Scotland
Yuletide Scenes 1: The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston LochWednesday, 19 December 2012
In our chilled Decembers, even when snowless, winter scenes are visually synonymous with Christmas, and Henry Raeburn’s small painting of The Reverend Robert Walker, from the 1790s, skating with abstracted solemnity and perfect balance on... Read more... |
CD: Mogwai – A Wrenched Virile LoreSunday, 18 November 2012
The remix album is an ungainly beast. The worst feel like a sign of creative bankruptcy while even the best feel like a shameless cash-in on a successful project. Hopelessly devoted fans might still call it a win-win situation, but to outside ears... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: The Blue Nile, The Seeds, Dan Penn, Frankie Goes to HollywoodSunday, 04 November 2012
The Blue Nile: A Walk Across The Rooftops, HatsGraeme ThomsonThe Blue Nile occupy a unique spot in the musical landscape. Formed in 1980 by Glasgow University graduates Paul Buchanan, Paul Joseph Moore and Robert Bell, four albums in 30 years... Read more... |
You've Been Trumped, BBC TwoTuesday, 23 October 2012
It has never been easier to get sucked into a warm, simplistic sensibility which portrays every rich capitalist businessman as corrupt and amoral, but you spend 90 minutes watching Donald Trump in action and you start to wonder. If Trump didn't... Read more... |
The Lighthouse, English Touring OperaFriday, 12 October 2012
Confinement is a thread running through English Touring Opera’s autumn season. In Albert Herring it is in the priggish village; in The Emperor of Atlantis it is in the circumstances of its creation within the Terezín concentration camp; in The... Read more... |
BraveMonday, 13 August 2012
Animated 11th-century Scotland is a great place to live for a girl with a bow and arrow, until your mum decides to marry you off to any young numpty who wins a clan tournament. No wonder the female audience comes predisposed to love Merida, the star... Read more... |
CD: James Yorkston - I Was a Cat From a BookSunday, 12 August 2012
James Yorkston, the very able singer-songwriter from Fife, is now on his fifth album for Domino. This comes hot on the heels of the reissue of his first and excellent release, Moving Up Country, which established him as one of the most talented... Read more... |
CD: Karine Polwart - TracesMonday, 06 August 2012
The best music has the power to lift the listener out of whatever else she may be doing, to transport her somewhere else. I listened to Traces, fifth album from doyenne of Scottish folk Karine Polwart, in a cafe in Edinburgh in what for that city is... Read more... |
The South Bank Show: Nicola Benedetti, Sky Arts 1/ The Good Guys, Sky 1Monday, 02 July 2012
There are worse assignments than making a film about Nicola Benedetti, and the glamorous 25-year-old violinist had clearly entranced Lord Bragg. Mind you, you'd struggle to find much to dislike about her. She's funny and articulate and has a billion... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Raploch: Sistema Scotland Makes Big NoiseSunday, 17 June 2012
For perhaps the most widely cheered orchestra on the planet, it doesn’t look like much of a concert venue. Fenced in with wire, flanked by a road which leads away to low-rise housing, a scrappy patch of scrubland stretches over a few nondescript... Read more... |
James Yorkston, Oran Mor, GlasgowMonday, 04 June 2012
“Before I met James Yorkston, I used to write songs that had choruses in them - and here’s one of them.” Irish folk-inspired singer-songwriter Seamus Fogarty may be one of the newer additions to the legendary Fence Records label from which Yorkston... Read more... |
Cannes 2012: Making a killing on the Côte d'AzurThursday, 24 May 2012
The last time that actor Brad Pitt and New Zealand director Andrew Dominik teamed up it was for the epic and elegiac western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Their new one, in competition in Cannes, couldn’t be more... Read more... |
