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Shostakovich had considered the career of a concert pianist, yet his piano music studiously avoids the virtuosity he had assiduously cultivated as a young performer. Almost all his piano writing is in some way experimental and conceptual.
Lord Richard Harries has selected 30 images to convey the essential truths of the Christian faith, some ancient and some modern. Drawn from both the West and the East, a few are well-known masterpieces and others will be unfamiliar.
Serial murderer Myra Hindley is often portrayed as an “evil icon”. Her crimes of sadistic murder against children continue to shock. There are few artistic sights so terrifying as the giant portrait of Hindley composed of the handprints of children.
On 17 August 1982, the first commercial CD was released. Digital recording and editing have changed the face of music by making recordings easy to originate and share. But has this affected musical quality, and what are the financial and artistic consequences?
From Horace Walpole to Ann Radcliffe, renegade novelists of the eighteenth century wanted to claim back the supernatural for fiction and so invented the Gothic Novel.
In the last ten years of his life Charles Dickens related to his adoring public in a number of different ways; as novelist, as journalist, as public speaker, and in public readings of his own work.
Prokofiev’s piano music struck his contemporaries as matching the new era: its dynamism was compared to sport (“football music”), and its grinding repeated patterns to industrial sounds (“machine music”).
Nurse Ratched is the evil nurse in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). She is the Evil Woman as autocratic, the absolute power in a psychiatric ward, which is the ultimate “total institution”.
Cinema’s original canons were based on a small number of works most highly esteemed by archivists and historians. But access to the history of film has been dramatically expanded by digital media, as have debates between those arguing from different premises.
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