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Articles by The Guardian for covent garden

Richard Desmond has big plans for Channel Five

2010/07/26 by James Robinson and Maggie Brown

It didn't take long for Richard Desmond, a man whose photo is regularly published in the newspapers he owns, to make an appearance on Five. He turned up on Live From Studio Five, the channel's lowbrow news and current affairs programme on Friday night, two hours after he acquired the broadcaster for £103.5m, telling viewers: "All we are going to do is add more programmes and put extra money on screen…

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Going out by staying in: where to watch the arts online

2010/07/25 by Leo Benedictus

To get the most from any show, apparently, you have to be there. No technology can transmit the sound of a real orchestra or the immediacy of theatre, can it? If you haven't shared a room with your favourite band, you can't really call yourself a fan. Even giant plasma screens and Blu-ray players cannot properly display those films that, everyone agrees, "you have to see in the cinema"…

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The 10 best movie cameos

2010/07/25 by Philip French

Alfred Hitchcock (Rebecca, 1940)Hitchcock, the brilliant self-publicist who probably devised his own sobriquet "Master of Suspense", virtually invented the movie cameo en route to becoming the world's most recognisable director. His first screen appearance was in a newsroom sequence in The Lodger (1926). Initially, the signature walk-ons were spasmodic, before becoming a feature of each picture after his move to the US, beginning with Rebecca (1940), where he is seen outside a telephone kiosk being used by George Sanders…

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Spartacus; Laurencia

2010/07/25 by Luke Jennings

Two reminders this week that, in Soviet Russia, ballet was an instrument of political propaganda and indoctrination. The Bolshoi's Spartacus, which launched the company's Covent Garden summer season on Monday, tells the story of the uprising against imperial Rome by Thracian gladiators in the first century AD. The piece was choreographed by Yuri Grigorovitch in 1968, and audiences were invited to identify Spartacus and his brave band with the Soviet state, struggling for self-realisation in a hostile world…

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BBC Proms 1 to 7

2010/07/25 by Fiona Maddocks

The last note of Simon Boccanegra rang out. Verdi's tragic Doge lay dead on the floor, inches from the lucky front-row Prommers in a packed Royal Albert Hall. Plácido Domingo might be 69 years old but he can hurl himself to the ground with spectacular abandon…

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Bringing Wagner to Gloucestershire

2010/07/22 by Tom Service

The village of Longborough in Gloucestershire is the epitome of Cotswolds sleepiness, a vision of pastoral English loveliness in which you might expect the most exciting events of the year to be the charity cricket match or the bring-and-buy sale. You could imagine a visit from John Nettles investigating one of those cheerfully rustic murders. It's not a place where you can imagine the world's biggest operatic challenge being staged…

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Anthony Rolfe Johnson obituary

2010/07/22 by Alan Blyth

One of the most attractive and intelligent tenors from the 1970s onwards, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, who has died aged 69, tackled a very wide repertoire. Its twin peaks were his Bach and his Britten. He was magisterial as the Evangelist in Bach's St John and St Matthew Passions, recording them both, and took on most of the operatic roles Britten wrote for Peter Pears, as well as most of his song cycles…

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Are we heading for a drought in prestige architecture?

2010/07/19 by Vanessa Thorpe

The idea that we have now seen the last of the great, prestige architectural projects of the last 10 years has provoked a strong, if divided response.

The debate started at the weekend when Rab Bennetts, the architect behind the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, said he feared the UK is sailing into the architectural doldrums. At the same time, though, he conceded that some of the landmark building projects that changed the skyline of our cities in the past 10 years were perhaps excessive, or even gratuitous…

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The Duchess of Malfi; La traviata

2010/07/18 by Kate Kellaway

In a long queue outside a former pharmaceuticals factory near Gallions Reach in London's Docklands, there is mounting expectation and one feels as if one has reached the rim of the world – a scrubby no man's land of cow parsley and warehouses. The sense is of being on the edge of the known world artistically, too, waiting to see a most exciting and unconventional event – a collaboration between ENO and radical theatre company Punchdrunk. Tickets have already sold out (with frisky bidding on eBay) for this opera based on John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi…

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Plácido Domingo: 'I am a very happy man, but I love to suffer on stage'

2010/07/18 by Peter Conrad

Plácido Domingo's name means Placid Sunday, which is not what he will be enjoying today. He may well sleep until the afternoon, but will make up for that inertia tonight on stage at the Royal Albert Hall, in a BBC Proms performance of the Royal Opera's production of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, he will age half a century, beginning as a swashbuckling corsair and ending – after the lapse of a few decades between the acts – as the elderly, careworn Doge of Genoa, poisoned by a vindictive political crony.

Since Domingo never disappoints, there will be the usual expenditure of vocal energy, in a graver, mellower register than we heard in his heyday as a virile tenor, when he wailed in erotic torment as Don José in Carmen or sounded a revolutionary battle cry as the freedom-fighter Cavaradossi in Tosca…

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