Front Row

Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle discusses The Eddy, his new Netflix musical drama mini-series set in a multi-lingual Paris jazz club, written by Jack Thorne. Dame Emma Thompson reads one of her favourite poems and discusses her new short film Extinction, made during the Extinction Rebellion protests. With cinemas closed and many film releases on hold, what power does lockdown streaming have...

James Bay is a multi-award-winning singer-songwriter and guitarist. He has released two albums, Chaos and the Calm, and Electric Light; for which he has won multiple Brits and been nominated for three Grammys. He was recording his third album when lockdown happened, but has been keeping busy - providing guitar lessons of his greatest hits on Instagram. He joins Kirsty Lang to perform his song Hold...

Panamanian-American baritone Nmon Ford on fusing house music with opera and the legend of Orfeus to create a unique new work which was set to premiere at London’s Young Vic last week. Sinéad Gleeson pays tribute to the great Irish poet Eavan Boland, who died yesterday at the age of seventy five. Boland's poems often drew connections between the lives of Irish women past and present. Author Kit de...

Randy Newman is most widely known as the Oscar winning composer of the Toy Story films and he has won armfuls of Grammys too for his Southern States-inflected music. His latest release, ‘Stay Away’, is a charity single to raise money for the New Orleans’ Ellis Marsalis Center, in memory of the revered jazz musician and founder of the Marsalis dynasty who died from Covid 19. Latin Rocks On is a new...

For Front Row’s Friday Review, BBC journalist Sophie Raworth and the novelist Naomi Alderman discuss the new TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s extraordinarily successful novel Normal People. They also review the new collection of short stories by Frances Leviston, The Voice in my Ear. Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, Front Row's Artist in Residence during the lockdown, continues his weekly live performanc...

Oliver Hermanus's new film about a gay teenage conscript and his brutal experience of being in the South African army during Apartheid is called Moffie, a common Afrikaans anti-gay slur. He tells us how a fear of homosexuality fuelled the problem of toxic masculinity that is still so prevalent in the country, and why he used such a provocative title for his film. This week is Lesbian Visibility We...

Arts Minister Caroline Dinenage on the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis. We put questions to her from arts organisations around the country. Tomorrow marks the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday. To celebrate, actor Paapa Essiedu performs the iconic “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy from Hamlet for us live from his home. Paapa played Hamlet in Simon Godwin’s highly acclaimed 2016 pr...

Organist Anna Lapwood, who is Director of Music at Pembroke College Cambridge, performs a Bach chorale prelude, live on the new organ she has installed in her living room. She talks about her virtual Bach-a-thon, for which musicians post videos of themselves playing Bach, and her new role as conductor of the NHS Chorus-19 - a virtual choir of over 700 NHS staff across the UK. Front Row announces t...

Leading baritone Roderick Williams was halfway through an ENO run of Anthony Minghella’s production of Puccini's Madame Butterfly at the London Coliseum when it was closed due to the coronavirus. Now at home under lockdown, he joins us to for a special live performance of The Toreador’s Song from Bizet's Carmen in a rather different setting – on Skype from his kitchen. Scots Makar Jackie Kay on a...

Adam Macqueen talks to Kirsty about his debut novel, Beneath the Streets, a counterfactual thriller set in London in the 1970s which imagines what might have happened had Liberal politician Jeremy Thorpe successfully arranged the murder of his ex-lover Norman Scott. The story, the historic version of which was recently dramatized by Russell T. Davies for television, features a cast of real-life ch...

Comedian Angela Barnes is the new host of Radio 4’s stalwart show The News Quiz. Fresh from recording the first episode of the new series, we ask how they’re keeping it funny when the only story is a deadly virus, and what it’s been like making the show under lockdown when there’s no audience to laugh at your jokes. When the coronavirus pandemic struck, Women’s Prize-winning novelist and games wri...

Sir Patrick Stewart has been releasing daily readings of Shakespeare's Sonnets on Twitter, recorded in different parts of his Californian home. He tells Kirsty why he's doing "A Sonnet a Day" during the lockdown and what he's discovered about Shakespeare in the process. Mik Scarlet reviews Devs, BBC 2’s new thriller miniseries created by Alex Garland (The Beach, 28 Days Later). Devs is about a com...

Comedian Russell Howard on his new lockdown TV show, Home Time. Video conferenced from his childhood bedroom, he gives his entertaining take on life in quarantine, with remote music performances and interviews with comedians and key workers. The 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction has been announced today. The winner is Algerian novelist Abdelouahab Aissaoui for The Spartan Court which is...

Roy Hudd was a comedian, actor and music-hall veteran whose career spanned seven decades. He sadly passed away in March. Starting out as a redcoat at Butlins in the 1950s, Roy became one the UK's best-loved entertainers. His show The News Huddlines ran for 26 years on Radio 2. When Samira spoke to Roy in 2015, he was approaching his 80th birthday, and was about to play Dame for the first time in p...

Masculinity, music, violence, guilt and redemption: one of the all-time great Hollywood directors Martin Scorsese in conversation about his latest film, The Irishman, and the themes that have fascinated and inspired him through his movie-making career. Main image: Martin Scorsese Image credit: Jon Kopaloff/Film Magic/Getty Images Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Sarah Johnson

Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson will be Front Row's Artist-in-Residence during the lockdown, delivering weekly live performances on the grand piano of the currently empty Harpa concert hall in Reykjavík, Iceland. Each week will also feature a mini-masterclass about the piece. Tonight Víkingur performs his own transcription of Sigvaldi Kaldalóns’ Ave Maria. Kaldalóns was a doctor aswell as a composer and...

On Easter Monday ITV will broadcast the first instalment of Quiz, the adaptation by James Graham of his play about the coughing controversy and the major convicted of cheating on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Graham tells Kirsty Lang why the story remains important. It's about truth, fact and power - the power of television. And there's a remarkable performance by Michael Sheen as Chris Tarrant....

AL Kennedy won the Costa Prize 2007 for her novel Day. She talks about her new book of short stories, the aptly named We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time – a powerful collection about characters living on the edge, from a woman finally snapping at a white man's racist tirade at a zoo, to the host of a podcast revealing why she is haunted by the state of New Mexico. Sam Sweeney, fiddle player in...

On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the birth of the great English poet William Wordsworth, Juliet Stevenson reads some of his most famous poems and Michael McGregor, Director of the Wordsworth Trust, explains why Wordsworth is particularly relevant today, at a time of crisis. As Front Row begins a week of celebrating the joys of listening - to radio, podcasts, audiobooks, music and drama - rad...

Miles Davis released his seminal album Bitches Brew 50 years ago this week. Saxophonist Soweto Kinch and Michael Carlson consider the impact of the double album, and discuss the recent documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool. What video games should we play while we’re self-isolating? Video games expert, journalist and broadcaster Jordan Erica Webber gives us her top picks and tips for first-ti...

Dua Lipa shares the inspiration behind her new album Future Nostalgia, what it's been like releasing an album under quarantine. As the Edinburgh Festivals are cancelled this year, Joyce McMillan of The Scotsman discusses what this means for theatre, comedy and the arts, and for the city itself. Set and costume designer Molly O’Cathain, on lockdown at home with her parents in Dublin, has combined h...

This edition of Front Row is devoted to one of the most exciting playwrights to emerge this century. James Graham is only 37 but has already become a foremost chronicler of modern Britain on stage and screen. He is known for taking on the big issues of the day – Brexit, privacy online, parliamentary democracy, fake news - whilst enabling his audience to see things from the points of view of those...

To mark Beethoven's 250th anniversary, soprano Chen Reiss has released an album of rarely performed Beethoven arias called Immortal Beloved. She joins us live from her home in Vienna, and also performs a favourite aria by Handel. With arts organisations scrambling to reproduce their output online, we discuss the dilemmas of streaming works intended to be experienced communally. Academic Kirsty Sed...

Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson has a new album, Debussy – Rameau, exploring the music of two very different but complementary composers. He plays live from Reykjavik, exclusively for Front Row. Actor Jo Hartley - best known for her roles in Shane Meadows' This is England series - discusses her new TV drama, In My Skin, which is coming to BBC Three. It's the story of a Welsh teenager - Bethan...

Disco legend Gloria Gaynor made headlines earlier this month when her TikTok video encouraging people to wash their hands to her hit I Will Survive went viral. She joins us from her home in South Carolina, to discuss winning a Grammy for her latest album Testimony, and how she's keeping busy in self-isolation. As galleries and art centres close their doors many organisations are turning to digital...