THE South West Wiltshire MP Dr Andrew Murrison is one of 508 MPs who are planting trees as part of the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy, a network of forest conservation initiatives to mark Her Majesty’s lifetime of service to the Commonwealth. Dr Murrison has planted silverbirch and rowan trees in Biss Meadows Country Park in Trowbridge….
THE views of Jurgen Klopp, manager of Premier League club Liverpool, on the subject of early kick offs are well known. He dislikes them intensely. This is reflected incidentally in the patchy results teams under his management have achieved. With that in mind, I wondered about the wisdom of asking the three bright young musicians…
NICOLA Werenowska’s powerful exploration of displacement and identity across three generations of a Polish family, Silence, reaches the end of its ten-venue tour at Salisbury, where it is on stage at the Salberg Studio until 17th November. Maria lived in Warsaw as Poland was invaded by both Germany and Russia, and she and her husband…
ENGLISH Touring Opera’s production of Handel’s 1720 opera Radamisto, loosely based on incidents in the Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome, is a musical, vocal and visual triumph. This opera seria, the first written by the German composer for the Royal Academy of Music in his adopted homeland, is the story of a tyrant, King Tiridate…
THE word feast could well be substituted for ‘Fest’ which follows Mozart, the composer at the heart of this annual festival now in its 28th year, on all the publicity material for the Bath’s Mozart Fest. Once again artistic director Amelia Freedman has brought a dazzling array of musical talent to the City of Bath…
IT was a dark and stormy night … the winds whipped monsoon-like rains across the South Wessex Ridgeway downs into pools across the road and the little hall shook. Not a night to be out … But it takes more than a wintry storm to keep the people of Wootton Fitzpaine away from an Artsreach…
THE Armonico Consort brought Armistice Day 2018 to a close at in Yeovil with a concert of contemplative music interspersed by readings chosen and performed by Timothy West. Directed by Christopher Monks, the popular Consort will be starting its own youth choir at the Octagon in 2019. Music on the day that marked the centenary…
STUDENTS at Arts University Bournemouth have the unique opportunity to produce plays about Mary Shelley and her famous literary community in the building where she and her son Percy lived from 1851. Their autumn series, Shelley at the Shelley, opened with two plays about Mary – Liz Lochhead’s Blood and Ice and Helen Edmundson’s Mary…
THE Bristol-based natural dye studio, Botanical Inks, is launching the Bristol Cloth – a textile which will be the first locally-sourced and regenerative material produced in the UK. A crowd funder raised more than £7000 in its first week, and dyeing is due to start on 20th November, with weaving beginning in January 2019. The…
Glière: Les Sirènes Turnage: Testament Prokofiev: War and Peace Suite Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Kirill Karabits conductor Natalya Romaniw soprano EVEN by the standards that we’ve grown to expect from Karabits and the BSO, this concert really was something very special. It was also a very personal concert for the Ukranian conductor, with…