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Winterreise review – agony and ecstasy as Bostridge and Drake bring Schubert’s song cycle to dramatic life
Wed, 12 Jun 2024 15:29:47 GMT
Ustinov Studio, Bath
Deborah Warner’s staged version of Winterreise is a powerful and deeply moving piece of theatre
Schubert completed his great song-cycle Winterreise in what was effectively his own last winter; he would be dead just a year later. In this setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller, depicting a man rejected in love and his painful journey across a freezing, stormy landscape, both actual and metaphorical, the singer’s challenge is exploring that balance between vocal and psychological elements.
By his own admission, tenor Ian Bostridge’s engagement with the cycle has long been obsessive. Now, he and pianist Julius Drake – singer as ego and pianist as id, Bostridge’s definition of the relationship – have collaborated with Deborah Warner in creating a staged version and it seems as if all their previous experience – 100-plus performances, different recordings, a film as well as a book – has flowed logically into this powerful and deeply moving piece of theatre.
Continue reading...Billie Eilish’s third is a triumph, Shabaka goes woodwind and Yunchan Lim makes the most thrilling piano debut of the decade … here are our music team’s picks of the best LPs from the first half of the year
Being called “overproduced” is generally a criticism but BMTH make it a virtue on this ridiculously high-intensity album. The glitched-up production reflects a fiendishly intricate digital world, while frontman Oli Sykes’ emotions are more histrionic – and affecting – than ever. At a time when so many bands are content with tinkering at the edges of what’s been done before, it’s bracing to hear BMTH be so relentlessly ambitious and fused to the present moment. Read the full review. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Continue reading...Paddington in Peru, which sees Olivia Colman, Antonio Banderas and Emily Mortimer join the cast, sees the beloved bear travel to Peru to visit Aunt Lucy
Break out the marmalade sandwiches: the first trailer for the third Paddington movie has been released.
Paddington in Peru, due for release in November, sees the duffel-coated bear travel to South America to pay a visit to Aunt Lucy along with the Brown family. But on arrival he’s told by a guitar-playing nun who runs the home for retired bears that Lucy is missing in action on a scientific mission.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Figures reveal that opposition leader traveled at taxpayer’s expense to event sponsored by Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting
Opposition leader Peter Dutton used a taxpayer-funded private jet to travel to a News Corp event in Tamworth, claiming $23,000 in travel expenses to speak at the summit where he criticised the government’s response to the cost-of-living crisis.
Despite multiple flight connections daily between Canberra and Tamworth, it’s understood Dutton had a pre-existing commitment, meaning no commercial flight could get him to the Daily Telegraph’s annual “bush summit” in August 2023 in time.
Continue reading...Plans for the £1.9bn Smithfield scheme include a park that is smaller than a football pitch, falling short of the council’s own guidelines
Campaigners are warning that a major development project that will be approved by Birmingham city council falls far short of the city’s own guidelines for open green space.
The £1.9bn Smithfield scheme will bring 3,500 new homes as well as restaurants and offices to 17 hectares (42 acres) of fenced brownfield land in the centre of the city. But the new park – Smithfield Park – will be only 0.8 hectares, smaller than a football pitch.
Continue reading...Former Scotland winger on being an ‘accidental footballer’, Russian culture and his country’s chances at Euro 2024
An afternoon with Pat Nevin unfolds like a travelogue. The former Scotland international waits for me inside Berwick-upon-Tweed station and, in a moment of peak Nevin purity, he is reading a memoir written by Simon Raymonde, the bass player of his favourite band, the Cocteau Twins. The book is great, apparently, and sparks a stream of amusing anecdotes about a time when Nevin was considered a “weirdo” as a Chelsea and Everton footballer interested in music, books, film and politics.
We drive out of England, and into Scotland, while the 60-year-old Nevin talks about his love of travel and his relish for another European Championship, where he will work as an analyst for BBC Radio 5 Live in Germany. The tournament begins on Friday and Nevin will be there as Germany face Scotland in the opening match in Munich.
Continue reading...Party has vowed to end sewage scandal if it wins power, but experts say it will have to act quickly and ambitiously
Since the UK’s general election was called, the Labour party has been seeking to capitalise on voters’ fury over the sewage filling England’s rivers and seas.
The debt-ridden, leaking, polluting water industry, owned largely by foreign investment firms, private equity and pension funds, has overseen decades of underinvestment and the large-scale dumping of raw sewage into rivers. It has become one of the touchstone issues of this election, with voters across the political spectrum angry at the polluting of waterways treasured by local communities. Groups have sprung up to look after rivers and lakes; protests pop up most weekends along the coast.
Continue reading...Whether it’s holidaying domestically or heading to a destination with a cooler climate, we’d like to hear about anything you’re doing differently this year
As the northern hemisphere enters the summer, we want to hear from people who are planning to have a different type of summer holiday this year.
Are you visiting a cooler climate than usual? Or holidaying domestically when you go abroad most summers, or vice versa?
Continue reading...This cheap politics of envy distracts from the country’s most pressing issue: inequality. To survive, Tories must face reality
Rishi Sunak looked relieved as he took the final press question from a local reporter after the launch of his Conservative manifesto yesterday. It came after a torrid previous week, which saw the prime minister accused of lying about Labour tax plans and having to apologise for unforgivably missing crucial D-day commemoration services. You might have thought the manifesto would include some surprising, eye-catching policies. But in many respects, it was a more traditional Conservative party manifesto than some had expected – it contained tax cuts, promises to pensioners and the customary pro-business language.
Yet one of the challenges that Sunak’s Conservative party faces is that for the first time in decades, it now finds itself with no clear political territory of its own. For the past several years it has travelled down a political cul-de-sac and is now at a political dead end. In pandering to Ukip, then the Brexit party, and now Reform, it has ceded the political centre ground to the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, alienating millions of voters turned off by the constant culture warring.
Continue reading...British Museum will host treasures from Samarkand in a bid to dispel cliches of camels, spices and bazaars
A monumental six-metre-long wall painting created in the 7th century, and 8th-century ivory figures carved for one of the world’s oldest surviving chess sets, are among treasures set to be seen in Britain for the first time.
The items will travel from the ancient city of Samarkand to the UK for an exhibition opening in September, as part of the first-ever loan from museums in Uzbekistan to the British Museum.
Silk Roads will be at the British Museum from September 26 2024 to February 23 2025. Tickets go on sale on Monday.
Continue reading...Interesting story of breaking the security of the RoboForm password manager in order to recover a cryptocurrency wallet password.
Grand and Bruno spent months reverse engineering the version of the RoboForm program that they thought Michael had used in 2013 and found that the pseudo-random number generator used to generate passwords in that version—and subsequent versions until 2015—did indeed have a significant flaw that made the random number generator not so random. The RoboForm program unwisely tied the random passwords it generated to the date and time on the user’s computer—it determined the computer’s date and time, and then generated passwords that were predictable. If you knew the date and time and other parameters, you could compute any password that would have been generated on a certain date and time in the past...
Ahead of the election in India, the Guardian’s video team travelled through the country to explore how fake news and censorship might shape the outcome.
Almost one billion people are registered to vote. The country's prime minister, Narendra Modi, has been in power for more than 10 years, and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) is seeking a third term.
But critics of Modi and the BJP say his government has become increasingly authoritarian, fracturing the country along religious lines and threatening India’s secular democracy. At the same time, the space for freedom of speech has been shrinking while disinformation and hate speech has exploded on social media.
From biking adventures to city breaks, get inspiration for your next break – whether in the UK or further afield – with twice-weekly emails from the Guardian’s travel editors. You’ll also receive handpicked offers from Guardian Holidays.
From biking adventures to city breaks, get inspiration for your next break – whether in the UK or further afield – with twice-weekly emails from the Guardian’s travel editors.
You’ll also receive handpicked offers from Guardian Holidays.
Continue reading...Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his Manchester United advisers were minded to sack the Dutchman but in the end another trophy changed their minds
The documentary of how Manchester United’s Sir Jim Ratcliffe-led season review ended with Erik ten Hag keeping his job as manager would show a forensic, painstaking process, according to a high-ranking club executive. The non in-house version might differ as it would show Ratcliffe and his advisers being minded to sack the Dutchman before a number of factors ultimately persuaded them that Ten Hag should remain in post.
Ten Hag probably stopped contemplating clearing his United desk after Ratcliffe’s beauty parade of Thomas Tuchel, Kieran McKenna (who signed a lucrative new contract with Ipswich), Mauricio Pochettino, Roberto De Zerbi, Thomas Frank, Graham Potter, Gary O’Neil, Paulo Fonseca and Gareth Southgate as potential replacements ended with them all judged less handsome than the incumbent.
Continue reading...Co-president of the KlimaSeniorinnen says declaration is betrayal of older women
Swiss politicians have rejected a landmark climate ruling from the European court of human rights, raising fears that other polluting countries may follow suit.
A panel of Strasbourg judges ruled in April that Switzerland had violated the human rights of older women through weak climate policies that leave them more vulnerable to heatwaves. Activists hailed the judgment as a breakthrough because it leaves all members of the Council of Europe exposed to legal challenges for sluggish efforts to clean up carbon-intensive economies.
Continue reading...The three British judges still on territory’s top bench under pressure to quit after two others stepped down last week
Pressure is increasing on the last remaining British judges who sit in Hong Kong’s top court to resign, after two senior justices stepped down last week because of the “political situation” in the former British colony.
Jonathan Sumption and Lawrence Collins resigned as non-permanent overseas judges from Hong Kong’s court of final appeal on Thursday. Collins cited the “political situation in Hong Kong” in a brief statement about his departure.
Continue reading...The conviction of peaceful pro-democracy activists is another shameful moment in the ongoing crackdown
Seven years ago, Lord Neuberger, a judge of the Hong Kong court of final appeal – and formerly president of the UK’s supreme court – described the Chinese region’s foreign judges as “canaries in the mine”. Their willingness to serve was a sign that judicial independence remained healthy, “but if they start to leave in droves, that would represent a serious alarm call”.
That was before the extraordinary uprising in 2019 to defend Hong Kong’s autonomy, and the crackdown that followed. The draconian national security law of 2020 prompted the resignation of an Australian judge, and two British judges quit in 2022. Last week, two more birds flew: Lord Sumption and Lord Collins of Mapesbury. Lord Sumption (with other judges) had said that continued participation was in the interests of the people of Hong Kong. Now he says that those hopes of sustaining the rule of law are “no longer realistic” and that “a [once] vibrant and politically diverse community is slowly becoming a totalitarian state”. He cited illiberal legislation, Beijing’s ability to reverse decisions by Hong Kong courts and an oppressive political environment where judges are urged to demonstrate “patriotism”.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Continue reading...The president has ruled out pardoning his son, but White House press secretary said it was unclear whether Biden would intervene to lessen a sentence length
The White House has not ruled out a possible commutation for Hunter Biden after a jury found him guilty on three federal gun crimes.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, speaking to reporters on Wednesday on Air Force One, said:
As we all know, the sentencing hasn’t even been scheduled yet.
Of course he respects that, and we all do, and we’ve all talked about it ad nauseam.
Continue reading...Six years in the making, jaw-dropping new film The Grab shows a secret scramble by governments and private firms to buy up global resources
In 2013, the US food conglomerate Smithfield Foods – the country’s largest pork producer and maker of the famous holiday ham – was sold to a Hong Kong-based company called WH Group in a deal worth $7.1bn. It was the largest ever Chinese acquisition of an American company; virtually overnight, WH Group, formerly called Shuanghui International, gained ownership of nearly one in four American pigs. Such a huge business deal did not go unnoticed; news coverage and an eventual congressional hearing questioned the sale with a mix of good, old-fashioned American xenophobia and reasonable concern for the nation’s food supply. But in the eyes of most people, and certainly most American consumers, the Smithfield Foods sale remained just that: a one-off business deal, if they were aware of it at all.
For Nate Halverson, a journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) out of Emeryville, California, the Smithfield deal was the first point in a much wider and concerning pattern – though the company’s CEO, Larry Pope, assured Congress that the Chinese government was not behind WH Group’s purchase, Halverson found evidence to the contrary on a reporting trip to the company’s headquarters: a secret document, marked not for distribution in the United States, detailing every dollar of the deal, and the state-run Bank of China’s “social responsibility” in backing it for “national strategy”.
Continue reading...Three US nationals on trial in Democratic Republic of Congo over events in May described as an attempted coup
More than 50 people, including three US citizens and a Belgian, have gone on trial in the Democratic Republic of Congo over what the army has described as an attempted coup.
The actions of the three Americans were “punishable by death”, Judge Freddy Ehume told the military court in the DRC capital, Kinshasa.
Continue reading...In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, revealed the tactics and traits that help him face the daily frustrations of leading a country at war for more than two years.
Within a ceremonial room inside Kyiv’s presidential compound, Zelenskiy spoke for nearly an hour with a Guardian team, including the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. The interview took place during perhaps the toughest time for Ukraine since the early days of the war. Russia is on the offensive in Kharkiv, an advance that follows months of delay in the US Congress over the passing of a major support package, limiting Ukraine’s battlefield capabilities
Continue reading...US wants show of strength with planned sanctions for helping Russia, but group will also discuss migration, Middle East and AI
A dramatic expansion of entities exposed to US sanctions for helping the Russian economy and an EU-led $50bn loan to ease the financial burden on Ukraine will be at the centre of discussions at a summit of the leaders of wealthy G7 nations in Puglia, Italy, starting on Thursday.
The leaders, facing unprecedented challenges from discontented electorates, will be under heightened pressure to provide concrete results as their three days of discussion range across an interlinked agenda encompassing the war in Ukraine, migration, Africa, the Middle East, the climate crisis and harnessing artificial intelligence (AI).
Continue reading...Four vessels, including nuclear-powered submarine and frigate, greeted by sparse crowd upon arrival in Cuba
A fleet of Russian warships has arrived in the bay of Havana, in a visit seen as a show of strength amid tensions with the west over support for Ukraine.
Four vessels, including the nuclear-powered submarine Kazan and the frigate Admiral Gorshkov, entered Havana Bay early on Wednesday, where they offered a 21-gun salute that was reciprocated from the battlements of La Cabaña, the fortress where Che Guevara once had his office.
Continue reading...The president has ruled out pardoning his son, but White House press secretary said it was unclear whether Biden would intervene to lessen a sentence length
The White House has not ruled out a possible commutation for Hunter Biden after a jury found him guilty on three federal gun crimes.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, speaking to reporters on Wednesday on Air Force One, said:
As we all know, the sentencing hasn’t even been scheduled yet.
Of course he respects that, and we all do, and we’ve all talked about it ad nauseam.
Continue reading...A lie is a lie, but the president’s support of his son - and of the legal system - has been moving to see
If you didn’t know better, you might think the jury that found Hunter Biden guilty this week knew precisely what they were doing. The evidence against the president’s son – that he lied about his drug use on a firearms form six years ago – was overwhelming, but so too was the impression of a trivial, overegged charge. But, by finding him guilty, the jury in this area of solid Democratic support have potentially done more injury to his father’s political rival than if they had found him not guilty on all counts.
For those of us watching, the entire spectacle has at times been an uncomfortable exercise in flushing out biases. Like the Trump children, Hunter Biden has the demoralised air of a scion struggling to escape his father’s shadow, albeit in a different style. If the Trump boys are chinless dimwits, Hunter has about him the seedy air of a second- or third-tier Hollywood actor, clamped behind aviators and accompanied seemingly everywhere by his much younger wife.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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D-day commemorations have failed to mention equally important turning points in the war, says Prof Colin Green. Plus a letter from Ben Summerskill
The D-day 80th anniversary events were really moving, especially hearing from the veterans who survived. Much has been made of Rishi Sunak’s failure to attend the international event (Furious Tories turn on Rishi Sunak over D-day commemorations snub, 9 June). I was more saddened by the repeated claim in TV programmes that D-day was the turning point of the second world war, without mention of the 27 million Soviets (including Ukrainians) who lost their lives and were ignored in this commemoration.
The eastern front was crucial to defeating Hitler and the Nazi armies well before 1944. Moscow in 1941, Stalingrad in 1942, three battles for Kharkov in 1941, 1942 and 1943, the great tank battle of Kursk (1943) and the siege of Leningrad (1941 to 1944) decimated the best German troops and were, collectively, the war’s true turning points. How Erwin Rommel would have welcomed defending Normandy with just a fraction of the 152 German divisions (3 million men) that invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. I feel great sadness for all deaths, including on D-day, and wake up every morning well aware that I owe my happy life to so many courageous men and women who gave their lives or were injured.
Prof Colin Green
Harrow, London
This summer is something else, a three-month run crammed with colour, drama, escapism. We’ll be there for every moment
As the gloom of June gives way to the gloom of July, August and September, it is worth taking a second to consult the schedule. Because an unusually epic summer of global sport is well under way.
This is quite a thing. From Real Madrid’s triumph in the Champions League final at Wembley this month through to the women’s cricket T20 World Cup in October, we’re in the midst of a non-stop sporting bloom.
Continue reading...The livewire Albania head coach on playing down his past, his work ethic and Euro 2024’s toughest group
“I never stay calm,” Sylvinho says midway through an afternoon that, in the best way possible, bears out his point. “The players know it, the federation knows it, the president knows it. Christmas party, end of year, normally you restart work in January … but the whole time all I’m thinking is how we can go through. How can we play against Italy? How can we play against Croatia? What will we do against the Spanish?”
It is an understandable preoccupation given Albania, who Sylvinho led to an outstanding qualification for Euro 2024 last year, must face all three over the next fortnight in the tournament’s toughest group. They could not have been dealt a more fiendish hand and it will cause shock waves if they progress. “You have to find a way to reduce the distance between them and us,” he says. “How? You have to work.”
Continue reading...Public polling is a critical function of modern political campaigns and movements, but it isn’t what it once was. Recent US election cycles have produced copious postmortems explaining both the successes and the flaws of public polling. There are two main reasons polling fails.
First, nonresponse has skyrocketed. It’s radically harder to reach people than it used to be. Few people fill out surveys that come in the mail anymore. Few people answer their phone when a stranger calls. Pew Research reported that 36% of the people they called in 1997 would talk to them, but only 6% by 2018. Pollsters worldwide have faced similar challenges...
Former Scotland winger on being an ‘accidental footballer’, Russian culture and his country’s chances at Euro 2024
An afternoon with Pat Nevin unfolds like a travelogue. The former Scotland international waits for me inside Berwick-upon-Tweed station and, in a moment of peak Nevin purity, he is reading a memoir written by Simon Raymonde, the bass player of his favourite band, the Cocteau Twins. The book is great, apparently, and sparks a stream of amusing anecdotes about a time when Nevin was considered a “weirdo” as a Chelsea and Everton footballer interested in music, books, film and politics.
We drive out of England, and into Scotland, while the 60-year-old Nevin talks about his love of travel and his relish for another European Championship, where he will work as an analyst for BBC Radio 5 Live in Germany. The tournament begins on Friday and Nevin will be there as Germany face Scotland in the opening match in Munich.
Continue reading...We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.
This week, from 2021: Much progress has been made in attitudes towards sexual equality and gender identity – but in many places a dramatic backlash by conservative forces has followed.
By Mark Gevisser
Continue reading...Jin has finished his stint in South Korea’s military but group won’t be able to reform until RM, Jimin, Jungkook, J-hope and V are discharged in 2025
Jin, the oldest member of the K-pop supergroup BTS, has completed his military service in South Korea, although their legions of fans around the world will still have to wait at least a year until all seven artists are reunited.
The star, who in December 2022 became the first member of the group to begin 18 months of military service, emerged on Wednesday from the 5th Army Infantry Division’s base in northern Yeoncheon province, 60km north of Seoul, to be greeted by fellow bandmates J-hope, RM, V, Jungkook and Jimin.
Continue reading...Stephen Kwikiriza is one of 11 campaigners against EACOP targeted by authorities in past two weeks, rights group says
A man campaigning against the controversial $5bn (£4bn) east African crude oil pipeline (EACOP) is recovering in hospital after an alleged beating by the Ugandan armed forces in the latest incident in what has been called an “alarming crackdown” on the country’s environmentalists.
Stephen Kwikiriza, who works for Uganda’s Environment Governance Institute (EGI), a non-profit organisation, was abducted in Kampala on 4 June, according to his employer. He was beaten, questioned and then abandoned hundreds of miles from the capital on Sunday evening.
Continue reading...This blog is now closed.
Sydney’s light rail network disrupted today amid industrial action
A reminder for Sydney commuters that the light rail network will be disrupted today amid planned industrial action.
Recent estimates have Australians consuming around 3,300,000 bags of cocaine per year, with every single one of them bought off the black market. There is no way of knowing whether any of them have been cut with deadly substances like fentanyl or nitazene.
We have to acknowledge that the majority of people who use cocaine do so recreationally and there is absolutely no chance of stopping people using the drug. We therefore need to consider all options to reduce harm, including regulating cocaine in a similar way to how we regulate alcohol.
Continue reading...We look back through 14 years of Conservative manifestos at policies on net zero, energy, transport and more
It’s been a long journey on environmental issues for the Tories – but somehow it feels as if it has been in the wrong direction. Eighteen years on from David Cameron’s “hug a husky” campaign of 2006, where the climate and nature crises were largely viewed with cross-party consensus, we look back through the (many) Tory manifestos since 2010 to see how the Conservatives’ environmental message has evolved.
Continue reading...Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was spying on its AI users, looking for harmful hackers at work.
Some pushed back at characterizing Microsoft’s actions as “spying.” Of course cloud service providers monitor what users are doing. And because we expect Microsoft to be doing something like this, it’s not fair to call it spying...
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, revealed the tactics and traits that help him face the daily frustrations of leading a country at war for more than two years.
Within a ceremonial room inside Kyiv’s presidential compound, Zelenskiy spoke for nearly an hour with a Guardian team, including the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. The interview took place during perhaps the toughest time for Ukraine since the early days of the war. Russia is on the offensive in Kharkiv, an advance that follows months of delay in the US Congress over the passing of a major support package, limiting Ukraine’s battlefield capabilities
Continue reading...Twelve jurors in New York have presented their fellow Americans with a simple question: are you willing to elect a convicted criminal to the White House?
On Thursday, Donald Trump was found guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. The verdict makes him the first president, current or former, to be found guilty of felony crimes in the US's near 250-year history. Regardless, the conviction does not disqualify Trump as a presidential candidate or bar him from again sitting in the Oval Office.
Trump, who opted not to take the stand during the trial, has denied wrongdoing, railed against the proceedings and ahead of the verdict compared himself to a saint: “Mother Teresa could not beat these charges. The charges are rigged,” he said on Wednesday. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, is expected to appeal the verdict.
The Guardian’s Sam Levine has been in court over the last several weeks covering all the developments – here are three testimonies he found most memorable.
Could Trump go to prison? Here’s what happens next after the guilty verdict
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