As we write, violinist Anthony Marwood—who recently dared to both play and perform the soldier/violinist in Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale—is somewhere in a remote cabin in Vermont getting to grips with a piece he has waited ten years for—a violin concerto written for him by his erstwhile musical partner, the pianist and composer Thomas Adès. The premiere in Berlin is less than a month away, with the British premiere at the BBC Proms on 6th September, but still Marwood has only just over half the piece. Way back in July, Adès reported that he had completed a draft and was on the point of faxing through some particularly terrifying passages when a new inspiration hit him. These are no doubt the ordinary vicissitudes of composition, and Marwood has every faith that his spontaneous impulse ten years ago, on hearing Adès's Powder Her Face, to ask the composer to write a concerto for him, will result in a piece that does full justice to both their now mature creative powers. But still, it must be getting quite tense up in those maple woods.
Forsythe returns
William Forsythe is returning to London—but not at the helm of Ballett Frankfurt. The New York-born choreographer ran the company for 20 years, turning it into an international success, but the more avant garde his choreography became (veering, for some, into experimentation so radical as to be indigestible), the more Forsythe had to battle the burghers of Frankfurt. Amid rumblings about subsidy cuts and a plan to confine the company to classical story-ballets (a rumour which elicited 16,000 indignant emails), Forsythe decided to break free. The Forsythe Company, which comes to Sadler's Wells in September, has risen from the ashes of Ballett Frankfurt (which did not survive his departure). It employs many of the same dancers, and is part-funded by Frankfurt; it splits its time between that city and Dresden. This radical new arrangement should, Forsythe's fans hope, enable the most liberated expression of his choreography yet.
Political art falls flat
Banksy's paintings on the Palestinian side of the Israeli separation wall may have been reported with bemusement by the British press, but according to Ha'aretz, the British graffiti artist's political statement has fallen rather flat for Israelis and Palestinians. The paper snidely referred to his "pastoral" paintings and quoted a Ramallah resident who approached Banksy to say, "You are painting the wall and making it beautiful." When Banksy thanked him, he retorted: "We don't want it to be beautiful. We hate this wall. Go home."
Booker longlist
Independent publishers are conspicuous by their (near) absence from this year's Booker longlist. After recent critical and commercial successes for Serpent's Tail, Tindal Street Press, Canongate, Profile, Atlantic and so on, this year's list is remarkably concentrated among extremely well-established publishers, with four from Random House, four from Penguin, three from Faber, two from Hodder, two from HarperCollins, one from Macmillan and one from Canongate.
On past form, the big houses often fall off on the way from long to shortlist. In 2003, Random House had six books on the longlist, none of which made it through to a shortlist dominated by independents (pity the junior editor who had to announce that to his colleagues). But then DJ Taylor, who's obsessed with provincialism, was judging that year. This year we've got, among others, David Sexton, literary editor of the Evening Standard. Only a year ago, Sexton was complaining in that newspaper that "the state of publishing in Britain now [leaves] so much scope" for new independents. How the mighty are not fallen.
