Front Row

Genre-defying South African cellist Abel Selaocoe speaks to Samira and performs a piece from his new album Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae), which will be launched at a performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. He is about to become Artist In Residence at London's Southbank Centre. His inventive and virtuosic compositions and performance style fuse Baroque repertoire with traditional African mu...

Sir Richard Eyre is one of the UK’s most distinguished and celebrated directors - equally at home in theatre, film, and television. At the age of 79, he has just made his debut as a playwright with his new play, The Snail House, which has just opened at Hampstead Theatre. He talks to Samira about his late literary blooming and what needs to happen for theatre audiences to return to their pre-pande...

Eileen Cooper is a painter and printmaker who’s been quietly creating boldly coloured figurative images and ceramics since the 1970s. This year finally sees the first major review of her work which, in magic realist style, encompasses huge themes: sexuality, motherhood, life and death. The show is called Parallel Lines: Eileen Cooper And Leicester’s Art Collection, and places Cooper’s work next to...

The trumpeter and musician Alison Balsom has performed with some of the world’s greatest orchestras. She talks about her latest album, Quiet City. Jack Hilton was a plasterer from Rochdale whose groundbreaking writing was praised by both WH Auden and George Orwell. His work fell out of print after the Second World War and he has been largely forgotten. Jack Chadwick, who is running a campaign to r...

American singer songwriter Loudon Wainwright III performs live in the studio and talks about his decades-long career, his current UK tour and his latest album titled Lifetime Achievement. Tonight the six books on this year’s Booker Prize for Fiction shortlist will be announced. The literary critic Max Liu joins us to comment. One of these six shortlisted authors will be chosen as the overall winne...

David Cronenberg’s new film Crimes of the Future is a science fiction body parts horror movie starring Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Stewart and Léa Seydoux. In a time when pain no longer exists a couple are using organ removal surgery as performance art. Leila Latif reviews and gives a run down on the films being shown at this year’s Venice Film Festival, including The Whale and Banshees of Inisherin....

Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power is a prequel and in keeping with the epic scale of Tolkein’s books and their film versions it doesn’t begin a two years before The Hobbit but two thousand. Sci-fi novelist Temi Oh and film critic Tim Robey review the Amazon Prime series. They also consider the merits of another millennia spanning work, George Miller’s film Three Thousand Years of Longing. It’s a r...

Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel, Babysitter, is the story of a woman caught in an abusive relationship with her lover, set against the background of the hunt for a serial killer in 70s Detroit. Its dark themes are not untypical of the subject matter of much of Oates’s long list of successful books which have won her great critical acclaim over the years. Tom Sutcliffe talks to her about her work...

Bestselling crime novelist Ann Cleeves joins Samira Ahmed to discuss the return of her no-nonsense Northumberland crime-fighter, Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope, in the Rising Tide. What gets books on the shelves of some of our biggest chain retailers? Tonight Front Row lifts the lid on the behind-the-scenes payments that influence what you get to see and buy. Composer James B.Wilson gives an in...

The BBC Proms is celebrating what would’ve been Aretha Franklin’s 80th birthday, and leading the tribute is American singer-songwriter Sheléa. She's a protegee of Quincy Jones who also found a mentor in Stevie Wonder, and names Natalie Cole and Whitney Houston as some of her inspirations. Sheléa shares Aretha Franklin’s influences of gospel, jazz and soul, and her skills to play the piano and turn...

When Gregory Doran was appointed Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2012, his stated ambition was for the company to stage the entire canon of plays in the First Folio, the first printed collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Ten years on and having just completed his plan, with the premiere of a new production of All's Well That Ends Well, he joins Nick Ahad to reflect on the chang...

Anne-Marie Duff talks to Samira about her new Apple TV+ series Bad Sisters, where she plays one of five sisters who is trapped in a coercive marriage, from which her sisters plot to free her by any means necessary. Is the Horniman Museum’s decision to return their Benin Bronzes to Nigeria a watershed moment for UK museums? We speak to Errol Francis, artistic director of Culture&, Dan Hicks, au...

Jacob Collier has won a Grammy Award for each of his first four albums. In fact, he has five Grammys altogether. He’s back home in London after his recent UK tour and has just brought out a new single, Never Gonna Be Alone. Jacob and his musical collaborators Lizzy McAlpine and Victoria Canal perform the song live in the Front Row studio. Following the attack on Sir Salman Rushdie at the weekend,...

Live from Edinburgh, with a review of Alan Cumming's one man show, Burn, which sets out to update the biscuit-tin image of Robert Burns. Plus Counting & Cracking - the epic, multilingual life journey of four generations, from Sri Lanka to Australia. To review the Edinburgh International Festival performances, Kate Molleson is joined by Arusa Qureshi, writer and editor of Fest Magazine, and Ala...

Both journalist Charlotte Higgins and playwright David Greig are fascinated by the Roman occupation of Britain. Higgins’s book Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, an account of her travels to the Roman remains scattered about Britain, is really about how we today relate to Roman Britain. It seems an unlikely subject for a play but Greig has adapted it for the stage and they both talk to...

Kate Molleson and guests live from Edinburgh Festival. Comedian and impressionist Matt Forde talks about capturing the essence of political figures in his show Clowns To The Left Of Me, Jokers To The Right. Mezzo Soprano Anne Sofie von Otter performs songs by Rufus Wainwright and Franz Schubert on the eve of her Edinburgh International Festival concert. Playwright Uma Nada-Rajah on her topical new...

Nope is the latest film from Oscar-winning writer-director Jordan Peele, whose breakthrough was the critically acclaimed 2017 horror Get Out. Tom Sutcliffe speaks to Jordan about reinventing genre- from black horror to sci-fi-western- and examining the exploitation of black talent in Hollywood's history. When the trombonist Peter Moore plays at the Proms next Tuesday it will be the first time that...

Tom Sutcliffe and guest reviewers Bidisha and Amon Warmann discuss Bullet Train, starring Brad Pitt. It's a vivid mixture of comedy and violence from director David Leitch, and is based on a thriller by Japanese author, Kōtarō Isaka. We also discuss Mohsin Hamid's latest novel, The Last White Man - a fable about what happens when white people's skin begins to turn brown. Conductor Semyon Bychkov c...

Huw Stephens reports from the National Eisteddfod of Wales in Tregaron, Ceredigion, talking to Archdruid Myrddin ap Dafydd, winner of this year’s Novel Prize Meinir Pierce Jones, and folk singer Owen Shiers. In 1965 the jury recommended that the Pulitzer Prize for Music should be awarded to the jazz composer and band-leader Duke Ellington. But he did not receive the honour. The music historian Ted...

Disabled-access ticket booking – for concerts, comedy clubs, theatre, festivals, and more. Carolyn Atkinson reports on problems with new initiatives to make access to the arts much easier for disabled people: the big delays to the National Arts Access Card, and inconsistencies in purchasing ‘companion’ tickets. Will Ashon is a novelist and non-fiction writer whose latest book, The Passengers, is a...

Beyoncé's Renaissance: we discuss Beyoncé's house and disco inspired new album – her first solo material in six years - and her huge significance as an artist and cultural icon. Nick is joined by Jacqueline Springer – curator, music journalist and lecturer- and by the writer and editor Tara Joshi. The Arctic is Don Paterson’s new collection of poems. The title refers not to the polar region but...

Panah Panahi is the son of acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Panah's film Hit the Road is a road movie with a difference as a family travel through Iran without acknowledging the real purpose of their trip. It's reviewed by Diane Roberts and Leila Latif. They've also been reading Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra, a novel set in wartime Hollywood where a new arrival is trying to e...

Sister Act the Musical is returning to the London stage, after two years of Covid delays and thirty years after the much loved Whoopi Goldberg film. Tom Sutcliffe met the stars of the new Hammersmith Apollo production, Beverley Knight who plays singer on the run Deloris and Jennifer Saunders who takes on the role of Mother Superior, to discuss mixing secular and sacred musical traditions with come...

The Mercury Music and Booker Prize lists - we discuss the albums and books nominated this year for these two major prizes. We're joined by writer and critic Alex Clark, and Ludovico Hunter Tilney, music journalist for the Financial Times, to discuss today's announcements. Queer Britain – the dedicated LGBTQ+ museum, recently opened in London’s King’s Cross. We speak to curator Dawn Hoskin, and to...

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, a...