Front Row

British jazz pianist and broadcaster Julian Joseph joins us to look at the life and music of his good friend; pianist and composer Chick Corea. Chick began his career in the early 60’s, released his first album in 1968 and over more than 5 decades he played with just about every big name in jazz, winning 23 Grammy awards and was still composing and performing new work just months ago – most recently a concerto inspired by the music of Bela Bartok

Elusive pop sensation Sia makes her film directorial debut with Music, the story of a troubled older sister learning to love and live with her autistic younger sister. It’s released in the UK this week under a barrage of criticism from the autistic community which has seen Sia apologise for depicting a potentially lethal restraint technique, and for casting a neurotypical actress (long-time collaborator Maddie Ziegler) as the autistic eponymous character. TV writer and author of Drama Queen: One Autistic Woman and a Life of Unhelpful Labels Sara Gibbs joins film critic Tim Robey to review the film. They also take a look at the film Democrats presented during Donald Trump's second impeachment trial on 9 February for its cinematic technique and editing.

When Riva Lehrer was born in 1958 with spina bifida, most children like her were not expected to survive. In her Barbellion prize winning memoir, Golem Girl, she recounts her life as a disabled person, using her paintings as a companion to her words. She joins us today to discuss the paradox of visibility, and how she uses art to amplify the lives of those who are usually left unseen.

Every year the Arts Foundation makes award of £10,000 to assist recipients with living and working costs - helping them to carry on creating. All five winners are talking about their winning projects on Front Row. The third is Shneel Malik, a bio-architect. Her work Indus is a wall of tiles impressed with what look like the veins of leaves, down which water pours. It is strikingly beautiful - and very practical. The channels of the veins hold a micro-algae gel that purifies the water, contaminated by toxins in processes such as textile dyeing by small enterprises in India. It prevents pollution and allows the water - a scarce resource - to be recycled. Shneel Malik explains her work and its potential.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Screenwriter and novelist Ben Hopkins talks to Tom about his ambitious new novel, Cathedral. It's a portrait of the construction of the medieval period's greatest buildings, featuring a cast of intriguing characters all vying for power - from the bishop to his treasurer to local merchants and lowly stone cutters.

Faith, Hope and Glory is a new drama series on Radio 4 which sees British playwrights Roy Williams, Rex Obano, and Winsome Pinnock chart the history of postwar Britain through the intersecting lives of three women. Starting in 1946, a week of 15 minute dramas which set the scene: Hope and Jim’s baby, entrusted to Eunice to take home to Antigua, is lost at Tilbury Docks, and found by Gloria and Clement, a celibate couple, who decide to keep her and call her Joy. The series continues with three 45 minute plays. Winsome Pinnock and Rex Obano join Tom to discuss the series.

Luke Jerram is the next artist to feature in #FrontRowGetCreative, where artists encourage you to try your hand at a piece of art. Today, he focuses on sound, which has been an important component to much of his work, from installing 2000 pianos in public spaces in 65 cities around the world to etching the sound

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Documentary-maker Adam Curtis crafts densely-constructed, visually-fragmented work so packed full of ideas and images that you can’t take your eyes off the screen for a moment. He pulls together disparate images and soundtrack to create a mesmerising hypothesis. He discusses his newest work, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, which debuts on BBC iPlayer this Thursday.

Welcome to Your Fantasy and The Missing are two new true crime podcasts swelling the ranks in a genre which continues to feature highly in both Spotify and Apple podcast charts. Crime writer and true podcast fan Denise Mina, Natalia Petrzela, presenter and co-producer of Welcome To Your Fantasy, and true crime podcast maker Hannah Maguire, co-host of RedHanded, discuss the continuing appeal of this format.

We’ve another in our continuing series, Moments of Joy, showing how art can brighten dark times. Today it’s the turn of writer Max Liu, who celebrates a moment in Annie Baker‘s drama The Flick, which defies theatrical conventions to great effect. It also reminds us of the unacknowledged value of small talk.

Presenter: John Wilson

Tom Hanks stars in Paul Greengrass's new film, News of the World. Hanks plays Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Civil War veteran who crosses paths with Johanna (Helena Zengel), a 10-year-old taken in by the Kiowa people six years earlier and raised as one of their own. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw gives us her verdict on the western.

Songwriter Roger Cook discusses Thursday’s world premiere of Next Year in Jerusalem, the title song of a musical he wrote with Lionel Bart 47 years ago. Roger is now hoping to revive the musical they never managed to stage at the time, and shares an exclusive recording of one of the songs, sung by him and Lionel Bart.

Mary Wilson was a founding members of The Supremes, one of the most successful and influential girl groups of all time to spring from the Motown stable. To celebrate her life, Kevin Le Gendre looks at what she achieved and her influence on the British beat group scene at the time.

Jean-Claude Carriere, who died yesterday, aged 89, had an extraordinary career. He published his first novel in 1957. His first screenplay was filmed in 1962. He carried on writing novels and films - he acted, too - until 2019. He worked with Jacques Tati and wrote most of Luis Bunuel's later films, including The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. He collaborated with Peter Brook on one of the most important productions in 20th Century theatre, the nine-hour-long stage version of The Mahabharata. Critic Christopher Cook assesses Carriere's cultural significance, paying tribute to a great French artist and intellectual.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Twenty years ago this week, the artist Michael Landy famously destroyed every single one of his 7,227 possessions in an artwork called Break Down. The artist looks back on the 14-day event which took place on an industrial conveyor belt inside a disused department store in Oxford St in London, and considers how the process affected him.

Since the now notorious Handforth Parish Council Meeting people have been imagining the film version starring Meryl Streep or Lesley Manville as Jackie Weaver, with cameos from Julie Walters and David Bradley, but films take forever to make. Already, though, people have been busy composing Handforth Parish Council, the musical, the opera, the sea shanty and the drill track, shooting videos and posting them online. Millie Taylor, professor of musical theatre assesses some of these almost instant offerings and talks to Kirsty Lang about what they reveal about creativity in lockdown.

Cathy Yan joins us from New York, to discuss how her work as journalist in China informed her film, Dead Pigs. Based on a true story, the film focuses on the lives and connections of a disparate group of characters as thousands of dead pigs mysteriously float down the river towards Shanghai. Cathy will discuss what made her want to adapt the story for screen, as well as her experience shooting in China.

How has the current situation affected plans for Coventry city of culture 2021, which is due to kick off on 15 May? Chenine Bhathena, creative director, discusses their plans, and how they've dealt with the challenges of lockdown and Covid.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

Main image above: Vivian Wu as Candy Wang (Centre) in Dead Pigs.

In April the artist Luke Jerram spoke on Front Row about his sculpture of the Covid-19 virus. Since then he has been ill with Covid and has created another sculpture - unveiled today - this time of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Jerram discusses his artistic engagement with Covid, including his piece In Memoriam, 120 flags made of NHS bed-sheets, commemorating those who have died.

The Oscar-winning actor Christopher Plummer, whose death at the age of 91 was announced today, is remembered by the film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh.

For our Friday Review, Larushka is joined by Carl Anka to discuss Malcolm & Marie, the black-and-white, made-in-lockdown relationship movie on Netflix starring Zendaya and John David Washington, written and directed by Sam Levinson. They also watch ZeroZeroZero, a new thriller on Sky unpicking the international cocaine trade based on the book by Roberto Saviano.

Arts Foundation Futures Award winner Keisha Thompson discusses her past work as a theatre-maker and poet. She talks about how she uses her background in science and maths to inform her theatre practice, and why she is fascinated by taboo subjects in art.

And to celebrate Welsh Language Music Day, the 19-year-old Welsh singer, composer and harpist Cerys Hafana joins us to explain how music and the Welsh language go hand-in-hand.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

Hollywood star Sam Neill joins us from his home in New Zealand to discuss the perils of acting with sheep in his new film Rams, based on an acclaimed Icelandic drama about two estranged brothers and their flocks of a rare horned breed of sheep.

A new colour blue has come onto artists’ palettes. Called YInMn it was discovered in 2009 by accident by scientists working on semiconductors but has only just become commercially available. Art critic Waldemar Januszczak looks at why this is significant and how artists have used the colour blue in painting.

The next artist in our series #FrontRowGetCreative is Sarah Maple who will be exploring the art of collage. Using the idea of ‘negative space’, Sarah will be showing us how to create our own collage using text and imagery from magazines, newspapers and junk mail, the result of which will be a modern and striking image and a significant step up from what we were doing at primary school.

Presenter: John Wilson

Film critic Leila Latif joins us to discuss today’s Golden Globe nominations, and gives us an overview of some of the highlights from the first ever online Sundance Festival.

The folklore of Taiwan is visited and revisited by subsequent generations of women in Bestiary, the debut novel from K-Ming Chang, as a Daughter falls in love and confronts her family’s secrets in America. Shot through with a litany of mythical beasts, it’s a novel that offers a charged narrative of diaspora and beauty in a hazy magic realist renderings of California, Arkansas & Taiwan. Author and poet K-Ming Chang tells Kirsty Lang how tracing her own heritage led to a story of queer desire, violence, and identity.

Writers write while agents tend to their interests and publishers bring their works to the public. There is, though, another lesser known but important worker in the books business - the Literary Scout. Their role is to find the right books, before anyone else, and bring them to publishers, all over the world. Scouts have to know everyone and everything and, as we all know, knowledge is power. Natasha Farrant, famous as a Costa Award winning children's author, has been a literary scout for 20 years. Antony Harwood has been a prominent literary agent even longer. On Front Row they discuss the role and importance of the literary scout, spilling the beans to Kirsty Lang...but probably not all of them.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

Main image: Josh 0'Connor as Prince Charles and Emma Corrin as Lady Diana Spencer in the Netflix TV series The Crown

The Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald discusses his follow-up to his YouTube film Life In A Day from 2010, where he invited the public to upload their own footage of their lives taken on one specific day. He then edited those contributions to create a finished film to tell the story of a single day on Earth. For Life In A Day 2020 he received over 320,000 submissions from nearly 200 countries.

Jakuta Alikavazovic is a Prix Goncourt winning French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. She talks to John Wilson about her new novel Night As It Falls which explores themes of identity, first love, class and contemporary anxiety against the backdrop of the war in the former Yugoslavia and is out in English this week.

As part of our ongoing mission to bring a bit of artistic light to the darkness, we’ve been hearing about some Moments of Joy – those sudden, intense moments watching a play or a film, reading, listening to music or looking at a work of art, when your heart soars. Critic Hanna Flint's choice is a scene from the film Blinded by the Light – with a soundtrack by the Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen.

Continuing the theme, February 2nd is Candlemas, the celebration of the infant Christ's presentation in the Temple, and the coming of light, when all the candles needed for the year were brought into the church, and blessed. Poets have been drawn to the subject - Robert Herrick, T. S. Eliot and Amy Clampitt - all writing Candlemas poems. There are a number of Candlemas customs and sayings - about how the weather at Candlemas predicts the coming season, for instance. The Cornish poet Charles Causley incorporates one of these into his poem, At Candlemas, with which we end Front Row, in a setting by the Dartmoor singer, and relative of the poet, Jim Causley.

Presenter: John Wilson

Jill Halfpenny stars in a new tv thriller The Drowning. Nine years ago, Jodie’s little boy disappeared on a picnic by the lake, presumed drowned, and she’s never been able to accept his loss. Now, out of the blue, she catches sight of a teenage boy and she’s sure that it’s her missing son. Jill talks to Samira about why she likes playing morally ambiguous characters, shares her own personal experience of loss and how grief is a monster you just can’t outrun.

The British Library has just acquired the archive of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East and Helen Melody, Curator of Contemporary Literature and Creative Archives, tells Samira Ahmed about its treasures: scripts, performance recordings, letters, photographs, rehearsal notes, press cuttings and props. The archive also contains material from the tenures of later artistic directors, such Philip Hedley and Kerry Michael, who notably encouraged diversity and inclusion, Black and Asian theatre, and work made by people with disabilities.

We mark the publication of a landmark anthology of queer writing, Queer: A Collection of LGBTQ Writing from Ancient Times to Yesterday, which brings together an unusually broad range of voices from across the ages and the globe to form a survey of queer literature. Editor of the anthology, Frank Wynne, will be joined by writer and artist Morgan M Page, host of trans history podcast One From the Vaults, for a discussion about the cyclical nature of attitudes towards sexuality and gender and to highlight some lesser known voices in the tradition from India, Mexico and Greenland.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Main image: Jill Halfpenny in The Drowning