Front Row

Nicola Benedetti has co-written a new cadenza for Beethoven's Violin Concerto. As she embarks on a tour with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, she talks to Kirsty Lang about the challenges of performing this classical masterpiece. Jason Solomons reviews Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built, which stars Helen Mirren in the first horror movie of her 50 year career and is set in the real...

Simple Minds, the stadium-filling band from Glasgow, have been together for 40 years. As they release Walk Between Worlds, lead singer Jim Kerr looks back on the four decades and the band perform an acoustic version of a song from the new album. Reputed to be Daniel Day-Lewis' final film before retiring from acting, Phantom Thread travels behind the doors of London's 1950s fashion houses. Film cri...

All day long I'd bidi-bidi-bum... Sheldon Harnick is 93 and won worldwide acclaim as the lyricist of the hugely successful Fiddler on the Roof. As a new production of Rothschild & Sons, one of his lesser-known musicals, opens in this country he talks about a lifetime of lyrics. Britain's first professor of Musical Theatre, Professor Millie Taylor, and theatre critic David Benedict discuss the...

Last year, wunderkind playwright James Graham premiered three plays Ink, Labour of Love, and Quiz which looked respectively at the rise of the Sun newspaper, Labour party history; and the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire "coughing Major" scandal. As he begins 2018 with another premiere, The Culture: A Farce in Two Acts, he discusses turning his attention to Hull's year as City of Culture and his desi...

Former National Theatre director, Sir Nicholas Hytner on his new production of Julius Caesar, starring Ben Whishaw and David Morrissey, which offers the audience a chance to stand and be immersed in the action. Sir Nicholas talks about the staging, how contemporary politics resonates with this Shakespeare play and about his new venue the Bridge Theatre. Ruth Barnes looks at what the list of Grammy...

As part of Radio 4's Reading Europe season, Kirsty Lang explores Turkish literature in Istanbul, talking to leading writers including Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. Critics Kaya Genc and Nagihan Ibn Haliloglu discuss how the Turkish literary scene compares to our own: what are the bestselling books, and how are writers dealing with the current political situation, given Turkey has imprisoned more wri...

In 2016 Paapa Essiedu became the first black actor to play Hamlet for the RSC. As he reprises the role for a tour of the production we speak to the actor tipped to be a star, about Hamlet and his performances in television dramas Kiri and The Miniaturist. It's rare for a poetry essay to make the news headlines but that's exactly what's happened to the essay written by Rebecca Watts in the current...

Now just 18, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason won the title of BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2016. His choice of repertoire ranges from Shostakovich to Bob Marley and he plays live in the studio on the release of his debut album, Inspiration. Following the announcement of the death of Ursula K. Le Guin, the Earthsea writer's literary agent Ginger Clark and fantasy novelist Vic James discuss her lega...

The nominations for the 90th Academy Awards were announced earlier today, with Guillermo del Toro's fantasy romance The Shape of Water receiving the most, including best picture. Stig Abell is joined by film critics Larushka Ivan-Zadeh, Gaylene Gould and Tim Robey to consider the winners and losers, and to assess whether the nominations reflect events of 2017 including Weinstein and #MeToo, and wh...

Matt Damon's new film Downsizing imagines a solution to over-population is to shrink humans to five inches tall. Director of Film for the British Council Briony Hanson reviews the film which is part midlife strife part speculative science-fiction. A choreographer for sex scenes on stage or on screen is just as important as that for a fight scene - so says movement director Ita O'Brien, who is call...

Director Richard Linklater discusses his new film Last Flag Flying, starring Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne and Steve Carell, about three former US servicemen who re-unite in 2003 for a road trip to bury the son of one of the men, killed in the Iraq War. A recent Arts Council England report into literary fiction shows that sales, advances and prices have slumped over the last 15 years with the...

Bridget Riley is known for her abstract geometric images featuring grids, lines, circles and squares. As the artist prepares to open a new exhibition of her recent work, art critic Charlotte Mullins assesses the importance and impact of the canvases and murals created in the last four years. As the Bayeux Tapestry is set to come to the UK from France we consider the extraordinary qualities of this...

Carleen Anderson, former singer with Young Disciples and the Brand New Heavies, discusses her album and 'tribal opera' Cage Street Memorial, and performs a song from it in the studio. Turkish writer Elif Shafak discusses her bestselling novel The Bastard of Istanbul about a family of women, for which she was accused of 'insulting Turkishness' in 2006 and put on trial. The novel has been made into...

As Will & Grace is revived twenty years after its premiere, TV critic Louis Wise discusses how the ground-breaking sitcom about two gay men and their best girl pal comes across in 2018. Disney and Pixar's new film Coco is about a Mexican boy who travels through the Land of the Dead to unlock a family mystery. We consider the evolution of Disney films, how they depict and reflect international...

Liam Neeson stars in action thriller The Commuter in which an insurance salesman is caught up in danger and conspiracy on his way home from work. He talks about the appeal of the ordinary man as hero. Jamie Hewlett is best known for his artwork for the comic strip Tank Girls, the group Gorillaz, and Damon Albarn's Chinese opera Monkey: Journey to the West. With the publication of a new monograph w...

Tom Hanks discusses his new film The Post, co-starring Meryl Streep and directed by Steven Spielberg, which tells the story of the part The Washington Post played in publishing the top secret Pentagon Papers that changed American public opinion about the Vietnam War. Sir Simon Rattle is conducting the European concert premiere of The Genesis Suite, a work with narration based on stories from the f...

In December the Royal Court withdrew and then reinstated its invitation to stage a new touring production of Andrea Dunbar's semi-autobiographical 1982 play Rita Sue and Bob Too as a result of sexual harassment allegations made against its co-director Max Stafford Clark - himself a former Artistic Director of the Royal Court and one of the most influential theatre directors of his generation. The...

As The Southbank Show marks its 40th anniversary we discuss the legacy of this historic arts programme with host Melvyn Bragg. As ITV makes a return to arts programing with Great Art, and the BBC prepares to revive its landmark series Civilisations, we discuss the state of arts on TV today. With Phil Grabsky, the award-winning executive producer of Great Art and the founder of Seventh Art Producti...

The 1996 radical feminist theatre piece, The Vagina Monologues, made a huge impact in America and around the world as well as inspiring V-Day, an organisation working to stop violence against girls and women. As the writer Eve Ensler updates it with some contemporary voices, we ask about the original production and why now is the right time to revisit it. We also look at feminist theatre in Britai...

A special episode featuring all five winners of the Costa Book Awards 2017. The winner of the novel category Jon McGregor talks about how he wrote his stunning portrait of an English country village, Reservoir 13. Katherine Rundell, winner of the children’s book category, reveals how she ate tinned tarantula for her adventure story The Explorer. The biography winner Rebecca Stott discusses In the...

Kiri, Channel 4's new drama series, is about the disappearance of a young girl, written by Jack Thorne. It stars Sarah Lancashire as the girl's social worker and Lucian Msamati as her grandfather. Dreda Say Mitchell reviews. The winner of the Costa First Novel prize is Gail Honeyman for Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. It tells the story of a 29-year-old woman who lives alone, surviving, but n...

Christopher Plummer discusses replacing Kevin Spacey as John Paul Getty in the Ridley Scott-directed All the Money in the World after Spacey was dropped from the film due to allegations of sexual misconduct. Film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh considers whether this bold move by the director pays off. As Saudi Arabia announces that it will reopen its cinema doors, we look at the arts scene in the coun...

Michelle Terry takes over as Artistic Director at Shakespeare's Globe in London in April, and today she announced details of her first season. She discusses her plans, as well as the drama off-stage that led to her predecessor Emma Rice's controversial early departure. Rebecca Stott, winner of the Biography category in this year's Costa Book Awards announced on Front Row this week, discusses In th...

Neil Cross, the creator of Luther talks about his new BBC One series Hard Sun. The pre-apocalyptic crime drama follows two detectives who stumble upon proof that the world faces certain destruction, a fact the British Government is trying to suppress Katherine Rundell is the winner of the Costa Children's Book Award 2017 for The Explorer, a classic adventure story of four children whose plane cras...

Novelist Wendy Holden announces the category winners of the Costa Book Awards 2017 exclusively on Front Row and Stig talks to the winner of the Novel Category. Artist Elizabeth Friedlander is the subject of a new exhibition at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft. The work of Friedlander is instantly recognisable as mid-20th century design at its best including her Penguin book covers and Bauer Type Fo...