Rachmaninoff plays Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

From: theoshow2

Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in A minor for piano & orchestra, Op. 43
Philadelphia Orchestra, Conducted by Leopold Stokowski
Sergei Rachmaninov, piano

Life Writing – Laurence Sterne

By Steven Connor
This extended review of Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) was broadcast as Radio 3’s Book of the Month, Wednesday 21 March 2001.
Laurence Sterne was an invented man, or he was nothing. Actually, he came within an ace of being nothing. In his packed and elegant new [...]

Balzac in Cairo – Naguib Mahfouz: Egypt’s Nobel Laureate

Hugh Miles in New Statesman
Mention modern Arabic literature and one name usually comes up: Naguib Mahfouz. Like a barrel of Saudi Arabia’s Arab Light oil, Mahfouz is the benchmark by which all other modern Arabic writers are measured, from a western perspective at least.
Mahfouz lived a long time and his life’s work is huge: 30 [...]

The Frida Kahlo conundrum

By Kathy Brewis in Times
She crafted her own image with exquisite care, creating herself on canvas over and over again, always the paradoxically triumphant victim. The legend she built around herself is so powerful it inspires and intrigues half a century after her death. Because at its heart remains a mystery.
Her intense, troubled marriage to [...]

Joan Sutherland – Casta Diva

From: coloraturafan

If you like opera, visit the blog Mostly Opera.
 

The restored St Martin-in-the-Fields’s

After two years shrouded in hoardings, the £36m refurbishment of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London is complete. The church has been expanded underground to incorporate more meeting rooms and chapels, and a striking new window by artist Shirazeh Houshiary.
Photos here.

Doris Day’s Vanishing Act

by David Kaufman in Vanity Fair
Doris Day, the bouncy, fresh-faced, blonde singer who had been born Doris Kappelhoff, had her first hit song, “Sentimental Journey,” in 1945, when she was 23. Like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, both of whom she worked with, Day parlayed her success as a big-band vocalist into a career in [...]

Aimé Césaire: poetry as weapon

“Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge” (Aimé Césaire)
Aimé Césaire died on 17 April 2008 in Fort-de-France on the French Caribbean island of Martinique at the ripe age of 94. His life and political choices are truly captured in his friend and surrealist writer André Breton’s words: Césaire was the “prototype [...]

Doris Lessing: prize fighter

At 88, Doris Lessing is still raging – at communists, war, Mrs Thatcher, the ‘bloody Swedes’ who awarded her the Nobel Prize… but most of her venom is reserved for the subject of what she says will be her final book – her mother. She talks to Nigel Farndale. Portrait by Reme Campos.
It takes [...]

The Imperial Palace Museum of Beijing, Forbidden City or Gugong

The online Palace Museum offers you a visual feast of 5,000 years of traditional Chinese art, with a rich concentration of architecture and artifacts from the Ming and Qing imperial courts.
Visit here.