Category: Music

Olga Kern and the love for music that stays

SHE’S BEAUTIFUL, SHE’S blond and, on a certain physical level, she fits a Hollywood stereotype, but Moscow-born concert pianist Olga Kern is not just a pretty face. The product of “many generations” of classical music, Kern won the prestigious Texas-based Van Cliburn International Piano competition in 2001 – […]

Strings that can move heaven and hell

“IT’S HELL TO try and get a concert ready in such a short period of time, but it’s important that we are a part of the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival,” says Rosemary Nalden, the founder and conductor of Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble, arguably South Africa’s most important musical […]

The universe in a classical guitar

He laughs at the idea of being the “darling” of the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival, the eighth edition of which started last Saturday, but classical guitarist James Grace has been an important festival drawcard, performing during the last three years of the festival to capacity-packed venues. This year […]

How to fall in love with Afrikaans

What is it that can take a language coloured by historical violence, a conservative community with historical bias on its hands, and turn them completely around, enabling the community in question to view itself in an hilarious and truthful mirror? The unequivocally miraculous phenomenon of Afrikaans culture that […]

Too much pretty in Boychoir

It’s odd to think that a director could get some parts of a film so right, but enable an ending for a film that so profoundly negates all its explored values in one foul swoop. While François Girard’s Boychoir probes the preciously transient phenomenon of the soprano boys’ […]

Bring back the music

A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy? The eponymous Norman Jewison musical from the 1970s, based on a series of stories by Shalom Aleichem may be high schlock to most contemporary audience members, but it retains its status as a modern classic, for a whole rash of reasons, […]