Sue Townsend, join forces to create a two-part show exploring the role of women in British politics. Given that there are more Lib Dems than women in the current cabinet, it seems a timely venture. Tricycle Theatre, London NW6 (020-7328 1000), 4 June-17 July.
Morte d'Arthur
Having adapted The Canterbury Tales for the RSC, the writer-director team of Mike Poulton and Gregory Doran now give us a compressed version of Malory's epic on Arthurian legend. Expect the round table, the holy grail and the hot, adulterous passion of Lancelot and Guinevere. Courtyard, Stratford-upon-Avon (0844 800 1110), 11 June-28 August.
Alice
Playwright Laura Wade and director Lyndsey Turner have just had a hit with Posh at the Royal Court. Now things get curiouser as the pair collaborate on a new version of Lewis Carroll's novel, in which Wonderland looks suspiciously like Sheffield. Over-eights only. Crucible, Sheffield (0114-249 6000), 17 June-24 July.
Greenwich and Docklands International festival
This outdoor festival can hold its head up proudly among its European peers. French company Ilotopie return with a new show, Oxymer – and there is a dazzling array of work from Catalonia. All events are free. Various sites around London, 24 June-4 July.
The Critic/The Real Inspector Hound
Sheridan is matched with Stoppard in two of the funniest plays ever written about theatre. In the first, a ludicrous play about the Spanish Armada descends into chaos; in the second, two critics get caught up in a Christie-style whodunit. Jonathan Church, who has boldly restored Chichester's fortunes, directs. Minerva, Chichester (01243 781312), 2 July-28 August.
You Me Bum Bum Train
Two hundred performers and an audience of just one – you. This show has been six years in the making, and now gets a full-scale production courtesy of the Barbican's BITE programme. LEB Building, London E2 (0845 120 7511), 6-24 July.
Earthquakes in London
Rupert Goold directs a Mike Bartlett play promising a rollercoaster ride through London from 1968 to 2525. Themes include social breakdown, population explosion and paranoia: a chance for Goold to exercise the expressionist talents he used in Enron. Cottesloe, London SE1 (020-7452 3000), from 28 July.
The Gospel at Colonus
Classic Greek drama is given a twist by US director Lee Breuer, who relocates Sophocles's tragedy to modern America and throws in a gospel choir, Blind Boys of Alabama, to collectively play the role of Oedipus. Edinburgh Playhouse (0131-473 2000), 21-23 August.
Architecture
The Serpentine Gallery summer pavilion
The gallery's 10th summer pavilion is as red as a London double-decker. It's also Jean Nouvel's first building in Britain, but only just: the French architect, best known for the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, has nearly completed a controversial office block in the City of London. This boldly geometric pavilion will be home to a series of cultural events. Serpentine Gallery, London W2 (020-7402 6075), 10 July–17 October.
Venice Biennale
The 12th International Architecture Exhibition is curated this year by the Pritzker prize-winning Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima. This is one of the most delightful places to encounter the latest ideas in architecture. Venice, 29 August–21 November. Details: labiennale.org
Television
Secret Diaries of Anne Lister
Anne Lister was a woman way ahead of her time. A Yorkshire industrialist, land-owner and traveller, she was also a lesbian and lived with her lover, long before lesbians officially existed. Best of all, she was an avid diarist, recording her life in great detail – and often in code. Maxine Peake stars as Lister in this one-off 90-minute drama, written by Jane English and directed by James Kent. BBC2, June
Big Brother
Love it or hate it, there's no denying BB's influence and impact on the first decade of the 21st century. Remember the chickens, and Nasty Nick? And how much nastier it got over subsequent series? This is the end – the last BB ever. (To be read in Marcus Bentley's Geordie voice: It's D-Day in the Big Brother house ...) Channel 4, June
Father & Son
A four-part thriller written by Frank Deasy (Prime Suspect: The Final Act and The Passion) about an ex-crim who returns to Britain from a quiet life in Ireland, to save his teenage son from prison. Starring Dougray Scott, Stephen Rea, Sophie Okonedo and Ian Hart. ITV, June
Vexed
A three-part comedy drama about a pair of cops (Toby Stephens and Lucy Punch) with a lot of chemistry between them, as well as issues at home. Written by Howard Overman, who penned the hit show Misfits for E4. BBC2, August
I Am Slave
A one-off drama from the people who created the feature film The Last King of Scotland, tackling the issue of slavery in contemporary Britain. Inspired by real events, it tells the story of a young woman's abduction from her home in Sudan to London, where she is enslaved. Channel 4, August
Classical and opera
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Bryn Terfel finally sings a role he was born to play – that of Hans Sachs, in Wagner's most life-affirming work. Welsh National Opera presents Richard Jones's new production in Cardiff and Birmingham, before bringing it to the Proms as a concert performance. Millennium Centre, Cardiff (029-2063 6464), 19 June-3 July; Hippodrome, Birmingham (0844 338 5000), 6 & 10 July; Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (0845 401 5040), 17 July.
What are Years
The highlight of Pierre Boulez's first-ever appearance at the Aldeburgh festival promises to be the world premiere of 101-year-old Elliott Carter's Marianne Moore song cycle, with Boulez conducting soprano Claire Booth and Ensemble Intercontemporain. Snape Maltings Concert Hall (01728 687110), Aldeburgh, 26 June.
The Duchess of Malfi
English National Opera and the theatre company Punchdrunk join forces to take over a vacant site in London's Docklands for an "immersive" production of Torsten Rasch's new opera, based on John Webster's 17th-century revenge tragedy. Great Eastern Quay, London E16. Tickets are not yet on sale, but you can register your interest here" 13-24 July.
Bach Day
As usual, the Proms will mark most of the year's significant musical anniversaries – Schumann, Chopin, Scriabin, Mahler – and will devote an entire day to Bach. John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Brandenburg Concertos, David Briggs plays organ works and Andrew Litton takes on an evening of orchestral arrangements. Cadogan Hall & Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (0845 401 5040), 14 August.
Montezuma
The European colonisation of the new world is the theme of this year's Edinburgh international festival – and Carl Heinrich Graun's rarely performed opera from 1754, with a libretto by Frederick the Great of Prussia, fits into it perfectly. A Mexican production team stages this story of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, with a cast drawn from both the old and new worlds. King's, Edinburgh (0131-473 2000), 14, 15 & 17 August.
East Neuk festival
Expect high-class chamber music at this Scottish event, with both the Belcea and Elias quartets in residence. Programmes range across more than three centuries, from Tallis to Britten. Various venues, Fife (0131-473 2000), 30 June to 4 July.
Jazz
Wynton Marsalis
Marsalis and the Lincoln Center orchestra celebrate 80 years of big-band jazz history with three big London concerts, as well as workshops and jams at the Vortex Club and elsewhere. The Hackney gigs feature both an afternoon family concert and evening show, while the Glasgow performance is part of the Glasgow international jazz festival. Barbican Hall, London E8 (0845 120 7500), 17-18 June; Hackney Empire, London E8 (020-8510 4500), 20 June; Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow (0141-353 8000), 27 June.
The Necks
Every performance by Australia's cult improv trio the Necks is different – though you can be sure that each will be a seamless episode of free improvisation. Hypnotic hooks emerge and fade from trance-like drones, jazz phrasing is touched on and abandoned, and drum sounds are both textural and rhythmic. It's a unique ensemble, with a big cult following. Tron Theatre, Glasgow (0141-552 4267), 22 June.
Pat Metheny Band
Guitar star Metheny came to Britain with his one-man-band Orchestrion project earlier in the year, but this show represents the Metheny his long-time fans know: the leader of an accessible quartet fusing Latin music, jazz themes and lyrical guitar. Regulars Lyle Mays (piano), Steve Rodby (bass) and dynamic drummer Antonio Sanchez complete the lineup. Barbican, London EC2 (0845 120 7500), 10 July.
Kurt Elling
Jazz singer and multi-award nominee Elling has it all – Sinatra's soaring sound and charismatic cool, a dazzling jazz-improv technique, and an intelligent audacity about picking unusual material. Ronnie Scott's, London W1 (020-7439 0747), 30 June-3 July.
World music
Womad
This festival can either be a miserable mudbath or an easy-going weekend in the Wiltshire countryside – but it's worth risking it for an impressive lineup. From Congo, Staff Benda Bilili play rousing rhumba-rock from their wheelchairs; and from Australia there's the soulful Aboriginal star Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. Plus Nigeria's master drummer Tony Allen, the Kamkars from Kurdish Iran, and great American veteran Gil Scott-Heron. Charlton Park, Malmesbury, Wiltshire, 23-25 July. Box office: 0845 146 1735.
Cambridge Folk Festival
There are dozens of good UK folk festivals this summer – but Cambridge still has the highest profile, partly because it has become an international event with increasing emphasis on American stars. This year the line-up includes country legend Kris Kristofferson, the Carolina Chocolate Drops and the multilingual Pink Martini, along with Malian star Rokia Traoré. The British contingent includes the Unthanks and Seth Lakeman. Cherry Hinton Hall, 29 July to 1 August. Box office: 01223 357851.
Dance
Pleasure's Progress
Will Tuckett visits the dark underbelly of 18th-century England, mixing dance and opera in this homage to William Hogarth. The cast includes the excellent Matthew Hart. Jerwood DanceHouse, Ipswich (01473 295230), 18-19 June, then touring.
Russian ballet in London
Heavyweight Moscow ballet giant the Bolshoi and the St Petersburg featherweight, the Mikhailovsky, fight it out for London's summer ballet audience. The Bolshoi have a new staging of Coppélia and Ratmansky's Russian Seasons, while the Mikhailovsky bring the classic Gorsky-Messerer Swan Lake, as well as Chabukiani's uber-Soviet ballet Laurencia. The Mikhailovsky are at the Coliseum, London WC2 (020-7632 8300) from 13 July; The Bolshoi are at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020-7304 4000), from 17 July.
Carlos Acosta
Acosta returns with his latest mixed programme – and his performances include debuts in the beautiful Russell Maliphant solo, Two, and Edwaard Liang's Sight Unseen, with Zenaida Yanowsky. Coliseum, London WC2 (020-7632 8300), from 28 July.
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: Agua
Following Bausch's death last year, her company opted to continue touring her work. Agua, seen here in the UK for the first time, is a tragicomic take on life played out against Brazilian landscapes. Playhouse, Edinburgh (0131 473 2000), 27-29 August.
Comedy
Penn and Teller
Stand aside, Derren Brown. Perform your disappearing act, Paul Daniels. Las Vegas magic act Penn and Teller are coming to town, for five nights in London this July. The duo's 30-year partnership has yielded multiple Emmy nominations, an appearance on The Simpsons – and, of course, their hit 1990s Channel 4 series, The Unpleasant World of Penn & Teller. This is their first live UK appearance in 16 years. Hammersmith Apollo, London W6 (0844 844 4748), 14-18 July.
Hans Teeuwen
Already confirmed for the Edinburgh fringe this year, the once-seen, never-forgotten Dutch comic Teeuwen unleashes his new show Smooth and Painful on an unsuspecting world. Even if you've seen the twisted cabaret of this demoniacal Nick Cave of comedy before, you've no idea what he'll come up with next. Pleasance Beyond, Edinburgh (0131-556 6550), 4-29 August.
My Name Is Sue
Winner of a Total Theatre award at last year's Edinburgh fringe, this frumpy cabaret once again unites the talents of composer/performer Dafydd James and director Ben Lewis, of the terrific Inspector Sands theatre group. James dons a blouse and skirt to play the titular housewife, who sits at a piano and whacks out the musical story of her unheralded life. Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff (029 2031 1050), 4 and 5 June. Then touring.
Emo Philips
A UK comedy favourite since the 1980s, Philips returns for the first time since 2006 to play – er, a tent in a field in Suffolk. Signing up the falsetto-voiced man-child is a real coup for Latitude: judging by his last British shows, age (he's now in his mid-50s) hasn't mellowed this relentless dispenser of disturbed one-liners. Latitude festival, July 18, then touring; at the Pleasance Cabaret Bar, Edinburgh (0131-556 6550), 5-29 August.
• Previews by Peter Bradshaw, Alexis Petridis, John Fordham, Michael Billington, Lyn Gardner, Robin Denselow, Brian Logan, Andrew Clements, Sam Wollaston, Judith Mackrell, Adrian Searle, Jonathan Glancey and Alison Flood
• This article/item was amended on 24 May 2010 to remove a box office
phone number at the request of ENO, as tickets must be registered for
online.
What to see in 2010
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 31, 2009
Can Martin Scorsese pull off a horror movie? Is Glasgow the new Venice? And what's Ricky Gervais up to in Reading? Our critics pick next year's hottest tickets
Film
Cemetery Junction
Having conquered Hollywood, Ricky Gervais is coming home. With his long-time collaborator Stephen Merchant, he has set out to create a British film in the tradition of Billy Liar and the Likely Lads – and of course his own masterpiece The Office – about three blokes working for the Prudential insurance company in Gervais's hometown of Reading. Released on 7 April.
A Single Man
The smart money says Colin Firth will be bringing home a certain gold, bald-headed statuette for his performance as a bereaved gay man in Los Angeles. Based on the 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood, the movie – fashion designer Tom Ford's directorial debut – follows one day in the life of Firth's literature academic as he confronts his own mortality. Released on 12 February.
A Prophet
Tahar Rahim is Talik, a scared young Arab guy in jail who is made an offer he can't refuse by Corsican mobster César, played by Niels Arestrup: he must murder a supergrass, or be killed himself. A gripping prison movie from French director Jacques Audiard. Released on 22 January.
Shutter Island
Martin Scorsese's much-anticipated new movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio was originally slated to come for autumn; the delay was reportedly due to its promotional budget getting credit-crunched. Anyway, better late than never. It's a mystery thriller with a generous spoonful of horror – a new generic twist for this master director. Released on 12 March.
The Headless Woman
A wealthy woman accidentally hits something in her car. Was it a dog? A person? She slips into woozy confusion, and the movie mimics the woman's disorientation and denial as she attempts to carry on with her life. An arthouse cult classic from Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel. Released on 19 February.
Scott Pilgrim vs the World
Edgar Wright is the British director who struck gold with Shaun of the Dead. Now he tackles his first proper Hollywood project – a wacky comedy based on the Bryan Lee O'Malley comic-book series. Michael Cera plays bass guitarist Scott Pilgrim, who, having fallen in love with a woman, must now do battle with her seven former boyfriends. Released on 27 August.
Father of My Children
A discreetly directed and superbly acted drama based on the tragic life of the French film producer Humbert Balsan. Grégoire is a much-loved mover-and-shaker in world cinema whose finances are crumbling. The ensuing crisis is brilliantly portrayed. Released on 5 March.
Visual art
Glasgow international festival of contemporary art
A huge, budget-melting installation by Swiss artist Christoph Büchel in the vast Tramway; a major new film by Gerard Byrne; works by Fiona Tan, Douglas Gordon, Linder and many more spread around Scotland's liveliest city, in the UK's best annual visual arts festival. Forget Edinburgh, forget Liverpool: this is the one. Venues across Glasgow (0141-287 8994, glasgowinternational.org), 16 April-3 May.
The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and His Letters
Van Gogh was erudite, intelligent, a great artist and an inveterate writer of letters. But he also did that thing to his ear, drank too much absinthe and killed himself. This show looks at his art in the light of his letters, recently published in English in full. Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 (020-7300 8000), 23 January-18 April.
Chris Ofili
Manchester-born Chris Ofili has rolled joints from elephant dung, made paintings decorated with dung, and moved on to territory that brings together German expressionism, Trinidadian myth, lovers, prophets, gods and ghosts. Promises to be blasphemous and inspiring, elegiac and sexy. Tate Britain, London SW1 (020-7887 8888), 27 January-16 May.
Jenny Holzer
There's more to American artist Holzer's work than an endless tickertape of words spelled out in LED lights. There are billboards, benches, condom wrappers and paintings. This is poetry with a plug, light shows with literature, an art of anger and beauty. Baltic, Gateshead (0191-478 1810), 5 March-16 May.
Sixth Berlin Biennial
The Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art is always fascinating, and sometimes great. In a city infested with artists and overshadowed by history, it attracts fewer wannabes, hangers-on, art-surfers and arrogant airheads than Venice. Berlin is serious, the food is a joke, the weather uncertain and the art at the time of writing a complete mystery. Go anyway. Venues across Berlin (00 49 [0] 302 434 5910, berlinbiennale.de), 11 June-8 August.
Gauguin
Paul Gauguin, stock-broker turned post-impressionist and symbolist painter and sculptor, mystified Van Gogh, with whom he shared a house for a while. What an odd couple. Gauguin died in French Polynesia in 1903 at the age of 54. His art, however, is a time bomb, still ticking in the 21st century; and this is the first major show in Britain for 50 years. Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8888), from 30 September.
Pop
Whitney Houston
Houston's misadventures during the last decade made the likelihood of her touring again seem nil. But here she is playing her first UK dates since 1998, rehabbed and in robust voice – although her ability to hit those power notes has diminished somewhat. Which may be a good thing. MEN Arena, Manchester (0844 847 8000), 8-9 April. Then touring.
Green Day
Here's a thing: an overtly political US band who are big enough to play stadiums. Mind you, if Green Day's views weren't complemented by radio-friendly rock, their two British summer dates would probably be somewhere cosier. Old Trafford (0871 2200 260), June 16; Wembley, London (020-7403 3331), June 19.
The xx
It's all about understatement and nuance with this indie band, earmarked just about everywhere as 2010's ones to watch. Don't expect fireworks or obvious "wow" moments on their first major headlining tour: they and their acclaimed self-titled album are very much insidious pleasures. Komedia, Brighton (0845 293 8480), 1 March. Then touring.
Lily Allen and Dizzee Rascal
Lily and Dizzee have more in common than you would think: they easily rank with 2009's most successful British musicians, and she's as influenced by Rascal's hip-hop milieu as he is by the pop world she inhabits. MEN Arena, Manchester (0844 847 8000), 5 March; 02 Arena, London (0844 856 0202), 7 March.
Glastonbury
The daddy of them all celebrates its 40th anniversary, and Glasto virgins U2 will be among those braving the mud to celebrate. Sold out, but returns go on sale in the new year. Worthy Farm, Somerset, 23-27 June.
Jazz and world music
Jerry Dammers Spatial AKA Orchestra
Specials and 2 Tone co-founder Dammers pays tribute to mystic free-jazz bandleader Sun Ra, who died in 1993, with a mix of jazz, funk, reggae, dub, hip-hop and rock. The all-star lineup includes Nathaniel Facey, Zoe Rahman and Jason Yarde. Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry (024-7652 4524), 4 March. Touring until 9 April.
Dan Berglund's Tonbrucket
Swedish pianist Esbjörn Svensson's death in 2008 wound up popular jazz trio EST, but bassist Dan Berglund and drummer Magnus Ostrom visit not only EST's music, but Pink Floyd, Arvo Pärt and more in their new quartet. Queen's Hall, Edinburgh (0131-668 2019), 13 March. Touring until 1 April.
Wynton Marsalis
The prolific Marsalis and his Lincoln Center Orchestra celebrate 80 years of big-band history in three major concerts, with jams all over London, including the Vortex. Barbican, London EC2 (0845 120 7550), 17 and 18 June; Hackney Empire, London E8 (020-8510 4500), 20 June.
African Soul Rebels
Mali's Oumou Sangaré, famed for her bravely outspoken views, is one of the stars of the sixth African Soul Rebels outing. She's joined by the rousing big band Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, and the veteran South African experimental political band, Kalahari Surfers. Poole Lighthouse (0844 406 8666), 18 February. Then touring.
Ali and Toumani
The most eagerly awaited African album of the year, this is the final recording by the great Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, and the kora virtuoso Toumani Diabaté – recorded a few months before Touré's death. Out 22 February.
Dance
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch
After the shock of Bausch's death this summer, her company has announced plans to continue under the joint direction of Dominique Mercy and Robert Sturm. In April, they come to London with Kontakthof, Bausch's 1978 meditation on love and human foibles. It will be performed by two radically different, alternating casts – one made up of senior citizens, the other of teenagers. Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891), 1-4 April.
Mark Morris Dance Group
Morris made L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, an ecstatic embrace of a dance, more than 20 years ago; it still ranks as one of the great experiences in the repertory. Handel's score will be played and sung by members of English National Opera. Coliseum, London WC2 (0871-911 0200), 14-17 April.
Hofesh Shechter
The rise and rise of Shechter continues with Political Mother, a large ensemble piece that plays with definitions of shock and normality, and comes with Shechter's own score. Dome, Brighton (01273 709709), 20 and 21 May; Sadler's Wells, London EC1 (0844 412 4300), 14-17 July.
Merce Cunningham Dance Company
A posthumous season for the late, great Merce includes the UK premiere of the work he choreographed just months before he died. Nearly Ninety belies its title with a score including music by Sonic Youth. Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891), 26-30 October.
Theatre
Arthur and George
David Edgar adapts Julian Barnes's gripping novel about a Birmingham solicitor who, after being convicted of a grisly crime, recruits the help of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Fact merges with fiction in a story that deals with race, innocence, guilt and spiritualism - with echoes of Sherlock Holmes. Rachel Kavanaugh directs what promises to be that rare thing: a necessary adaptation. Birmingham Rep (0121-236 4455), 19 March-10 April.
Peter Pan
David Greig relocates JM Barrie's masterpiece to a gas-lit Victorian Edinburgh. Director John Tiffany (Black Watch, The Bacchae) and designer Laura Hopkins are at the helm, so this Pan shouldn't simply fly, but soar. Kings, Glasgow (0844 871 7648), 23 April–8 May. Then touring.
Hamlet
Once again, it looks like we're set for a major battle of the princes. John Simm has first crack at the title in a Paul Miller production in the refurbished Sheffield Crucible. Then Rory Kinnear takes on the moody Dane, with Clare Higgins as Gertrude, directed by Nicholas Hytner at the National. Some people, recalling the very recent David Tennant-Jude Law clash, resent this duplication. I say: "Bring it on." Crucible Theatre, Sheffield (0114-249 6000), from September; Olivier theatre, London SE1 (020-7452 3000), from October.
Posh
Just in time for the general election, Laura Wade's new play deals with a group of Oxford hearties, all members of an elite student dining society. They hunt, booze, take illegal substances (possibly) and are, it seems, destined to rule over us. It's good to see Wade, who made a big impact with Breathing Corpses in 2005, resurrecting the class war in a topical Court production, directed by Lyndsey Turner. Royal Court, London SW1 (020-7565 5000), 9 April-22 May.
Oh! What a Lovely War
Joan Littlewood's timeless musical satire on the first world war gets its first major post-Iraq outing, with directors Erica Whyman and Sam Kenyon leading the troops over the top. Northern Stage, Newcastle (0191-230 5151), 6 March-27 March. Then touring.
The Persians
A Brecon military range becomes the setting for a site-responsive revival of Aeschylus's great play about war and defeat. Mike Pearson, who has been using found spaces with his legendary company Brith Gof long before it became fashionable, directs. Cilieni Village, Powys, Wales (01874 611622), 11-21 August.
Architecture
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford
Dynamic reconstruction of the famous 1930s theatre. New work includes a 1,030-seat modern take on a 17th-century courtyard stage, a revamped art deco foyer, a rooftop restaurant and a bridging tower linking old and new spaces. November.
Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany
Six rigorously geometrical new wings parade around four urban courtyards in this major extension by David Chipperfield of a fine museum devoted to 19th and 20th-century French and German art. The model of a modern building for a (hopefully) less wilfully ostentatious era. April.
Rolex Learning Centre, Lausanne, Switzerland
This exquisite Swiss building – a single, undulating floor boasting lake and mountain views – is a coming of age for Tokyo's Sanaa, designers of the 2009 Serpentine Pavilion. A science research centre that's as much landscape as architecture. February.
Television
Mad Men
The immaculately dressed alcoholic misogynists of the Sterling Cooper ad agency return to alternately horrify and entrance us. Nine months on, how is the company's merger with a London firm working out for boss Don, copywriter Peggy and co? And what state is Don's estranged wife Betty in? BBC4, from 27 January.
Glee
Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy's new musical comedy-drama about a high-school choir (the "glee club" of the title) is huge in the US. The club's show tunes and chart hits have sold millions, while viewers and critics have embraced the cast of engaging misfits (Murphy has a sharp eye for school dynamics, as fans of his shortlived cheerleader show Popular will recall). E4, from 11 January.
Money
This two-part slice of 1980s nostalgia, based on Martin Amis's novel, should offer a thought-provoking look at the era of flash cash and queasy living. Nick Frost (Hot Fuzz, Shawn of the Dead) stars as anti-hero John Self in a cast that includes Mad Men's Pete (Vincent Kartheiser). BBC2, spring.
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister
Maxine Peake (Shameless, Criminal Justice) plays a lesbian who keeps a coded journal of her love-life in a 19th-century Yorkshire village. Everything about this 90-minute drama screams "record", "hit" and "award-winning". BBC2, March/April.
Mistresses
Furtive hotel sex; frantic muffin-baking; guilty pinot grigio guzzling. This soapy drama about four Bristol thirtysomething women returns for a third series with some inspired new casting: Joanna Lumley joins as the bossy mother of muddle-headed doctor Katie, played by Sarah Parish. BBC1, late 2010.
Classical and opera
Mahler in Manchester
The most innovative celebration of Gustav Mahler's 150th birthday you'll hear all year: the Hallé and BBC Philharmonic's cycle of his symphonies, in which each symphony is paired with a new piece from an international line-up of composers, from Austrian surrealist Kurt Schwertsik to Parisian organist Olivier Latry. Bridgewater Hall, Manchester (0161-907 9000), 16 January-5 June.
Placido sings Handel
Whoever thought you'd see this at Covent Garden? Placido Domingo takes the composer's greatest tenor role, Bajazet, in Tamerlano, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the pit. Mouth-watering. Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020-7304 4000), 5-20 March.
Elegy for Young Lovers
English National Opera continues its part-time residency at the Young Vic with Hans Werner Henze's 1961 opera on crazed creative amorality in the Alps, with a libretto by WH Auden, and a production directed by Fiona Shaw. The only chance to see Henze, the greatest living opera composer, in the theatre in the UK this year. Young Vic, London SE1 (020-7922 2922), 24 April-8 May.
WNO's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
The operatic role of the year: Bryn Terfel sings Hans Sachs for the first time in Wagner's Meistersinger. It's a part he should play even more convincingly than the Wotan he sang in Covent Garden's Ring. This new staging by Richard Jones could be the one that cracks Wagner's complex comedy. Welsh National Opera, Cardiff (08700 40 2000), 19 June-10 July.
Total Immersion: Wolfgang Rihm
No composer alive has written as much music as Wolfgang Rihm; yet no major figure in new music is as shamingly unfamiliar to British audiences. With this two-day event, part of its Total Immersion series, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with the help of the London Sinfonietta and the Arditti Quartet, put that right. Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891), 12-13 March.
Comedy
Dara O'Briain
From Three Men in a Boat to one man on a stage, TV favourite O'Briain takes to the nation's concert halls for a 64-date tour. A civilised and smart standup long before TV fame came calling, this is the Mock the Week anchorman's first tour in two years. Regent, Stoke (0844 871 7649), 1 March. Then touring.
Laura Solon
With her latest show, Rabbit Faced Story Soup, the winner of the last-ever Perrier award has turned her talent for creating comic characters into a comedy play about an ailing publishing house and its missing star novelist. Now she's taking it on a national tour. Junction, Cambridge (01223 511 511), 29 January. Then touring.
Pappy's Fun Club
The fast-rising young quartet take to the road with their Edinburgh 2009 hit show World Record Attempt: 200 Sketches in an Hour. It's less Fast Show, more nonsense cabaret, supplying music, anarchy and good cheer. Komedia, Brighton (0845 293 8480), 21 January. Then touring.
Chosen by Judith Mackrell, Michael Billington, Caroline Sullivan, Lyn Gardner, Jonathan Glancey, Peter Bradshaw, Adrian Searle, John Fordham, Robin Denselow, Brian Logan and Tim Lusher