Hi °C | Lo °C Which show’s props include 100 tealights, three pillows, a towel, a footstool and a chair?
It's one of the smallest and most intimate events, and promises to reach parts of the audience other festivals have failed to reach. It'll put a spring in your step, and hope in your sole. It's in a church, for an audience of one, and is the most talked about event. Worked it out?
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Festival can be scary for less experienced performers. Courtney Mcneely (16), a BRA pupil, is one of four local teenagers in gritty play FML, looking at the lives of young people. “It's my first time at the Waterfront,” she said. “I think I'll be quite nervous. I only got into acting in the past year, so I'm used to smaller halls. But I'm sure everyone gets nervous before a show ... I'm looking forward to it!” So are we, Courtney.
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Some £300,000 of tickets have already been sold for festival — that's 75% of its target. And the curtain isn't up! Could be a record ... but it's an award-winning festival on many levels. It’s packed with winners of the Grammys, Turner Prize, Booker Prize, South Bank Show awards and Olivier awards. And it's full of anniversaries, — Chopin, Mahler, Kenny Wheeler, Tagore, Terry Riley, Colin Middleton, John Lennon, Edward Carson, Ian Curtis — there's got to be a pretty big birthday cake in the wings at Festival House.
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Warsaw-born Jan Krzysztof Broja is, as you read, flexing his fingers for tonight's concert in the Great Hall at Queen's. Broja, winner of international competitions in Vilnius, Hanau and Brusnwick, will enthral with a rare performance of first piano concerto in a version for solo piano plus all of Chopin’s 24 preludes. An evening to remember.
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There's only one exhibition to mark the centenary of artist Colin Middleton's birth. And ... you guessed ... festival's hosting it. The Modern Landscape looks at his re-invention of the Irish landscape, from his early neo-romantic paintings of the war years to the abstracts of the 1970s. It's in the Crescent Arts Centre, and illustrates most eloquently the essential idea of place in the artist's work.
