Front Row

Front Row comes from Belfast where Steven Rainey hears about some of the highlights of this year’s Belfast International Festival.

Pianist Ruth McGinley talks about her new album AURA, a collection of traditional Irish airs re-imagined for classical piano. Ruth found success at a young age after winning the piano final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition but felt burnt out by the pressure and demands of life as a concert pianist. She discusses her return to playing and the freedom she’s found in collaborating with other musicians and composers.

Composer and theatre maker Conor Mitchell is known for his ground-breaking operas covering topics including the trial of Harvey Weinstein and homophobic comments from a DUP politician. His new musical, Propaganda, is set during the Berlin blockade and asks questions about the ransoming of supplies. He discusses Propaganda’s contemporary parallels and using a musical to explain political turmoil.

Claire Keegan has been shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize for her novel Small Things Like These. Set in the 1980s in County Wexford, Ireland, at a time when the infamous Magdalene laundries were still operating, the book follows a coal merchant and father of five daughters who is faced with a moral choice.

Presenter: Steven Rainey

Jazz saxophonist Camilla George plays live in the studio and talks about her new album Ibio-Ibio - a tribute to her Ibibio roots in Nigerian.

Iranian artist Soheila Sokhanvari joins Samira to discuss Rebel Rebel, her first major work in the UK. The exhibition at the Barbican’s Curve features 27 miniature portraits of pioneering female performers who blazed a trail in cinema, music and dance before the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Elizabeth Strout is the latest of the authors shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize to be featured on Front Row. She's been shortlisted for the third novel in her series of Lucy Barton novels, Oh William! We hear an extract from her interview with Open Book about the novel.

BBC Scotland's arts correspondent, Pauline McLean, reports on the financial pressures that are besieging Scotland's cultural institutions.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Main image: Camilla George

Alan Garner’s 10th novel, Treacle Walker, may be one of the shortest books to make the Booker Prize shortlist but once read the slim volume which explores the nature of time weighs on the reader’s mind. Alan talks to Nick Ahad about the creation of Treacle Walker and what’s it like to be the oldest author ever to be nominated for the UK’s most celebrated literary prize.

Monteverdi’s opera, Orfeo, is regarded as the first great opera and while there have been numerous productions since its premiere in 1607 none of those have attempted the approach being taken by Opera North this week. Monteverdi’s opera is being recreated through a collaboration between Indian and Western classical music traditions. The co-music directors - composer and sitarist Jasdeep Singh Degun and conductor and harpsichordist Laurence Cummings - along with the opera’s director, Anna Himali Howard, join Nick to discuss why Monteverdi’s opera provides the perfect gateway to a new form of music storytelling.

When Baz Luhrmann was a young theatre and opera director he had the opportunity to assist Peter Brook on his epic production of the Mahabharata, which Brook was staging in a quarry in Australia. Luhrmann tells Nick Ahad that he didn't have much to do he did a good deal of observing, and that he learned a great deal.

Presenter: Nick Ahad

Main image: Alan Garner

Author Percival Everett talks to Tom Sutcliffe about his Booker Prize nominated novel, The Trees, which uses dark humour to explore gruesome events in Mississippi.

Science Fiction writer Una McCormack and historian Prof Anthony Bale review Stephen Frears's new film The Lost King, about the real life search for the remains of Richard III and a new exhibition at the Science Museum devoted to Science Fiction.

And writer Hari Kunzru on the life and work of Annie Ernaux, who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Image Credit: Photographer - Graeme Hunter, © PATHÉ PRODUCTIONS LIMITED AND BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION 2022ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Mercurial musician Björk has just released her tenth album Fossora. She discusses the experience of making the album and her interest in mushrooms.

Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for the second time, this time for her second novel Glory. It recounts the political turmoil of Zimbabwe’s recent past through a cast of animal characters. NoViolet tells Samira what made her want to approach the subject in this way.

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of James Bond, Samira speaks to producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson about the immense impact and legacy of the franchise.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Main image: Björk

The announcement of the winners of the BBC National Short Story Award and Young Writers’ Award with Cambridge University live from the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House in London. Joining Tom Sutcliffe to celebrate the imaginative potential of the short story are chair of judges Elizabeth Day, previous winner Ingrid Persaud, and the poet Will Harris. All the stories are available on BBC Sounds.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

American actress Viola Davis, who has won an Oscar, Emmy and a Tony for her outstanding performances, plays a female warrior in the historical epic The Woman King. Viola Davis and director Gina Prince-Bythewood discuss bringing the story of a 19th Century female general to life.

Rona Munro’s trilogy The James Plays were one of the theatrical highlights of the year when they premiered in 2014. She has now returned to Scottish history with two further monarchal plays – James IV: Queen of the Fight, and Mary. She talks to Samira about how her new plays challenge the traditional histories about the court of James IV and the life of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Amy Sherald is a celebrated American painter, known for her striking official portrait of Michelle Obama. As her first European exhibition opens in London, she joins Samira in the Front Row studio to discuss her new paintings, which continue to explore themes of American realism and Black portraiture.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Image: Viola Davis in The Woman King

Artist Samson Kambalu talks to Shahidha Bari about his sculpture Antelope, a thought provoking commentary on colonialism which has just been unveiled on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth.

Period gangster drama Peaky Blinders has been turned into a ballet by dance company Rambert. As it opens in Birmingham, Rambert Dance's Helen Shute explains how they've interpreted the TV show for the stage.

Screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce and critic Helen Nugent review the first Shakespeare production at the new Shakespeare North theatre in Prescot, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Joyland, the the first Pakistani film to be selected at the Cannes Film Festival.

The Blackwater Lightship is a novel by Colm Tóibín, published in 1999 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later made into a film and has now been dramatized for the Dublin Theatre Festival. Set in the early nineties, it tells of a young gay man suffering from AIDS who visits his grandmother in rural Wexford and the repercussions his arrival has on her, his mother, and sister. Elle talks to the writer and director David Horan about adapting the novel for the stage, and the issues it raises about mother-daughter relationships and attitudes to AIDS then and now.

On the 40th anniversary of the First National Black Art Convention, held at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, and an accompanying exhibition at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, we look at that foundational moment for black art now, 40 years on. Elle speaks to Marlene Smith, artist, curator, and a founding member of the BLK Art Group, and to Alice Correia - art historian and editor of a new collection of documents from that time.

Plus filmmaker Kirsty Bell discusses her directorial debut, A Bird Flew In - set during lockdown, and featuring a stellar cast, including Sadie Frost, Derek Jacobi, and Frances Barber.

Presenter: Elle Osili-Wood

Luke Jones meets the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, whose show Only An Octave Apart is about to begin a month long run at Wilton’s Music Hall in London. He discusses how he discovered his range, why he fuses opera with pop and his return to the ENO next year in Philip Glass’s Akhnaten.

Luke takes a tour round See Monster in Weston-super-Mare, a retired North Sea rig that's been turned into one of the UK's largest art installations as part of the Unboxed festival.

And a discussion on the impact of the cost of living crisis on theatre and live music. Jamie Njoku-Goodwin speaks from the Labour Party Conference and Mark Davyd from the Music Venue Trust. Eleanor Lloyd from (SOLT) The Society of London Theatres/UK Theatre.