WOMAD 2026

29 July 2026

When the WOMAD Festival moved to Charlton Park in Wiltshire in 2007 (reviewed here in August 2007) that first festival at the new site was beset by problems, exacerbated by the constant rain that created a sea of mud. Last weekend's first post-Charlton Park WOMAD, at the festival's new home of Neston Park near Corsham in Wiltshire, seemed to have learned much from the 2007 experience - and also benefited from near perfect weather. For the first outing at this new venue (after a fallow year with no festival in 2025), everything seemed to go extremely smoothly. Neston Park feels smaller than Charlton Park (the WOMAD programme described it as "more intimate") but the numbers attending seemed to fit the space well. I soon got the hang of the new layout of the festival arena (though it took me until Saturday afternoon to realise that the beautiful path through the sunflower field provided a handy shortcut between the two halves of the arena). I'm not sure they had got the positioning of all the stages quite right but I expect the necessary tweaks will be in place by next year's festival. And, for me, 2026 was, musically, the best WOMAD for quite a while. I saw 23 performances over the three days, including 15 full sets, and there were many many highlights. It was great to see WOMAD founder Peter Gabriel on stage on Saturday afternoon to pay tribute to the WOMAD Festival Director Chris Smith who is retiring after 20 years in charge. Later in the day I found myself standing immediately behind Peter Gabriel in the crowd in the Sunflower Tent, watching the band LYR, featuring the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. I really enjoyed Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek and their 1970s psychedelic version of traditional Anatolian folk music. I was charmed by the intergenerational group representing the Lăutăresele Şaraimanic project that celebrates music from the variety of different ethnic communities in Romania. While these performances of Anatolian and Romanian folk music presented the traditional in an innovative modern way, the Mexican brass band Mixanteña de Santa Cecilia performed music from the Pacific coast of Mexico in a way that appeared to be completely historically authentic, with traditional costumes and dancers, but was no less thrilling. Bénin International Musical's "incendiary voodoo sound of West Africa" was engaging and varied. And I loved the Brooklyn disco funk of Say She She. Amidst these big danceable shows on the main stage, I'm pleased I also found the time to see Pakistani musician Ustad Noor Bakhsh on the smaller Village Stage. He plays the benju - a zither with typewriter-style keys, played like a lap-steel guitar - and he only found international recognition when already in his late seventies. His hypnotic fast-picking tunes found an enthusiastic audience at WOMAD and provided a beautiful opportunity for contemplation. But my favourite moments of the 2026 WOMAD Festival were the polyphonic vocals of the Occitan group Barrut from Southern France and the high energy singing and dancing of Galician female folk trio Tanxugueiras from Northern Spain. In both cases I found myself thrilled to have chosen to be at those stages at that time and thinking I will remember these performances for many years.

Edinburgh Festivals 2025

29 August 2025

We had a great time at the Edinburgh Festivals last week, seeing 21 shows across a wide variety of genres, topics and venues. There were many highlights but I'll just mention a few favourites:

'Down to Chance' is a great piece of fringe theatre from the Cornwall-based theatre company Maybe You Like It. A two-hander with Ellie Jay Cooper (also the writer) and Robert Merriam playing multiple roles, it tells the story of the Great Earthquake that hit Anchorage, Alaska, on Good Friday 1964. The earthquake took out all communications apart from the local radio station, where female reporter Genie Chance was left in sole charge, broadcasting through the night to reunite missing people and coordinate the volunteer efforts. A gripping true story, entertainingly told.

'Lady Macbeth Played Wing Defence' by West Australian company Crash Theatre Co. and House of Oz reimagines the Scottish play as the story of a high school netball team. ‘Mac’ is determined to become captain of the team, even if it means dispensing with her teammates by murdering their reputations. It's great fun, and very silly, but the occasional actual Shakespearean speeches are surprisingly moving.
'The Queen Is Mad' is a musical/chamber opera, by Amy Clare Tasker and Tom James McGrath, about Joanna, elder sister of Catherine of Aragon and daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, who inherited the thrones of Castile and Aragon but was prevented from ruling either by her father, her husband and her son who imprisoned her, claiming she was mad. It's beautifully sung by a cast of three, featuring Maria Coyne as Joanna, and a fascinating piece of history.  

We were very lucky to see the Aurora Orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Collon, at the Usher Hall, playing Shostakovich's 5th Symphony from memory. Memorising this titanic work for a huge orchestra is an incredible feat but it's not just a party trick. The whole orchestra standing, without any music stands, and moving with the music, was an amazing sight. And it sounded fresh and incredibly exciting. They had played the symphony at The Proms in London a few days before and it's well worth watching on BBC iPlayer, but it only gives you a flavour of the live experience. It was a thrilling performance. 

Edinburgh Festivals 2024

29 August 2024

Our visit to the Edinburgh Festivals last week was the 30th anniversary of our first trip there in 1994. We haven't been every year but I think we've now done the festivals at least 20 times. As always, our 2024 visit was brilliant and exhausting: we saw 22 shows in four and a half days in a total of 17 different venues. In the Edinburgh International Festival we were at the Usher Hall to see the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra (who we last saw in Edinburgh in 2016, reviewed here in September 2016) conducted by Thierry Fischer, playing the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss. This was the first time I've seen a performance of the symphony since I played it with the Northampton Symphony Orchestra in 2019 (reviewed here in June 2019). We also went to the opening night of 'Assembly Hall' at the Festival Theatre - an intriguing mixture of drama and dance performed by the Kidd Pivot company, directed and choreographed by Crystal Pite and written by Jonathon Young. 'Assembly Hall' shows a group of medieval battle re-enactors gathering for their Annual General Meeting in a crumbling community hall. As the group start to argue about whether to disband or continue, the argument morphs into a vicious battle, complete with swords and armour. It's a peculiar, beautiful, funny and puzzling piece of theatre, with the dancers syncing exaggerated movement to the recorded dialogue to indicate which character is speaking. Crystal Pite uses the dancers to create some stunning tableaux and mesmerising effects but we found it difficult to completely follow what was going on. We really enjoyed another chance to see the philosopher Julian Baggini at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, this time speaking about his new book 'How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy'. In the Edinburgh Festival Fringe our favourite shows included 'Nation' written and performed by Sam Ward - a clever and disturbing tale about a town gripped by fear and hatred, which reminded us of the unsettling theatre made by Tim Crouch (such as 'The Author', reviewed here in September 2010). We also loved 'Same Team' by Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse at the Traverse Theatre - a funny, moving and inspiring play about a women's football team from Scotland playing in the Homeless World Cup which was told by five actors in a style reminiscent of John Godber's plays for the Hull Truck Theatre company (such as 'Teechers', reviewed here in September 2010). And once again I am grateful to Kelly for her brilliant Fringe recommendations which included the wonderful 'Sawdust Symphony' a bizarre but strangely beautiful circus piece from Germany that was essentially live woodwork - the sort of thing you could only see at the Edinburgh Fringe. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uThKVDvZqCY

WOMAD 2024

31 July 2024

The 2024 WOMAD Festival, at Charlton Park near Malmesbury in Wiltshire, took place over a gloriously sunny weekend. I saw 17 full performances and sampled many more, seeing artists from countries including Brazil, Bulgaria, India, Mongolia, Morocco, Taiwan, Tanzania and Tibet. 

It was fascinating to see the Bhutan Balladeers at the Taste the World Stage, demonstrating how to cook a traditional Bhutanese curry (containing a massive bowl of chillies which they told us was half the amount they would normally use!) while singing traditional religious songs written in a language that nobody in Bhutan now speaks. None of the members of the band had ever been out of Bhutan before (and had never previously been on a plane) but they were wonderful ambassadors for this small, remote Himalayan country which has a population of around 800,000. 

I was intrigued to see Sangjaru, a trio from South Korea who claimed to stitch together the swing of gypsy jazz with the folk traditions of their Korean homeland. They turned out to be even more eccentric than their description suggested, and great fun - though a little less gipsy jazz than I had hoped. 

The Pankisi Ensemble are Cechens from Eastern Georgia - four women singing in achingly beautiful scrunchy harmonies. They were clearly more used to formal recitals than outdoor festivals but the rapturous reception they received from a packed crowd seemed to relax them and they began to smile and even offered an occasional dance move. 

I really enjoyed Saigon Soul Revival, from Vietnam, and their very cool take on 60s psychedelia. But my favourite moment of this year's WOMAD was the performance by Duo Ruut - two Estonian women who have invented a completely new way to play the traditional Estonian plucked zither. Rather than sitting with the zither on the lap, the two of them stand facing each other across the instrument (on a high stand) and jointly pluck, bow and strum the single instrument (a bit like a four-handed piano piece) while singing into microphones placed above the zither. They perform their own, beautiful contemporary compositions. And, much like the Estonian zombie-folk duo Puuluup, who I saw at last year's WOMAD Festival (reviewed here in August 2023) Duo Ruut's patter between the songs was genuinely hilarious - and reinforced the idea that the only thing Estonians sing about is the weather! Fortunately WOMAD 2024 had near perfect weather.

You can see a selection of my photos from WOMAD 2024 at: https://culturaloutlook.blogspot.com/search/label/WOMAD2024

Edinburgh Festivals 2023

1 September 2023

We had a great time at the Edinburgh festivals last week. This year we decided to go for 5 days rather than our usual 7, but we still managed to see 20 shows - and we chose well. I’m grateful to Kelly for her recommendations which were among our favourites. ‘Beautiful Evil Things’ was a one-woman show from Ad Infinitum in which Deborah Pugh plays the decapitated head of Medusa telling us the story of the Trojan Wars in a tour de force of physical theatre and story-telling. ‘Her Green Hell’ was another amazing one-woman performance, from TheatreGoose, with Sophie Kean playing the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Peruvian jungle, trying to make her way to safety - the remarkable true story of Juliane Koepcke and the 1971 LANSA Flight 508 plane crash. We also loved Out of the Forest theatre’s production: ‘The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria’. King Boris III chose to ally with Hitler’s Germany rather than Russia in the Second World War but went on to undermine the Nazi’s plans, saving the lives of around 50,000 Bulgarian Jews before apparently being assassinated. Joseph Cullen and Sasha Wilson’s play with a cast of five was a hilarious comic pantomime that also managed to present a fascinating and respectful account of this forgotten episode in European history. We went to two stunning orchestral concerts at the Usher Hall. We saw the Oslo Philharmonic, conducted by Klaus Makela, give a thrilling performance of Shostakovich’s ‘Symphony No 5’. They also accompanied Yuja Wang playing both Ravel’s ‘Piano Concerto in G major’ and his ‘Piano Concerto for the Left Hand’ - which we played with the Northampton Symphony Orchestra a few years ago (reviewed here in November 2017). And we really enjoyed seeing the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra from Venezuela playing the Beethoven Choral Symphony with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus - with conductor Rafael Payare pushing the pace throughout.

WOMAD 2023

2 August 2023

Last weekend I was back at Charlton Park in Wiltshire for the WOMAD Festival. At most festivals it is impossible to see everything (there were 160 artists performing at WOMAD this year) so you end up curating your own mini festival. I saw 23 performances (including 18 full sets) and this year my WOMAD was dominated by a series of remarkable women.

Liraz is a singer who was born to an Iranian-Jewish family and raised in Israel. In 2020, in defiance of the Iranian government, she recorded an album in a hidden basement in Istanbul with her Israeli octet and musicians from Tehran who cannot be named for fear of reprisals back home. Her music is joyous Middle Eastern pop underpinned by life-affirming political messages.

Marina Satti is a classically trained Greek-Sudanese singer  who founded Fonés - a female a cappella group performing traditional polyphonic songs  - and Chόres - a choir of 150 women aged 13–55. She combines catchy pop music with close harmony female vocals which draw on Greek and Bulgarian traditions and, at times, sound very like my favourite Finnish group Värttinä (reviewed here in August 2006). This video from 2019 showcases the vocal harmonies of Marina Satti and Fonés: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEs0YJrdjYg  

It was great to see the Manchester-born Palestinian singer, musician and broadcaster Reem Kelani again, who I last saw at WOMAD in 2007 (reviewed here in August 2007) and whose 2006 debut album 'Sprinting Gazelle' is still a favourite of mine. Her explanation of the stories behind her songs gave fascinating insights into Middle Eastern and Mediterranean ancient and recent history and I would recommend listening to her Radio 4 documentary on the role of music in Egypt's 2011 revolution, 'Songs for Tahrir', which is available on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b019fxjf  

There were two great comic performances at WOMAD this year. It was wonderful to see the brilliant New Orleans-style Riot Jazz Brass Band - ten years after I first saw them at WOMAD (reviewed here in August 2013). As their website says Riot Jazz "hail from the grimy protoplasm of Manchester’s prolific creative scene, spreading unconditional love and irresistible energy across the nation and continent".  But what makes a Riot Jazz performance is their irrepressible frontman MC Chunky. Part compere, part comedian, part rapper, he provides a running commentary during and in between the tunes, orchestrating the audience participation, introducing the band and entertaining everyone, all in a strong Manchester accent. His role is also a very clever way of getting round the brass player's challenge of not being able to play continuously for an hour without a break. Here's a flavour of Riot Jazz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8iaBTIYv2w

Puuluup are a self-styled Estonian zombie-folk duo who play hiiu kannel (a rectangular violin-like instrument) and use electronic loopers to create multi-layered songs. As they explained "there used to be 38 other musicians in the band but it was too expensive so we got rid of them and bought a looper, and now we are rich". They have perfected a very serious kind of ridiculousness and the deadpan humour of their introductions to the songs is hilarious. We are told that most Estonian folk songs are about agriculture, or cross-country skiing. And when they finally play a love song it is an ode to a piece of technology - a wind turbine "but otherwise it is just like any other love song". This short video will give you an idea of taste of the craziness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVFFHgqrvZg

I always enjoy the Taste The World stage at WOMAD, where artists who are performing at the festival are interviewed while cooking a traditional dish from their country. This year I saw the eccentric Austrian singer Alicia Edelweiss wrongfoot her interviewer when asked whether the Knödel recipe she was demonstrating had been passed down through generations of her family, explaining that she had actually found it online last week in preparation for this session. And the most moving moment of the weekend was Sahra Halgan from Somaliland cooking a traditional meat casserole while talking about having to act, at the age of 16, as an untrained nurse during the war of independence against Somalia. When the resistance ran out of medicine, painkillers or antibiotics, she tried to relieve the pain of the wounded in the only way left to her - by singing to them. Somaliland has been a self-declared republic for 32 years, with a population of nearly 6 million people and regular democratic elections, but is still not officially recognised by the United Nations. Sahra Halgan singing, smiling and holding  a small Somaliland flag, while sprinkling spices into her bubbling casserole will be one of the images that stays with me from WOMAD 2023.

Finally it was a real privilege to see the legendary Afro-Peruvian singer Susana Baca. At 79 years her voice still has strength and delicacy, and her gentle, beautiful songs are delivered through a beaming smile.

You can see a selection of my photos from WOMAD 2023 at: http://culturaloutlook.blogspot.com/search/label/WOMAD2023

Edinburgh Festivals 2022

2 September 2022

It was great to be back at the Edinburgh Festivals last week, for the first time since 2018. It did feel a little less busy than our last pre-pandemic festival, and the streets were strewn with rubbish because of strike action affecting bin collection. Nevertheless, in most aspects it did seem like things were getting back towards normal. We managed to see 27 shows during our week in Edinburgh - almost all of a surprisingly high standard. We saw two brilliant orchestral concerts at the Usher Hall as part of the Edinburgh International Festival: the Czech Philharmonic, conducted by Semyon Bychkov, gave a stunning performance of Mahler’s ‘Symphony No 7’; and the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, were incredibly engaging and entertaining in Florence Price’s ‘Symphony No 1’. This symphony, premiered in 1932, was the first work by a Black woman composer to be performed by a major US orchestra and it’s a lovely piece which deserves to be more widely performed. At the Edinburgh International Book Festival we saw the actor Alan Cumming talking about his recent memoir ‘Baggage’. Our pick of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival included fringe veteran comedian Simmon Munnery - on particularly good form this year - and our belated discovery of the wonderfully funny and likeable musical duo Jonny & The Baptists (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdR8e08ng9M). We enjoyed two excellent quintessential fringe one-person biographical plays: Alison Skilbeck’s ‘Mrs Roosevelt Flies to London’ and Tayo Aluko’s ‘Call Mr. Robeson’. Seeing the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh production of ‘The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart’ by David Greig and Wils Wilson in the amazing setting of the University of Edinburgh Playfair Library felt like proper ‘event theatre’ and was great fun. Emily Bruni was brilliant in Matt Wilkinson’s one-woman play ‘Psychodrama’ at the Traverse Theatre. And we rounded off our week in Edinburgh with another outstanding solo performance - Samuel Barnett in ‘Feeling Afraid as If Something Terrible Is Going to Happen’, written by Marcelo Dos Santos and directed by Matthew Xia, at the Roundabout at Summerhall. As always Edinburgh in August felt like a cultural top-up which should keep us going for the next year.

Amp Literary

29 April 2022

On Saturday we made the short journey to the Parkside Community Hall in Ampthill to attend ‘Amp Literary’ - the Ampthill Literary Festival - an event postponed from 2020. The journalist and Sunday Times bestseller Erin Kelly spoke about her ‘psychological gothic’ novels and explained the process of writing her latest book ‘Watch Her Fall’ during lockdown. ‘Watch Her Fall’ is a thriller about a dancer, which uses ‘Swan Lake’ as its inspiration and structure. It was fascinating to hear how she had used the ballet to develop the novel. Erin Kelly was one of the most engaging, articulate and well-prepared authors I have seen at a book festival: we really enjoyed her session. It was also wonderful to rediscover the poet/comedian Henry Normal who I first saw live at a comedy club in Peterborough nearly 30 years ago. Henry Normal disappeared from view as a performer when he set up Baby Cow Productions with Steve Coogan and spent 17 years as its Managing Director. During this time he focussed on writing (he co-wrote ‘The Mrs Merton Show’ and ‘The Royle Family’) and producing shows including ‘Gavin and Stacey’, ‘Red Dwarf’, ‘The Mighty Boosh’, ‘Nighty Night’ and ‘Alan Partridge’. Since retiring from Baby Cow in 2016, Henry Normal has written and performed a lovely occasional series of BBC Radio 4 shows (all still available on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/b09rwvwt) which showcase his brilliant poetry. His poems are alternately childishly silly, beautiful, hilarious and breathtakingly poignant. The Scotsman newspaper called him "The Alan Bennett of poetry". I still treasure my copy of ‘Nude Modelling for the Afterlife’ - Henry Normal’s 1993 collection which I bought after seeing him at the Edinburgh Book Festival. It was very exciting to see him again after so long, in the intimate setting of the Ampthill festival. He is a brilliant performer and had the audience in the palm of his hand. He was there to promote his new book ‘The Escape Plan’  which includes all of the poems from his Radio 4 shows, together with the most popular poems from each of his previous collections. I’m looking forward to reading my signed copy! We finished our visit to Amp Literary with a very enjoyable performance from The Antipoet - an anarchic duo with their own unique blend of poetry, comedy and music.

‘Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics’

2 July 2020

One of the small pleasures of lockdown has been working through the back catalogue of episodes of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics’. Comedian, and classicist, Natalie Haynes has been taking a fresh look at the ancient world, through 30-minute programmes focussing on particular figures from ancient Greece and Rome, since 2014. All 6 series are available to listen to on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b077x8pc Her natural enthusiasm, detailed knowledge, straightforward approach and hilarious incredulity at the peculiarities of the ancient world are infectious, and we’ve gradually worked (backwards) through all 24 episodes. The most recent programmes (recorded during lockdown) look at mythical characters including Penelope, Eurydice and Helen of Troy. Having exhausted the archive of radio programmes we have now had to feed our addiction by watching ‘Troy Story’ – the event Natalie Haynes recorded for this year’s online Hay Festival Digital. This was a bravura summary of the whole of the Trojan War in just over an hour, in which Natalie Haynes was accompanied by live drawing by the illustrator and cartoonist Chris Riddell. It’s rather brilliant and can be watched on Hay Player, which contains thousands of audio and film recordings from several years of the Hay Festival and costs £10 for an annual subscription: https://www.hayfestival.com/p-16774-natalie-haynes-chris-riddell.aspx

'A Flavour of Flitwick' Fun Palace

11 October 2019

On Saturday morning I was at Flitwick library for the Fun Palace, 'A Flavour of Flitwick'. There were plenty of people taking part in creative and science activities, including lots of very young children. They were painting and drawing, engaging in a foreign language quiz and practicing the strange art of bookfolding (see: https://youtu.be/S0asVzuW7y4). Local air cadets were supervising a paper aeroplane challenge, a group of adults were playing whist and there was a lot of Lego on the floor. Someone was tentatively tapping out a tune on an upright piano and a circle of chairs, each containing a ukulele, promised more music to come. It was certainly a fun environment, with people genuinely enjoying themselves and trying new things for the first time. This was one of 390 Fun Palaces that took place across the country last weekend, see: http://funpalaces.co.uk/

WOMAD 2019

30 July 2019

My annual visit to the WOMAD Festival, in Charlton Park near Malmesbury in Wiltshire, was slightly shorter than usual this year as we were attending a wedding in Lancashire last Friday. But I made it to WOMAD for Saturday and Sunday and experienced near perfect weather – dry and warm, not too hot and not a drop of rain. The music was pretty good too. I saw 14 full performances from across the globe. My highlights included the other worldly ethereal sounds of South Saami singer Marja Mortensson from Norway joiking accompanied by electronics, percussion and tuba. The former child soldier turned rapper Emmanuel Jal from South Sudan is a brilliant showman, performing here with his sister Nyaruach from whom he was separated for 20 years. I enjoyed the exuberant set by Balkan brass/klezmer band Lemon Bucket Orkestra from Toronto. And it was great to see ‘Kraftwerk Re:Werk’ - a  symphonic reworking of the classic 1977 Kraftwerk album ‘Trans-Europe Express’ by composers Charlotte Harding and Lloyd Coleman. The performance of this 40-minute, 6-movement piece by Army of Generals and the British Paraorchestra (the orchestra of professional disabled musicians originally formed for the London 2012 Paralympics closing ceremony) conducted by Charles Hazlewood was stunning. I also really enjoyed seeing Orquesta Akokan – a gloriously old-fashioned band from Cuba playing traditional mambo and swing from the 1940s and 1950s. But my pick of the festival was the six piece vocal group San Salvador, from the Massif Central in southern France, who sing in Occitan, mostly a capella but with occasional drums and other percussion. Their scrunchy vocal harmonies (sung by three men and three women) reminded me of my favourite Finnish folk/rock band Värttinä (reviewed here in August 2006) and of the famous Sardinian singing shepherds, Tenores de Bitti (reviewed here in June 2007). I loved how theatrical each of San Salvador’s long and varied songs were, while being performed with a serious intensity. There was no imploring the audience to clap along nor any need to whoop up the crowd – just a hypnotic performance of vocal drones, rapid fire chanting (sounding at times like the auctioneer in a livestock sale) and complex accelerating rhythms. And the massive crowd in the Siam Tent responded with the most genuine and prolonged wave of adulation of the weekend. Take a look at San Salvador performing at Womex 2018 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgUhP9qQYBw And you can see a selection of my photos from WOMAD 2019 at: https://culturaloutlook.blogspot.com/search/label/WOMAD2019

Edinburgh Festivals 2018

30 August 2018

We had a wonderful time at the Edinburgh Festivals last week, seeing 26 shows including theatre, music, comedy and poetry. We enjoyed catching up with some old favourites such as the comedians Simon Munnery (recounting his experience of working as a cleaner in a Bedfordshire chicken factory) and Owen O’Neill (with ‘Ten Songs to Die For’ - another beautifully constructed and brilliantly performed piece of theatrical storytelling). It was also good to see another play by the impressive young duo Roxy Dunn and Alys Metcalf, whose previous work ‘In Tents and Purposes’ we really enjoyed at the Edinburgh Fringe two years ago. Their new show, ‘You Only Live Forever’, featured the same comic meta-dissection of the writing process and squabbling between the performers, bearing some resemblance to the marvellous National Theatre of Brent. Our musical highlight was an incredibly exciting Edinburgh International Festival debut by the Colbourn Orchestra – a youth orchestra from the Colbourn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles. Conductor Stéphane Denève drew a thrilling performance from the young musicians, starting with Esa-Pekka Salonen’s highly entertaining ‘Nyx’. The orchestra were joined by fellow Colbourn student Simone Porter for the gorgeous ‘Violin Concerto’ by Samuel Barber, galloping through the seemingly impossible final movement with ease. Rachmaninov’s ‘Symphonic Dances’ had audience and orchestra on the edge of their seats and an encore of Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Overture to Candide’ provided a stunning finish to a wonderful concert. Our theatrical highlights included Lily Bevan’s new two-hander ‘Zoo’ - a funny and poignant story of a cross-Atlantic friendship, natural disaster and bats. We really enjoyed Alison Skilbeck’s one-woman play 'Are There More of You' – only realising afterwards that we had seen her perform it before at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2008 (reviewed here in August 2008)! We also liked Mark O’Rowe’s triptych cycle of friendship and estrangement in contemporary Dublin, ‘The Approach’, and the descent into farce in Brian Parks’ play ‘The House’ had us laughing uncontrollably. But our best discovery was the young actor Kizzy Dunn who was performing two Shakespearean adaptations by Nick Hennegan. At the end of ‘Hamlet’ the dying prince says “Oh God, Horatio, what a damaged reputation I’m leaving behind me, as no one knows the truth. If you ever loved me, then please postpone the sweet relief of death awhile, and stay in this harsh world long enough to tell my story.” In ‘Hamlet: Horatio’s Tale’ Kizzy Dunn played Horatio recounting the tragedy of his friend, in effect giving us a one-woman rendition of ‘Hamlet’ in an hour. It was a stunning performance which made us immediately book tickets for her other show, ‘Henry V: Lion of England’. Kizzy Dunn’s performance of ‘Henry V’ (again in one hour) was even more impressive: it’s the first time the St Crispin’s Day speech has actually made me cry. She is definitely a name to watch and these solo shows in a small venue where everyone is close to the action demonstrated the very best of fringe theatre.

WOMAD 2018

30 July 2018

This year’s WOMAD Festival at Charlton Park in Wiltshire had mixed weather but the threatened torrential downpours failed to materialise and we only had a little light rain on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. The music was eclectic as ever. My personal highlights, from the 17 full performances I saw, included gentle acoustic songs from Estonian singer Mari Kalkun, the pan-American female quartet LADAMA (from Columbia, Brazil, Venezuela and the USA) and a long-overdue opportunity to see the wonderful Amparo Sanchez and her band Amparanoia. This was a WOMAD for catching up with artists I have enjoyed listening to for years but never before had the chance to see perform live. French vocal gymnast Camille (reviewed here in May 2008) proved as impressive, bizarre and compelling as I had hoped, with a stunning show on the main Open Air Stage on Saturday evening, featuring some great dancing. And the young, female, a cappella, Finnish folk hop quartet Tuuletar (reviewed here in January 2017 when I compared them to Camille) were stunning live performers as well as being hilarious and charming in their appearance at the Taste the World stage (where they demonstrated how to make traditional Karelian pie). But my favourite performance of WOMAD 2018 was the Bollywood Brass Band with the South Indian violinist Jyotsna Srikanth. I loved Sarha Moore and Kay Charlton’s new soundtrack for the finale of the amazing 1948 film 'Chandralekha’ which the band performed live with the film on Saturday afternoon. It starts with the epic scene where 400 dancers perform on top of enormous drums: suddenly the drums open up to reveal armies of soldiers who attack the stronghold – it’s an incredible spectacle. Then the Bollywood Brass Band played their new four-movement  ‘Carnatic Suite: A Day In Bangalore’, composed with Jyotsna Srikanth and featuring the amazing South Indian percussionist and vocalist RN Prakash. It was a great performance from a really enjoyable festival. You can see a selection of my photos from WOMAD 2018 at: https://culturaloutlook.blogspot.com/search/label/WOMAD2018

WOMAD 2017

1 August 2017

I have been writing here about my annual visit to the WOMAD Festival every year since 2006, so regular readers will be expecting a list of my key highlights, a boast about how many bands I saw and some comments on the weather – and I don’t plan to disappoint you! This year it was good to get the chance to see again some old favourites as well as some great new discoveries. It was WOMAD 2009 when I last saw the great Wassalou singer from Mali, Oumou Sangaré (reviewed here in July 2009 and March 2009), and it was wonderful to see her on great form again on the Open Air Stage this weekend. I wrote here in January 2016 about ‘Junun’ – the wonderfully hard-to-categorise album of music by the Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur, recorded with a troupe of Sufi qawwali musicians and Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood – and it was great to get the chance to see this music performed live by Shye Ben Tzur & Rajasthan Express on Friday. One of the most bizarre moments of the weekend was watching Dorit Chrysler and Charlie Draper from the New York Theremin Society performing a mixture of classical, jazz and contemporary music on the original electronic instrument – I want a theremin! Talking of bizarre, it was a joy to discover the brilliant Spooky Men’s Chorale from the Blue Mountains of Australia. As their own publicity says “Men. Singing Songs. Some of them are funny.” Their idiosyncratic mixture of dead-pan comedy, pathos and beautiful harmonies felt like a combination of the amazing Chumbawamba performance at WOMAD 2010 (reviewed here in July 2010) and the legendary Flying Pickets. Here’s a flavour of the Spooky Men’s Chorale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiFJL4IrH7Y. And another standout moment in an increasingly bizarre weekend was watching a 28-piece brass band playing Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’. Tubular Brass, arranged and conducted by Sandy Smith, also accompanied the young electronic music experimentalist Hannah Peel in her new work ‘Mary Casio’. But my favourite performances from WOMAD 2017 were all from the Baltic. Estonian fiddler Maarja Nuut and the Estonia folk trio Trad.Attack! both create very modern music from traditional folk sources. It has been eleven years since I last saw one of my favourite bands, the great Finnish folk/rock band Värttinä, live (reviewed here at WOMAD in August 2006) and it was fantastic to see their three female vocalists performing as Värttinä Vocal Trio on Saturday. They were joined by the English folk star Eliza Carthy for a wonderful English/Finnish version of ‘Three Drunken Maidens’. But my favourite song was the beautiful ‘Emoton’ which you can hear at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjsSMIXOnn0. For the record I beat last year’s tally of 22 bands, seeing 23 performances in total last weekend. And the weather was a mixed bag this year – hot, sunny, cold, wet, windy and very muddy by the end of the weekend. You can see a selection of my WOMAD 2017 photos at: https://culturaloutlook.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/WOMAD2017.

Edinburgh Festivals 2016

2 September 2016

We had a great week in Edinburgh where we saw a total of 26 shows in the Edinburgh International Festival, Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. A week at the Edinburgh Festivals always serves as a cultural top-up for the year. There is so much to do that you don’t really have the opportunity to reflect on it until you get home – but then what you’ve seen acts a spur to further investigation and cultural exploration.

Since I got back from Edinburgh I’ve been reading some of the witty, dark short stories of Saki – the pen name of the author Hector Hugh Munro who died in the trenches in the First World War and was the subject of the excellent new play ‘Life According to Saki’ by Katherine Rundell which we saw performed by Atticist at C venue. I’ve been re-listening to one of my favourite albums – Michelle Shocked’s 1989 rock & roll/Big Band masterpiece ‘Captain Swing’ – which it was a genuine thrill to discover she was performing in its entirety at the New Town Theatre.

I’m looking forward to reading Meg Rosoff’s first novel for adults ‘Jonathan Unleashed’, which we saw her discussing at the Book Festival. I’ve set a reminder for the broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Thursday 15 September of the stunning concert by the Russian National Orchestra that we saw at the Usher Hall – featuring Kirill Karabits conducting Scriabin’s triumphant ‘Symphony No 2’. And I’ve been inspired to start practising Shostakovich’s ‘Symphony No 5’, which I am due to perform with Northampton Symphony Orchestra in November, after seeing an amazing performance of the piece by the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marin Alsop.

Other highlights from our Edinburgh week included brilliantly bizarre stand-up from Simon Munnery, a fascinating lecture from Melvyn Bragg on the Peasants’ Revolt and a return visit to the surreal world of Kenny Young and The Eggplants (‘Eggplantis’).

Two of the best shows we saw this year shared a similar format – plays featuring solo performers using a mixture of poetry, spoken word, storytelling, songs and physical theatre. Tom Gill’s ‘Growing Pains’ and Lotte Rice’s ‘Exactly Like You’ (both at Underbelly) were both bravura performances by young rising stars.

WOMAD 2016

5 August 2016

I had a lovely weekend at the WOMAD Festival at Charlton Park near Malmesbury in Wiltshire. After the rain and mud of 2015, this year’s festival was blessed with almost perfect weather. Although it rained just before I arrived at the festival site on Friday it then stayed dry until I left on Sunday, with a mixture of extremely hot sunshine and some welcome cloud cover. I saw 22 performances from almost every corner of the world. It was great finally to see the Hot 8 Brass Band from New Orleans (who I wrote about here in January 2013) live on stage: from the moment they opened their set with a high tempo version of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Sir Duke’ I knew we were in for a treat. I also enjoyed seeing the charming young Brazilian singer-songwriter/cellist Dom La Nena (“the bossa nova Joanna Newson”), Scottish fiddle and harp duo Twelfth Day with their mixture of traditional and contemporary folk and classical, and Hollie Stephenson – an 18-year-old soul singer from North London with a powerful Amy Winehouse voice.

Long-time readers with good memories may recall my trip to the mountain village of Bitti in Sardinia in 2007, home to the famous singing shepherds, Tenores de Bitti. As I wrote here in June 2007: “the Sardinian canto a tenore tradition is an amazing sound. For centuries shepherds have gathered in mountain huts at the end of the working day to sing to each other (and drink!) through the night. Standing in a circle facing each other, this is very much participatory music – not designed for an audience. The four-part unaccompanied close-harmony singing imitates natural sounds: the bass (‘bassu’) is the sound of a cow, the ‘contra’ is the sound of a sheep and the ‘mesu ‘oche’ is the sound of the wind. Above these the soloist (‘voche’ – the human voice) leads the song and carries the text. The result is harmonically scrunchy, with a very low growlly bass – hypnotically repetitive and remarkably catchy.” It was a great pleasure, therefore, to get my first opportunity to see the tenore tradition live at the WOMAD Festival on Sunday. Cuncordu e Tenore de Orosei is a group that performs both secular tenore songs and the cuncordu religious vocal tradition.   The five male singers make a spectacular deep polyphonic sound. They were also just about the least audience-friendly act I have ever seen at WOMAD! True to the traditional Sardinian style they stood in a close circle facing each other, around a single microphone, some way back from the front of the stage. At the end of each song they came out of their circle and stood briefly facing the audience to acknowledge the applause – but with very little attempt to engage the crowd, mostly staring straight ahead with hands in pockets or arms folded. This kind of behaviour only tends to provoke a WOMAD audience into even more vociferously enthusiastic reaction – enjoying the challenge of winning over such seriously unresponsive performers. Sure enough, as the performance progressed, the whooping and cheering of a huge crowd packed in between the trees of the arboretum at Charlton Park, began to elicit a few smiles and bows from the Sardinian singers.

It is hard to pick out a single highlight from a long weekend of live music but I especially liked the remarkable Indo-Scottish MC, Soom T, who really seemed to be enjoying herself on the stage of the Big Red Tent. And I loved the acoustic Canadian folk trio from Prince Edward Island, The East Pointers, whose music was slick, fast, catchy and extremely danceable and reminded me a lot of another Canadian group, The Bills (reviewed here in May 2006).

You can see a selection of my photos from the WOMAD Festival at: http://culturaloutlook.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/WOMAD2016

WOMAD 2015

29 July 2015

I may have been tempting fate twelve months ago when I wrote here (in August 2014) that “2014 was the hottest WOMAD I can remember”. This year's WOMAD Festival, at Charlton Park in Wiltshire, was much more reminiscent of the infamous 2007 festival (reviewed here in August 2007), when weeks of rain led to a sea of mud across the festival site. Last weekend wasn't quite that bad – the ground had been very dry before the rain started on Friday, and Saturday's weather was really good – but continuous rain on Friday and Sunday made festival-going hard work. If you have never had the festival liquid mud experience I can assure you it is even worse than you are imagining! Nevertheless I saw some great music (and quite a lot of great dancing too this year). I will particularly cherish the memories of two performances from South Africa – veteran female singers the Mahotella Queens, now in their seventies but still creating glorious vocal harmonies and exuberant dance moves, and, at the other end of the age spectrum, the joyful young a capella trio The Soil who had a similarly engaging stage presence with a very different style of music. Another highlight was the final WOMAD appearance of the English folk big band, Bellowhead, who I first encountered at WOMAD in 2006. About to start their farewell tour, Bellowhead gave a typically rousing performance on the Open Air Stage on Friday evening which drew an enormous crowd, despite the pouring rain. As well as the musical performances at this year's festival I enjoyed a talk by Richard Ranft, Head of Sound and Vision at The British Library, about '125 years of recorded music at The British Library'. I also attended the live simulcast on BBC Radio 3 and 6 Music on Sunday morning, hosted by Cerys Matthews, Mary Ann Kennedy and Lopa Kothari, which featured short performances by a host of the festival's stars. One of my favourite discoveries of the weekend was the French/Egyptian band Orange Blossom who draw on musical influences from around the world to create thoughtful, serious music, blending electronica and Arabic rhythms. I'm really enjoying listening to their new album, 'Under The Shade of Violets'. You can see a selection of my photos from WOMAD 2015 at: http://culturaloutlook.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/WOMAD2015

'Love is Strange' by Ira Sachs

23 October 2014

On Thursday evening I was at the Glasgow Film Theatre for a screening of Ira Sachs' new film 'Love is Strange', presented as part of both the Luminate Festival and Glasgay! Alfred Molina and John Lithgow play George and Ben, an elderly gay couple who have lived very happily together in New York for 39 years. But when they decide to get married, their world begins to fall apart. George loses his job teaching in a Catholic school and they can no longer afford their apartment. While they search for an affordable alternative they have to sleep on the sofas and bunk beds of friends and family. The pain of living apart from each other after so many years together is evident. And the strain of living in other people's homes is cleverly depicted. 'Love is Strange' is a delicate, subtle, intelligent film. Much is said without the need for words, with numerous close-ups of unspeaking faces telling you much more about the characters' feelings than the dialogue does. The film is beautifully shot, with the trees, streets and skyline of Manhattan becoming part of the cast of characters. There's also a lot of Chopin – sometimes deliberately obscuring the dialogue (though it was very distracting to have two scenes where different characters were shown playing a piano they clearly weren't playing – why bother showing the hands in that case?). One beautiful scene sums up the best aspects of the film: Ben's nephew's wife Kate (Marisa Tomei) is trying to write a novel in her living room while Ben is innocently chatting to her, oblivious to the fact he is constantly interrupting her work. Kate grows more and more frustrated – we can observe the strain growing on her face (unseen by Ben) and we are waiting for the point at which she is clearly going to snap at him. But before this comes Ben's chatter turns into a moan about how annoying it is when Kate's son Joey thoughtlessly interrupts Ben while he is trying to complete a painting. Kate's frustration dissolves into a smile without a word. As Ben says: “When you live with people, you know them better than you care to”. 'Love is Strange' is gentle but powerful, incredibly sad but ultimately uplifting. It will be on general release from February 2015.

'Every Picture Tells My Story' by Hugh Campbell

23 October 2014

On Thursday afternoon I was at the Haining Centre – a nursing home in Falkirk – for 'Every Picture Tells My Story' – a Luminate Festival event. Haining resident Hugh Campbell had created a noticeboard depicting the story of his life through text and photos, and talked us through some of the key episodes. Hugh was an entertaining raconteur and it was fascinating to piece together the personal history of the man sitting in front of us. We learned about Hugh's childhood: he was brought up by his grandmother and aunt as his parents couldn't cope with rearing six children. He saw active service in the Second World War and, after an apprenticeship in a local foundry, Hugh went on to enjoy a 30-year career as a bus conductor, getting to know his regular passengers well, including the young midwife who he went on marry. He told us about his love of ballroom dancing, the music of Daniel O'Donnell and Mediterranean cruises. In telling his story, apart from an occasional lapse of memory, Hugh was very sharp and I was genuinely amazed to discover that he is 95 years old: he seems at least ten years younger. He clearly still has an eye for the ladies and took a lively interest in one young woman in the audience who was a mere 65 years his junior! At the end of the session she had her photo taken with Hugh to provide another addition to his notice board. Hugh's key message was that he doesn't feel old, he feels like he is getting younger rather than older, and he's not finished his story yet.

'Colin Gray: a journey with his parents through love, life and death'

3 October 2014

While I was in Edinburgh this week I visited North Edinburgh Arts Centre to see an exhibition of photographs by Colin Gray, presented as part of Luminate 2014 – Scotland's Creative Ageing Festival (of which I am a Trustee). 'Colin Gray: a journey with his parents through love, life and death' is a selection of works documenting Gray's 34 year collaborative journey with his parents. It includes work from 'The Parents' series, which started in 1980; from 'In Sickness and in Health', photographs that explored his parents' older age and his mother's death; and a preview of new work from 'Do Us Part', his ongoing series of images of his father and daughter. Many of the photos are playful and funny – showing Gray's ageing parents retaining a childlike sense of fun. I particularly enjoyed the picture of them sailing down an imaginary stream in their garden in an old bathtub. In contrast, the pictures of Colin Gray's mother's final days are incredibly sad – including candid shots of her in a hospital bed and her corpse in the coffin. And the scenes of her husband grieving alone are painful and moving, including a close-up of his wrinkled neck enclosed by collar and black tie. But the exhibition ends with pictures of Gray's father with his granddaughter comforting him, providing a warm final image that shows continuity of life into the next generation.