This Cultural Life

[Aruntraveller]

A thread for posting events, concerts, festivals, exhibitions etc that have made an impression on you. Doesn't have to be highbrow. My first one is of a classical concert but it could equally have been about a trad jazz band in a local pub.

We went to the Nottingham concert hall yesterday evening to see the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra.  They performed the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the soloist being Arabella Steinbacher (very impressive) and then Shostakovich's 5th symphony, which some of you will remember I am a big fan of. It was a remarkably accomplished performance and better than the Halle when I saw them perform it some time ago, when the tempo in the first movement particularly was far to quick. A good evening. And we got home before the rain started!

[Walter]

A thread for posting events, concerts, festivals, exhibitions etc that have made an impression on you. Doesn't have to be highbrow. My first one is of a classical concert but it could equally have been about a trad jazz band in a local pub.

We went to the Nottingham concert hall yesterday evening to see the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra.  They performed the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the soloist being Arabella Steinbacher (very impressive) and then Shostakovich's 5th symphony, which some of you will remember I am a big fan of. It was a remarkably accomplished performance and better than the Halle when I saw them perform it some time ago, when the tempo in the first movement particularly was far to quick. A good evening. And we got home before the rain started!

last time I went to a gig like that a bloke at the back shouted ''play summat we know''


actually it was me !!!! 

[Harrowby Hall]

A Soviet artist's response to just criticism.

I think that that is Walter was trying to say ...

[Rhiannon]

It was a while ago but I'm a Paul Nash fangirl and went to the exhibition at Tate Modern three times. It was beautifully curated. One of the chaps that I went to see it with comes from Dorset where Nash lived and worked for many years; he spotted that a cloud in one of the paintings is actually an outline of the county boundaries of Dorset, which wasn't mentioned in the exhibition notes. I found a real poignancy in how his work went full circle, beginning with a particular landscape and ending with landscapes of the same area as he neared the end of his life.

He had a very animist, maybe even pagan edge to his work. He began by painting spirits in the sky. He saw that objects could have personalities - he used a large piece of tree root found by a riverbank that he called Marsh Personage in his work, and he said that to him it was 'alive'. He also thought that objects or collections of things were art waiting to be discovered by the artist (I once had a brilliant conversation about this with a London cabbie called Jason). And in his later paintings he featured wheels rolling down hillsides of wheat, and lunar and solar landscapes and eclipses.

I always see something new in his work. And I haven't even mentioned his war art.

[Harrowby Hall]

Going back to Trent's experience. The only time I have attended a performance of Shostakovich 5 was also in Nottingham but in the Albert Hall (that tells you how long ago it was) by the LPO under Leonard Slatkin.

A few years ago I heard Baiba Skride with the CBSO and Andris Nelsons play Shostakovich's first violin concerto. This was written during the time of the Stalin purges. Anyone to whom Stalin took the slightest objection could find themselves very quickly in the gulag (if he or she were lucky!). The composer poured all his anxiety and fear into this concerto and then left it locked in a desk drawer until after Stalin's death.

I found it a bleak and harrowing experience.

[Nearly Sane]

I saw Alan Rickman in Liaisons Dangereuses and I think everyone in the theatre would have been a conquest that night.

One month apart I saw John Martyn do one of the worst shows ever, smashed out his head, and a stunning surprise gig in a bar that had a slew of Glasgow men with something in their eye.



I was lucky enough to go the Comedy Store and see a surprise set by Robin Williams which was as close to genius as I have seen.

[Robbie]

I saw Macbeth, a school production (Scalby school I think) at Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough on 26th. Wonderful!

Last time I saw Macbeth it was the opera, a few years ago and I was abroad somewhere. (I think it was France, husband thinks it was somewhere else.)