Front Row

Singer and fiddle player Bella Hardy talks about her new album – her tenth – Love Songs, which sees this adventurous musician return to where she began, with the traditional songs she’s known all her life.

Thomas Lynch is an American poet with strong connections to Ireland. He is, too, an undertaker, a career that has informed his verse and essays, which dwell on life and death, faith and doubt, and also place. From his ancestral cottage in County Clare Lynch talks to Shahidha Bari about these things and reads from Bone Rosary, his New and Selected poems, just out.

The Birmingham 2022 Festival is the biggest celebration of creativity ever in the region, showcasing the work of artists within the Commonwealth. Ahead of the Commonwealth Games starting this week, the arts festival Executive Producer Raidene Carter and artist Beverley Bennett share their continued vision and excitement with Shahida Bari.

Presenter: Shahidha Bari

Notre-Dame On Fire, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, is a film dramatising the events of the horrifying night on April 15, 2019 when the cathedral that symbolises so much in France and beyond started to burn. Milk Teeth is the second novel from Jessica Andrews, whose debut Saltwater won the Portico Prize in 2020. It explores appetite, control and desire in a young woman from the north of England who finds herself in the heat of Spain. The writer Sarah Hall and the journalist Agnès Poirier review both.

Ahead of her upcoming Proms performance in the Royal Albert Hall, composer and vocalist Jennifer Walshe joins Tom Sutcliffe to perform one of her original compositions live in the studio. Walshe’s soundscape has been described as transcending the contemporary classical music world and she explains her approach to composing original works.

And Sam Leith, literary editor of The Spectator magazine, joins Tom to remember the comic book writer Alan Grant, whose death was announced today.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Photo: a still from the film Notre-Dame On Fire Photo Credit: Mickael Lefevre

Where The Crawdads Sing: director Olivia Newman on bringing the multi-million copy best-selling novel to the big screen.

On Sonorous Seas: Hebridean artist Mhairi Killin on her multi-media exhibition on the Isle of Mull. Fusing sound, video, whalebone artefacts, and poetry, the work is inspired by research into military sonar in Scottish waters and recent mass strandings of whales.

Reflecting on his 50 years in fashion, designer Jean Paul Gaultier sits down with Samira Ahmed to talk about his life, Madonna, London and how it has inspired his new show at the Roundhouse Fashion Freak Show.

An all party parliamentary report has been released documenting the current state of music touring. The Chief Executive of UK Music Jamie Njoku-Goodwin and Jack Brown of the band White Lies join the discussion.

Much Ado about Nothing is this year’s Shakespeare play, with a production in Stratford in the spring, one that opened at the National Theatre yesterday, another at Shakespeare’s Globe, running into winter, and one at The Crucible in Sheffield which will open in September. Front Row brings three directors – Simon Godwin (National), Lucy Bailey (Globe) and Robert Hastie (Crucible) – together to discuss the fascination of this funny, but disturbing, love story with Samira Ahmed.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Photo Credit: Mark Senior

Karl Bartos, musician and composer, on his life in the German band Kraftwerk - as told in his new memoir The Sound of the Machine.

Playwright and screenwriter Lucy Kirkwood on her play Maryland - devised in response to normalisation of violence against women, and originally staged at Royal Court Theatre in London in 2021, it has now been adapted for BBC TV screens.

The Spooky Men’s Chorale: the strangely comedic but musically marvellous and popular Australian male voice choir stop off in the middle of their UK tour to sing and talk to Samira Ahmed about Georgian polyphony, Swedish folk band Abba, and not being a men’s group.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Image credit: Markus Wustmann

The new film Persuasion based on Jane Austen’s novel starring Dakota Johnson and directed by Carrie Cracknell has already attracted a lot of attention for its blend of 21st century millennial dialogue and Austen’s own words. And Peter Morgan, writer of The Crown, returns to the stage for his new play Patriots which looks at the rise of the oligarchs in Russia, in particular Boris Berezovsky, played by Tom Hollander, helping to secure the rise of Putin, played by Will Keen. Guardian foreign correspondent Luke Harding and film critic Hanna Flint join Shahidha to review both.

Durham’s International Brass festival, which has been going for more than 20 years, is showcasing bands from as far afield as Cuba, Italy and Ghana. Among this year’s high profile artists taking part are Mercury Prize and Brit Award nominees, a MOBO-winning CBBC star, and an avant garde rock band fronted by the Poet Laureate. The BBC’s Sharuna Sagar went to Durham to see how this traditional style of music is being embraced by new generation of musicians and collaborators.

We hear who has been named Art Fund Museum of the Year, and speak to the winner just minutes after it is announced.

Presenter: Shahidha Bari

Photo credit: Nick Wall/Netflix © 2022

In the late 16th century, the Merseyside town of Prescot had the only purpose-built, indoor theatre outside London. Now the Shakespeare North Playhouse, a £38 million architectural representation of a Shakespearean stage, opens there this weekend. Samira Ahmed is joined by Laura Collier, the theatre’s creative director and the writer and performer Ashleigh Nugent who have co-curated Open Up, the opening festival.

Front Row is hearing from the five museums nominated to be this year’s Museum of the Year and tonight it’s the turn of Tŷ Pawb in Wrexham. Reporter Adam Walton takes a tour of the museum and finds why the museum is at the heart of the local community.

Danny Brocklehurst is the Bafta-award winning writer behind Shameless, Clocking Off and Brassic. He joins Samira to discuss turning to more family friendly fare in The Railway Children Return. In his sequel, set 50 years after the classic 1970 film, Jenny Agutter’s Bobbie is a grandmother and former Suffragette, and the titular children are evacuees from Manchester.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Image: Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot

Oscar winning Joker composer Hildur Guðnadóttir talks about her new commission for the BBC Proms, inspired by political division, and the difference between writing for films and games, ahead of the first BBC Prom devoted to gaming music.

To discuss the government's National Plan for Music Education for schools in England, Tom is joined by Catherine Barker from United Learning, Colin Stuart from the Incorporated Society of Musicians, and Jimmy Rotheram, a music teacher at Feversham Primary Academy in Bradford.

Curb Your Enthusiasm director Robert Weide on his decades long friendship with the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, which has resulted in his new feature documentary film, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Jack Absolute Flies Again, at the National Theatre, is an adaptation of Sheridan’s comedy of manners The Rivals. Writers Richard Bean (who wrote One Man, Two Guvnors – a big hit) and Oliver Chris keep the original characters – Lydia Languish, Sir Anthony Absolute and the lexically challenged Mrs Malaprop – but move the action from 18th Century Bath to the Battle of Britain. Samira Ahmed talks to director Emily Burns about this, and to Peter Forbes, who plays Sir Anthony, about finding character in the comedy.

Pianist and songwriter Joe Stilgoe on his new album, Theatre - which he describes as a love letter to the theatre - and performs for us live in the studio.

In Paris, conceptual art has found itself in the dock, as rights of authorship over some of the artworks created by artist Maurizio Cattelan - including one of his most famous works,'La Nona Ora' (The Ninth Hour), a wax figure of Pope Jean Paul II struck by a meteor – are at the centre of a legal case brought by the French sculptor Daniel Druet. In the wake of the court’s judgment, lawyer Mark Stephens, discusses the issues the case raises.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

This week’s cultural critics, music journalist Jude Rogers and film critic Rhianna Dhillon, join Tom Sutcliffe to review a new Radio 3 drama, He Do The Waste Land in Different Voices, marking the centenary of poet T.S. Eliot’s Modernist masterpiece The Waste Land. They also discuss the film Brian and Charles, a mockumentary directed by Jim Archer, which follows a reclusive man who builds and befriends a robot in rural Wales.

The Story Museum in Oxford is the latest of those to be shortlisted for the Art Fund Museum of the Year, all of which we are featuring on Front Row before the announcement of the winner next week. Tom visits the museum and takes a tour through storytelling trees, down a rabbit hole and through the back of a wardrobe.

And actor Sam Crane joins us to talk about an extraordinary live performance of Hamlet in the video game Grand Theft Auto.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Photo: John Cairns